Professional social media management is sometimes used as a means of tailoring a consistent brand message for commercial accounts. But it doesn’t always need to be that proactive. Both commercial accounts and professional individuals can also use the service as a kind of filter, so they still control their own content while a social media management team makes sure that nothing potentially damaging gets through.

Impulse control is a problem for an awful lot of social media users. It’s pretty much the easiest thing in the world to take any thought that comes into your head and tweet it or post it as a caption alongside and Instagram selfie. But it’s every bit as easy for those impulsive posts to create trouble for the owner or for a brand they’re associated with.

As you rise higher in professional life and your social media accounts become more popular, it becomes increasingly important for you to exert flawless judgement and reliable impulse control. But if this is something you struggle with, there’s no shame in it. Many people do, and neither your CV nor the success of your business makes you an exception. The only thing that really sets you apart in that situation is that you can probably afford professional social media management, and you probably stand to benefit from it more than others.

If you want to use social media management in this way, there are a number of different kinds of instructions you can give to your digital marketing company. Those instructions will largely determine how hands-on or hands-off an approach you take to your own social accounts. That in turn determines how easily you can avoid the perils of your own impulses, but it also changes the extent to which the accounts genuinely reflect your own personality.

As one option, you can have a conversation with your social media management team and come to a mutual decision the essential elements of an account’s brand identity. Then you can hand over the entire account to the professionals and allow them the freedom to construct that identity however they see fit, while drawing on experience to avoid controversy or offense.

On the other hand, you may choose to retain a high degree of control over your social media presence while relying on social media management only as a stopgap against public relations disasters. This can be accomplished, for instance, by maintaining separate public and private accounts, either on one platform or across multiple platforms. In that case, you can post relatively freely on accounts that are viewable only to trusted followers, and you can rely on your social media management team to repost only that content which appropriately reflects the agreed-upon brand.

Whatever approach you choose, you can be assured of a safeguard against serious fallout from the carelessness that is so prevalent online. It’s easy to fall victim to that carelessness when you’re already busy with your professional life and you just want to share your thoughts with friends and family throughout the day. By all means, you should be able to continue doing that, but you should also allow a trusted social media management team to have some say in which of those thoughts end up permanently stored on the internet, where they can fall into anyone’s hands.