30 Quick Tips to Spring Clean Your Social Media Presence

Spring cleaning may have deep roots – in some cultures it is associated with the symbolic new year, sweeping out the old and welcoming the new. You probably do some form of this in your home, whether it’s giving your house a scrub down or cleaning out your closets. But have you given your social accounts a good spring cleaning yet? Our online lives get just as cluttered as our real ones. Here are some tips on how to spring clean your social media presence.

Facebook

First, make sure you’ve covered the basics.

• If your profile picture is more than a couple of years old, replace it with a professional headshot or a current company logo.
• Update your cover photo with an attractive image. This represents your business, so consider a high-quality shot of your office, your team or a local or seasonal photo.
• Make sure the About section is filled out with the things you want to be known for professionally.
• Update your hours of business and contact information so it’s easy for potential and current clients to get in touch with you.
• If you haven’t already secured it, see if your vanity URL is available.

Then, look at your posts. Political, religious and similar posts run the risk of alienating clients with different beliefs. That’s not to say you should hide who you are, but your small business page may not be the place for potentially inflammatory opinions.

Next, consider cleaning out your “friends” and “likes.” If your page has fraudulent likes (as the result of “like farms”), it can really skew any paid advertising you do on Facebook. For this reason, you’ll want to clean out any fake accounts.

To declutter your news feed, try these tips:

• First, if there are people or businesses whose posts you no longer want to see, you can “unfollow” them. Look for the inverted caret symbol at the upper right-hand corner of any post. Then check “unfollow [Name].” This eliminates any awkwardness of unfriending, while still decluttering your news feed.
• Second, you can group individuals into “Acquaintances” instead of friends so you see fewer posts from them.
• Look at your groups. If they are no longer relevant, leave those groups.
• Revoke permissions for various games and apps you no longer use.
• Unlike pages that are no longer relevant to you.

After finishing these activities (which may take some time), you will have a leaner and cleaner profile and experience when you log in to Facebook.

Twitter

First of all, make sure you’ve covered the basics.

• Complete or update your bio, highlighting the personal or business traits you want to emphasize.
• Add your personal or company website to your bio, if appropriate.
• Consider updating your photo, especially if it’s outdated.
• If you’ve updated logos or colors, you should also consider changing your header photo and/or your theme to reflect your fresh look.

Secondly, take a look at your posts, especially the recent ones.

• Are there any that are inappropriate for your professional account?
• If you publish something on the Internet, it lives forever, but you can delete anything you don’t want to draw attention to. Flippant comments or poorly executed jokes can have long-lasting consequences.

Finally, take a look at both the people you follow and your followers.

• People you follow whom you may want to delete: Those who post about things that don’t interest you, those who never post, or those who live-tweet events or shows you aren’t interested in. You can consider muting them so their tweets don’t show up in your timeline, or you can stop following them.
• For followers, are they real? Spammers can add fake accounts to your list of followers. Find out who’s fake, then delete or block those accounts.
• Consider creating Twitter lists to organize friends or industry contacts.

You may also want to take a closer look at your app permissions. See which apps or sites you have given permission to access your profile and remove any that are no longer useful or relevant.

LinkedIn

First, take a look at your profile.

• More people will see your headline than anything else, so make sure it’s well-written and contains quality keywords.
• Replace or update your profile photo with a current professional headshot.
• Work on your summary to highlight your most relevant experience and skills. Think of this as your elevator pitch.
• Do you have a new title, new responsibilities or an expanded set of skills and experiences you should add or highlight?
• Make sure your contact information is updated so clients and others can get in touch.
• Personalize your profile’s URL with your name or business name.
• Use keywords to make sure you’re coming up in relevant searches for people looking for someone like you. Don’t abuse keywords, but do include them in your Headline, Summary and Experience sections.
• Ask happy customers and contacts for recommendations. A good word from a past customer is always helpful.

Next, take a good look at your connections. When you first joined LinkedIn, chances are you accepted most requests to connect. But once you’ve been on the platform for a while, it makes sense to be specific to your industry or your current and prospective clients.

• Remove people from your network who aren’t helpful or positive. Spammers, people who constantly ask for help without returning the favor, etc.
• Keep your network updated. Have you been to any conferences, meetings or other events where you’ve met interesting contacts? Add them to your connections.
• Consider joining industry-relevant groups or leaving those that are no longer useful.

For the advanced, start researching LinkedIn’s publishing platform to see if it’s something you’d like to add to your content marketing efforts.

Our online lives evolve, just like our regular lives. Don’t feel guilty about cleaning up your accounts. These tips will help you scrub your profiles and make them shine. Enjoy your hard work!