When you first start building a social media presence it can seem like no one out there hears you and all your efforts are nothing more than tweeting in the dark. But eventually your efforts start to gain traction and before you know it you’ve got followers, subscribers, likers and retweeters. Now that things have been rolling along for a while you might want to consider going back and cleaning up some of those virtual dust bunnies lurking under your social media accounts.
We found an excellent blog post written by Hannah Clark, a Marketing Coordinator at HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) titled “Social Media Spring Cleaning: 13 Essential Chores to Stop Putting Off.” (You can read the entire blog post here.)
Hannah’s list of 13 social media ‘chores’ are simple, common-sense tasks that should only take a few minutes each to perform and even though most of us postpone doing these tasks they are all important in maintaining our social media image.
Her first tip (like all of them) is a something we all forget to do on a regular basis – clean out all those unused apps. Start with your Twitter account, click on the apps tab and clean out all those apps you haven’t used in months.
Next, review your employee permissions. Are there people who still have access to your social media accounts that no longer work for the company? Clean that up (before someone posts something you might regret).
Number three on Hannah’s list is something we all hate to do (but should). Change your passwords! We know we should. We know that the longer we wait the greater the risks. Yes it’s a pain. So take a deep breath and just do it!
Hannah goes on with other valuable tasks that you should do, tasks such as updating photos, making sure company assets (like changes to a company logo) are up to date and make sure your profiles are all up to date too. This applies to your contact information (email addresses, phone numbers, titles, they all change and it’s easy to forget to update everything).
Number eight on her list is also a no-brainer that sometimes slips through the cracks; make sure you have link buttons to all your social media accounts on your web and blog pages. As Hannah says, “If you don’t yet have them, adding Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest buttons will tell your audience which social accounts you are on, and prompts them to follow you.”
Another task Hannah mentions is to check your analytics again…and again. When we begin getting analytics reports they are like a new toy, but after a while checking the numbers gets to be more of a pain than a game and we put it off. Go back and check things again just to make sure you are still on track.
Hannah has a number of other suggestions that may not be things you look forward to doing but you should – at least every once in a while. So set aside a few minutes, read Hannah’s blog post, and clean up your social media assets. You’ll feel better, I promise.
