This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
I go against most advice and talk about unfollowing and cleaning up your accounts.
I LOVE organizing, and cleaning that involves organization. It’s a dream of mine when I retire from my professional career to move onto organizing and I someday hope to find buried treasure that will pay for the rest of my days on earth. But I digress.
The same way you Spring clean your house every year is the same way I believe you need to spring clean your social accounts. Even though the mass follow has short-term rewards in the beginning (ie. more people to connect with), it can also result in clutter if those people aren’t engaging back. So here’s what I’m starting to do on my various personal accounts.
At the start of the year I realized I was following over 4,500 people and thought that was pretty ridiculous because there’s no way I’m going to see everyone’s content. Part of the reason why I’m less engaged on Twitter than I was years ago is because of the clutter I have in my Home feed now. So, I am on a bit of an unfollow rampage. Not in a bad way. I am highly utilizing my List functions and sorting people I might have followed on Twitter into those categories, since I look at those streams on a daily basis. My goal is to get the # of people I’m following down to 2000-2500 because then I think I’ll be able to follow the content I’m most interested in out of those Tweeters. 200 down, 1800 more to go!
I’m getting new friend requests every day, so now I’m only adding people who I have at least 20 mutual friends with, and who are friends whose content I follow pretty often. I just don’t have time to engage with random folks, even if we might have some friends in common. And every now and then I DO browse my news feed so when I do, I’m super aware of any content that I don’t want to look at in future. In that case I’ll hit “unfollow” instead of unfriending the person completely. It means that their content isn’t interesting, but not that they themselves aren’t!
About two years ago, I did a sweep of my LinkedIn connections and deleted people who obviously weren’t active (no profile or photo). I don’t tend to connect with people outside of Canada or Vancouver, unless we have something in common in our job titles or industry. And I send personalized messages each time I add someone new on LinkedIn, so our connection needs to be worth the time I spend to do that.
Snapchat
I’m now following enough people on Snapchat than I have time for in the day, so it’s starting to feel like it was in the early days of Twitter. Instead of unfollowing completely, however, I’ll simply just watch the people I’m closest with or whose content is most entertaining. Kevin Hart (kevinhart4real) is a must.
I’m pretty wary of who I follow on Instagram on my personal account, but now that I’m following almost 500 accounts, if the content isn’t exciting I will unfollow. We’re following a lot more on our company Instagram account because we want to engage with and share content that’s related to conscious media and business.
What are some of your social media clean up tips?
