Social media is an integral part of most people’s lives today. We use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to stay connected with friends and family, build our personal brand network, and much more. However, over time, our social media profiles tend to get cluttered with old posts, photos, and connections that may no longer represent who we are or how we want to portray ourselves professionally. This is where social media cleanup tools come in handy.
Why You May Want to Clean Up Your Social Media Profiles
Here are some key reasons why doing a social media cleanup can be beneficial:
Present Your Best Self
Old posts and photos that you shared years ago may no longer align with your values, beliefs, interests, or the image you want to present. We all change over time, and our social media should represent our growth. For example, a photo from 10 years ago may showcase an outdated style or interest. Or an old post could highlight viewpoints you no longer believe in after gaining life experience.
Social media cleanup with the help of tools such as TweetDelete gives you a chance to tidy up your profiles to better represent your current identity and personal brand. Having an accurate portrait of who you are now is crucial for your own self-perception and how others see you.
Professional Image
For those using social media for business, career networking, or job-seeking opportunities, maintaining a professional brand image is key. Outdated, inappropriate, subpar or overly casual content could undermine your professionalism and make employers second guess contacting you.
Potential employers, clients or business partners may come across your profile when assessing you for opportunities. First impressions matter greatly in these situations. You want your social presence to instill confidence in your abilities.
According to PR Newswire, 79% of employers admitted to rejecting a candidate based on something uncovered during a social media screening.
Be sure any visibility set to “public” presents you in the best possible light.
Privacy and Security
The more unused and outdated information you have publicly available on your profiles, the more vulnerable you may be to privacy breaches, hacking and identity theft. Cutting back on what’s out there can limit your exposure.
Old posts, photos, and other content often contain personal information that criminals can piece together for exploitation, such as home addresses, phone numbers, answers to common security questions, etc. Routinely removing unneeded content improves safety.
Common Social Media Cleanup Tasks
When undertaking a social media cleanup, some of the key maintenance tasks include:
Removing Old Posts and Photos
Go back through all your major updates, photos, videos and posts and delete ones that are redundant, embarrassing or no longer relevant. Unflattering photos and crude jokes from your early college days, for example, don’t need to stick around.
Hiding Old Updates From Your Timeline
If you have older posts you want to keep for nostalgia or to access privately but don’t necessarily want to be public anymore, social platforms like Facebook let you hide these from your timeline without fully deleting them.
Unlike Pages and Groups
Review all the business pages, brands, groups, and communities you currently like or follow and those you dislike or unfollow that are no longer relevant. This will help you focus on who can reach you through sponsored posts and ads.
Prune Friends/Followers/Connections
Go through your full contacts/friends/followers lists and remove connections that you no longer interact with, don’t actually know well offline, or that don’t serve a purpose anymore.
Top Tools to Help Clean Up Social Media Profiles
Cleaning up even one social media platform manually can be extremely tedious and time-consuming. Thankfully, there are some excellent social media cleanup tools available that can automate a lot of the work. Here are some top options with additional details:
Social Book Post Manager
Social Book Post Manager helps manage your Facebook presence, including old posts and photo removal. Key features include:
- Bulk delete old Facebook posts, photos and videos in one click, either by date filters or keyword search filters
- Cross-platform posting to streamline removal across other connected accounts
- Detailed analytics on your posts and followers to inform cleanup
- Easy photo editing like cropping and filters to refresh old images
- Unlike Pages and Groups in bulk with one click to curate interests sharply
TweetDelete
TweetDelete lets you schedule automated deletion of your old, outdated or irrelevant tweets based on age of content or total number of tweets. Core functionality includes:
- One-time or recurring scheduled tweet deletion
- Preserve your tweet history with downloaded tweet archives
- Keep select tweets with filters by likes, retweets or keywords
- Analytics to compare changes in engagement after cleanup
- Block or mute users in bulk to overhaul your followers
Flock Social Media Manager
Flock provides an integrated platform to manage multiple social profiles from one centralized dashboard efficiently. Helpful cleanup features include:
- Cross-platform posting to easily duplicate deletion tasks to all connected accounts
- Robust filters to bulk remove posts by content type, specific keywords, media formats or date ranges
- Tools to unfollow or remove followers from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in bulk
- Analytics to track changes in follower count across networks after cleanup
Google Social Profile Cleaner
To help manage your overall Google presence, including Google My Business, Google Search, and Google Maps, Social Profile Cleaner identifies duplicate listings, outdated information, and other issues that can undermine your brand. It also provides step-by-step guidance to address problems that have been found.
Social Insider
Social Insider is a social media analytics platform that provides an audit feature to analyze profiles and highlight areas in need of cleanup. You can then directly take action to address identified issues, such as outdated information, broken links, etc., right within the platform.
Step-by-Step Guide to Cleaning Up a Social Media Profile
Cleaning up a social media profile can be broken down into a few key phrases.
1. Download Profile Data
In the initial preparation stage, download your full profile history from platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This allows you to reference a complete set of your social data to inform cleanup decisions. Typically, download options are found within account settings. Be sure to select file formats that you can easily search and sort.
Having your entire breadth of social content available makes it possible to flag items for removal consideration systematically.
2. Conduct Profile Audit
The next step is thoroughly auditing your presence post-by-post and detail-by-detail. Be highly critical, noting anything that seems redundant, irrelevant or outdated. Sort mechanisms can help isolate older content. Use filters to pinpoint items containing target keywords or media quickly. Document your audit findings so you can efficiently take action later.
The audit should give you a comprehensive understanding of your social media presence and areas needing attention.
3. Set Removal Guidelines
With audit notes in hand, define focused parameters that will steer your removal choices. This keeps cleanup efforts consistent and productive. Potential criteria could cover date ranges, content types, engagement thresholds, specific terms and more.
Custom criteria aligned to your goals streamline decision-making as you undertake profile enhancements.
4. Choose Your Tools
Depending on the extent of recommended changes, select tools that will simplify execution. Minor cleanups may only require manual tweaks. Medium efforts can leverage browser extensions for bulk actions. Major overhauls warrant robust social media managers with automation.
The tools you choose should fit the scale of revisions on your agenda.
5. Schedule Ongoing Upkeep
Finally, maintenance is key for social media. Set reminders to periodically sweep your profiles and address any emerging cleanup needs before they escalate. Quick check-ins also help you stay current as your interests and priorities evolve.
Staying on top of profile upkeep prevents requiring full overhauls down the road.
Following this methodical approach to social media cleanup makes the process much more manageable and effective.
Key Takeaways on Social Media Profile Cleanups
- Cleaning up your profiles clears out the digital clutter to present your best, most authentic self.
- For businesses and careers, a tidy social presence protects your brand and reputation.
- Leverage cleanup tools to automate and simplify parts of the process.
- Schedule regular social media maintenance sessions moving forward.
Keeping your social profiles fresh and current is well worth the effort and pays dividends when it comes to showing the world the version of you that you want seen.