Lately I’ve been cleaning up my social media accounts.
I’ve been chewing through a few tasks on Twitter lately and thought I’d share what I’m doing and see if you have any other advice.
1. I’ve been unfollowing accounts that haven’t posted in the past three months with http://untweeps.com/ Why? Because the fewer accounts you follow on Twitter the easier it all is to manage into lists, which is my next task. Also, some people look at the ratio between accounts you are following and who is following you as if that implies something deeper like true popularity. I don’t care about that, but I’m a list fanatic and I am about to build some new ones on artificial intelligence so wanted to start with just accounts that are active. So far I’ve removed about 5,000 accounts — all by hand clicking one-by-one because Twitter doesn’t let third-party apps have a “delete all” button anymore.
2. I’m blocking fake followers. These are followers that don’t do anything. They never tweet. They rarely have a profile photo. They rarely have any followers of their own. Why block? Because they mess up stats that you might show advertisers about how engaged your audience is. Also, potential advertisers look at these to see how “real” your follower numbers are and if you have too high a percentage of fake ones they hold it against you. I’m using https://www.twitteraudit.com/pro to do that work. So far I’ve blocked 13,500 fake accounts from following me (out of about 500,000 people following me). By the way, I’ve never bought followers. These are often bots designed to follow lots of people, which can be used for nefarious purposes (IE, marketing or electing people like Trump).
3. On Facebook I got rid of a bunch of groups that people had subscribed me to (I find that the fewer groups I belong to, the better my feed gets).
4. On Facebook I am going through 1,000 friend requests one-by-one to either add as friend or delete the request (which requires me to actually open their profile up and see if there’s anything on their last 20 posts that I care about).
One thing I really appreciate about Twitter is that Twitter makes it a lot easier to do these chores than, say, Facebook or LinkedIn do. I wish I had these tools on Facebook as well (I’d love to delete all friends who haven’t posted for three months, for instance).
Anyway, this is the kind of work influencers have to do behind the scenes to keep their businesses and social media accounts healthy.
Do you do anything along these lines to keep your accounts clean? Let me know at scobleizer@gmail.com and I’ll publish any great tips.
Scobleizer 