The slow emergence of spring can be a confusing time. Caught between one-day heat waves and week-long April showers, it’s difficult to decide whether we should be throwing the windows wide and letting the air in or battening down the hatches for the next downpour.

We’ve compiled five important ways to spring clean your social media, which can be done with your laptop perched on the edge of a deckchair or overheating under three blankets and a duvet. No excuses!

Streamline your branding

Have you recently made some changes to your business branding? Even small changes like an altered colour scheme or a slightly different logo need to be rolled out across all your social media sites. If you have several different variations of the logo, it’s better to nominate a single ‘social media logo’ for this purpose. Making sure that all of your platforms have a consolidated, recognisable identity will boost your customer’s confidence that they’ve found the right site, meaning they’re more likely to hit the ‘Follow’ button.

 Update your details and check security

It’s up to you how much personal, business and contact information you share across each site, but whatever you share, make sure it’s up-to-date. In particular, make sure that there’s a visible primary email address and contact number that followers can rely on if they need to get in touch.

It’s also worth reviewing your privacy settings on each site – it can be effective to strike a balance between content that’s visible to everyone online, and valuable content that can only be seen by those who follow or like your page. This can be a great incentive to attract new followers and fans.

Change your cover photos

When was the last time you changed the cover photos on your sites? Because your profile picture should always be consistent (we recommend always using your company logo on every platform) the cover photo on each site should be the element you focus on for fresh, engaging content.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have cover photo functions, which allow you to upload creative, informative and demonstrative images. Just make sure when designing these photos that you use the recommended cover photos dimensions for each site, so they don’t become cropped or warped when they’re uploaded.

Twitter scan

Have a scan through all the profiles you’re following on Twitter – you should be able to quickly determine which accounts are active and useful. Start by unfollowing as many inactive and spam accounts as possible. Once this is done, have a look at the active accounts that you follow and assess if the information they’re providing is relevant to you. If it’s not, but you want to preserve the ‘follower relationship’, then hit the Mute button in the drop-down menu underneath any of their tweets.

This is a reversible action that means you won’t see updates form that account in your feed, but you’ll still be ‘officially’ following them. They never have to know!

Password Audit

A last, important one to do when spring cleaning your social media is to audit your passwords across your business pages. A lot of time can be wasted trying to guess passwords, communicate them to other staff members or going through the resetting process for the hundredth time. Consider using a password manager, which securely stores all your passwords for each account, or look into using a method that enables you to generate secure and memorable passwords for each site.

How have you found the process of de-cluttering your social media? Let us know in the comments below.

By Olivia Rose French

Olivia is an expert writer, blogging specialist and Copywriter at Shake Social.

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