Spring-Cleaning: Social Media Tips & Tricks to Organize Your Accounts

As a Bostonian, I’ve been patiently (not really that patiently) waiting for the warm weather to hit and all of the 110.6 inches of snow to melt. With the winter officially over and the snow finally starting to clear, we can now focus on the brighter things in life – spring.

However, with spring comes another unpleasant battle, the annual spring clean. For social media marketers, spring-cleaning takes on an entirely new meaning. It’s no longer washing windows and scrubbing floors, but it’s organizing social audiences, reexamining the competition, and more.

By doing a thorough spring-cleaning across accounts, social media marketers will have their affairs in order for the months to come. Not only will this help get all accounts up-to-date and organized, but it will also act as a timesaver.

As the saying goes, “Success comes before work only in the dictionary.” So, let’s work to get all of your social media accounts in order so that you can experience the success that comes with it. Here is a guide to social media spring-cleaning, including tips and tricks to better organize your accounts. Enjoy!

Reevaluate Your Social Media Goals

What are the goals of your social media marketing program? This is arguably the most important part of your spring-cleaning initiatives, as it will likely alter everything to be done after. Establishing a solid social media marketing foundation with clear-cut goals will help you better organize your social media accounts.

Here are some key questions to answer:

What do you want to achieve with social media marketing?

Determining what you want to gain from social media will, without a doubt, affect your spring-cleaning tasks. For example, if one of your goals is to dramatically grow your Twitter followers, you may not be as picky about who you’re following. On the flip side, if one of your goals is to gain extremely targeted and relevant followers, you may want to be a bit more selective with whom you’re following.

What is each platform used to accomplish?

It’s important to understand that it’s OK to set different goals for different platforms. When considering the 5 major social media networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram), each has very unique benefits, requiring a strategy tailored per platform.

To provide some insight into how these benefits differ, here’s how I view each platform:

• Twitter is a great platform for engaging with industry influencers and publications, establishing thought leadership, sharing content and driving referral traffic.
• Facebook is sending less organic traffic to websites; however, it’s still a great place to gain brand visibility, show-off employee and company achievements, and humanize the brand through storytelling. There are a variety of different Facebook tactics to consider that are working right now for business pages.
• Google+ is most beneficial for engaging in communities and helping the search engine index content more quickly. It’s easy to find relevant communities to share industry-related content and interact with influencers and publications.
• LinkedIn allows your company to display its knowledge and expertise, while sharing high-level industry information. Groups are another mechanism for you to utilize to build thought leadership and support your company’s social media objectives.
• Instagram, as mentioned in a previous post, may not be the most link-friendly platform, but it allows you to get creative and communicate your brand story through a series of photos.

Are your social media goals aligned with your broader business goals?

The most important objective for any social media strategist to have is to keep the overall mission in mind. Sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck in a day-to-day routine and lose sight of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it in the first place. For businesses, social media marketing isn’t just about getting retweets, shares, or page likes.

A successful social media strategy helps businesses increase brand recognition and loyalty, boost conversion rates, drive referral traffic and more, all in effort to generate sales. Focusing on the broader business goals will allow you to see the real impact of your social media strategy.

Analyze Your Audience

Start this spring season off with a clear perception of your target audience. Just as social media is constantly changing, so too is your audience. If someone asked you what your target audience likes and doesn’t like seeing on social media, could you confidently answer? To know this, it’s necessary to regularly analyze engagement rates across your accounts.

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide easy-to-use and insightful analytics that will help you optimize your updates by understanding what engages your audience. Sort through the updates that received the highest engagement and determine what was different about them.

Ask yourself:

• What type of post is it?
• What time was it posted?
• How is it structured?
• What is the text?
• How long is the caption?
• How many photos are there?
• Is there a CTA?

As I mentioned previously, Facebook organic reach is down across business accounts. In effort to fight this trend, we are constantly testing new strategies and evaluating our clients’ Facebook Insights to see what works best in each industry.

For example, when testing different style Facebook posts for one of our clients in the used equipment industry, we found that photo galleries were generating exceptional engagement. We also found that posts published during weekend night hours generated increased clicks.

This is when we found our sweet spot. By posting photo galleries during weekend night hours, we were able to increase reach by 780%, direct clicks to the website by 2,933% and Likes by 587%. See the numbers below for yourself:

Posted at 2:30 p.m. on a weekday

Posted at 9pm on a weekend night

Organize Your Audience

Do you know who you’re following on Twitter and who follows you? How about the business pages you’ve Liked on Facebook, or the Google+ circles you are in? These are all constantly changing and, if you’re not staying updated, you may be losing valuable connections and missing out on potential opportunities.

Contaxio is a social media relationship management tool that I use to clean up Twitter followers, export real-time data, and find new connections. With features that show the users not following you back, users you don’t follow back, and mutual connections, you can make sure that you aren’t missing out on any opportunities.

After doing a thorough clean up of your followers, you will have a narrower focus to better organize your audience into lists. You may even want to create a list especially for people you don’t intend to follow, but don’t want to lose as a connection.

I wouldn’t recommend naming the list something as obvious as “People I’m Not Following,” but get a little creative, maybe something like “Awesome Tweeters.”

Followerwonk is another tool I use to find new social media connections. With the ability to search bios for keywords and sort users by social authority, it’s a great tool for identifying strong industry influencers. Once you’ve updated your list of social influencers, you can begin connecting with them across social media networks, engaging with them, and sharing their content on a daily basis.

Revamp Your Profiles

Spring is a great time to update and optimize your social media profiles to provide users with a fresh appearance and accurate and detailed information about the company.

Completeness and uniformity are essential elements of all your social media profiles. To provide users with the best understanding of what the brand is about, it’s important for all sections of your profiles to be filled out with as much detail as possible and with consistent language across social media networks.

To update and optimize your social media profiles, consider doing the following:

• Cover Photos: Give your profiles a mini makeover with new cover photos. Cover photos are meant to catch the eye of visitors and attract them to your page, which is why it’s necessary to refresh them every so often. In fact, we just recently updated KoMarketing’s cover photos by using Canva, an awesome design tool. What do you think?

• Profile Pictures: Make sure that all of your profile pictures are consistent, with the most recent company logo. This is essential to build and strengthen brand awareness, as users should be able to quickly find and recognize your profiles.
• Bio Descriptions: While the length given for bio descriptions varies on each social media network, it’s important to make sure that all bio descriptions are similar and use consistent language that aligns with the brand. When crafting the perfect bio, it may be helpful to reflect on the company’s about section of the website and mission statement.
• Contact Information: At bare minimum, this includes having the company address, telephone number, and email. Having the same and correct contact information in all of your social media profiles is crucial. If this information isn’t consistent, visitors may get confused and frustrated with the brand.
• Links: Make sure that all of your profile links are updated and working correctly. You should be linking to your website and blog, and also cross-linking to your other social media profiles. This provides an easy way for new visitors to find you on other channels.

Final Thoughts

The start of spring symbolizes brighter days to come, making it the perfect time for social media marketers to do some spring-cleaning. Hopefully, these social media tips and tricks provided you with some helpful ideas to tidy up your social media accounts.

I’d love to hear some of the ways that you keep your social profiles in order, so feel free to comment below with anything you would add to this guide.