If you’re after some off-the-wall inspiration to get your place in tip-top shape for summer, check out The Art of Organizing—our look at the friendship between organization and creativity. If you’re trying to purge the dead weight from your social media marketing, stay put! Our five-step guide is all you’ll need to keep ahead of the curve and get that strategy looking tidy and shiny (no gloves or rubbish bags required).
1. Kick junk to the curb 🚮
Carefully comb through each of your profiles and delete any low resolution or poorly-sized images and old logos. Replace with the correct versions, and refer to Hootsuite’s handy sizing charts if you’re unsure of the specifications for each channel.
Check your bios and profile descriptions too. Are they referencing something that happened in 2014? Do they display the right Redirect URLs? Is the messaging still relevant?
Making these quick changes helps keep your branding consistent, and has a big impact on how professional your audience perceives your business to be.
2. Throw out anything that doesn’t fit 👚
Now it’s time to re-assess the type of content you’re posting.
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.William Morris
Morris’ wisdom can be applied to social, too—but the bar is set even higher as every single post should be as useful as it is aesthetically pleasing. Sharing low-quality or meaningless content just to tick a box or maintain frequency is never a good call.
Also, social media is no place for sentimental hoarding. If something’s not doing well (and remember, numbers don’t lie!) rework or get rid of it.
Purging is painful because we marketers are proud creatures who develop attachments to our own ideas, beliefs, and ways of doing things. But—a huge part of acing your job is knowing when to let go.
3. Stay on-trend 💅
It feels like there’s an algorithm tweak or a new app on the block that’s “killing” a veteran more often than IKEA launches a new collection.
In the last two weeks alone, Facebook has changed the way it calculates organic reach. Instagram has started testing Reactions to Stories, and Pinterest has made improvements to its platform to increase accessibility for visually impaired users. Whew!
Even minor changes can (and should) influence everything from creating your strategy to content planning to reporting. How do you keep up with it all?
Easy. Subscribe to Forbes’ weekly Social Media Roundup.
4. Renovate ✨
Social media marketing can be a tough gig, right? Why not reward yourself with the dashboard/content calendar/storage solution of your dreams?
We get it—familiarizing yourself with yet another platform or allocating budget may seem like a waste of time and money. But the right tools are absolutely worth the investment.
They take care of all the boring, time-consuming bits of social media (scheduling posts, competitor analysis, automatic resizing, content approvals) for you, and some of the best are free.
5. Change the locks 🔐
When was the last time you changed your passwords? Is the employee who went to work for your biggest competitor six months ago still a Page Admin?
Security is just as important as memes, guys.
