Using Free Time to Update Twitter and Facebook

Maintaining your social media profiles ensures that the face you put forward is your best, and most up-to-date. When others come across your social media profiles, they will rather promptly determine whether or not you are worth their time. Encourage new readers and audience members by keeping a pristine social media presence.

Lately I’ve been mentioning a number of ways you can save time when it comes to creating, organizing and publishing content for your blog. Now I’d like to mention a few ways in which you can utilize your new found downtime to manage your social media presence. In an era where you’re held accountable for your online actions and content, it’s difficult to escape regret. Whether you’re aiming for a more mature audience or you would simply like to make the best first impression, you can benefit from some regular social media cleaning.

Here are a few relatively minor tasks you can do if you have a few extra minutes. Completing a task or so every month or so can keep your social media profiles in top condition.

Unfollow Unnecessary Twitter Accounts

It’s easier than ever to get followers and follow other users on Twitter. After a while, it may seem like an unrewarding endeavor. Trim the Twitter fat to get rid of the spam content and unwanted updates so you can better focus on the relationships that will benefit you and your blog. Go through the Twitter users you’re following and see which ones are unecessary. Don’t feel badly about unfollowing another user–it’s not as personal of an action anymore.

Update Your Facebook Privacy Settings

Now that Facebook has updated its privacy policy and changed much of the profile content to default as publicly accessible, it’s high time that you go back through and update your settings accordingly. If you’ve been to visit Facebook since the changes, you should have been invited by Facebook to take a look at the new settings options. However, it’s important that you go through all your settingsto ensure that they align with the new accessibility functions on Facebook. Beyond Facebook, it’s a good idea to update your privacy settings across all your social media accounts as well.

Update your Facebook Groups

Keeping separate lives on Facebook is common practice these days. A profile for your personal life, another for your business colleagues and yet another for your own blog may be three types of lives your juggling. Whether you’re pulling this off with one or several Facebook accounts, creating Groups is a great way to manage the content your friends have access to.

Particularly important for those that are using one account for multiple purposes, creating and managing groups is becoming a necessity. Take a few minutes to update your Facebook Groups. Add and remove individual friends as you deem necessary. Think about the relationships your friends have with each other, or with additional people outside of your immediate network to ensure that you’re assigning friends to their proper Groups.

Mature Your Content

If you find yourself older and wiser than you were a couple of years ago or a couple of weeks ago, reflect these changes in your social media profiles. Photos, updates and notes that may have seemed like a great idea at the time may not be so great anymore. Untag yourself in unwanted photos from others, and remove your own content that you’ve grown beyond. With certain networks such as Facebook, some reassignment via Groups and privacy settings will allow you to limit or grant access to more personal information, if you’re not entirely ready to delete those party pictures all together.

Update Third Party Apps

Using third party applications makes your job as a blogger a whole lot easier, espeically if you use apps to help streamline the time spent managing your social media profiles. For your social media cleansing, it’s important to update these third party applications as well. Make sure that your passwords are up to date, so that they are still in sync with your main social media accounts.

Make any other changes necessary; perhaps you no longer want to auto-follow new Twitter users that follow you. This is also a good time to file away the account info for the third party app itself–keep an email or document with a list of all the third party apps you use so that the next time you find a few minutes to update your settings, you’ll have all the websites at hand.

Go Through Shared Bookmarks

You bookmarked them for a reason. Take some time to go back through your bookmarks to see why you shared them in the first place. Delete any unnecessary bookmarks, or move them to a private folder or account. Depending on the type of shared bookmarking service, you can also use this time to manage some of your friendships on the site. See what new sharing options you have, add and remove friends as necessary and send a few personalized messages to maintain correspondence with others. These people in particular can help you spread your blog content through shared bookmarking services and other social media sites.

Go Through Recommended Content

Depending on the service, many networks have content that can be shared and recommended to you by others. While this is something we’d ideally like to do on a daily basis, it may not always top our priority lists. If you find yourself with some down time, go through this recommended content so you can respond to other users accordingly. Maintaining this correspondence will help your social media presence in the end.

Reply to Comments

As implied above, correspondence with others is vital to your social media survival. It is social, after all. For your blog in particular, replying to comments is important. Taking some time to go through comments, reply individually and connect with others beyond your blog can really boost your readership and support from existing readers. Replying to comments on other social media profiles has a similar effect, and can be accomplished relatively quickly if you break up the associated tasks.

Tweak Your Profiles

Something that may take a little more time but is still a necessity is redoing your profiles. Even a tweak here and there can help you maintain your presence and your sanity. Update your profile picture and your basic information on one day, and your work information and favorite quotes on another day. Some networks allow you to change your privacy settings around particular profile information. These privacy settings would be good to check out as well.

Update About Me

Similar to redoing your profile, updating your About Me section is important as well. I’m speaking primarily of your blog, but updating your About Me sections across all your social media profiles is also helpful. Have you accomplished anything recently that you’d like to add to the About Me section? Perhaps you’d just like to tweak the wording of a particular sentence, or change a link you’ve included here.

Written by Kristen Nicole from Kristen Nicole
Posted on January 6th, 2010 and filed under Blogging
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