Social Media Spring Cleaning Tips

Logging into Twitter over the last few days, users are being prompted to update their profiles. According to the AP,

Twitter is encouraging people to allow their e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers to be included in the service's search index.

Let’s be honest, this is more of a Twitter acquisition strategy than a Twitter service improvement. The more information Twitter has about its users, the more it can charge advertisers. Twitter may push out 50 million tweets every day, but after four years in business the blue birdie needs to make some bank.

Social Media Spring Cleaning Tips
We should still take advantage of the profile prompting. In fact, as spring promises to arrive sooner than later, we should do a sweep of all our social media profiles. Several of these tips were created with Twitter in mind, but I think that most can apply roughly to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and even social media platforms like Foursquare to a degree.

A | B | C
 As much as I love that Glengarry Glen Ross scene, this does not represent always be closing. A, B, C stands for Avatar, Bio and Content/Conversation/Commercial.

• Avatar: Use one! And preferably the avatar is a picture of you. I break this rule. Often. But the point is it reminds everyone that there is a real live person at the end of every tweet you send.
• Bio: Twitter is reminding everyone to fill out their profile because in part not enough people have filled out their information. And if you look at the picture below, my first instinct is to NOT follow this person. No picture + no bio info + no tweets = no context and no real reason to follow them.

• Content/Conversation/Commercial: This is also called the law of thirds. If you focus too much on just pushing out links to stuff or just on having conversations or only shamelessly self-promoting yourself, you won’t appeal to many potential friends/followers/contacts. A mix of all three is a well-received variety.

Don’t fret about getting it literally into thirds. But this is a helpful guide to keep your content streams as useful as possible.

Register Your Name
OK, this is a very niche tip and may only apply to Twitter. But if you go by handles like crazylegs25 or, uh, prblog, it pays to include your full name in your profile and/or register your full name account so people can find you. I use @kevindugan to do nothing other than push people to my @prblog account.

Better yet? Don’t even start down this schizo-branding road. Be yourself from day one. Trust me on this. As the line between personal and professional continues to blur online, it doesn’t make much sense anymore. In my defense, I started down this road eight years ago.

Profile Consistency
You may want to use every pose you paid for at Glamour Shots, but using one or two pics across profiles consistently helps people to recognize you. If you have a few specific interests or skills, be sure to use the same keywords across every profile. This makes it easier for like-minded people to find you in relevant searches. And by pushing each profile’s email alerts to one account you can be more organized and potentially more responsive when new friends find you.

Register at Directories, Create Lists
It really can be tough to find people on Twitter, hopefully their profile update prompt helps this in the long run. But for open-API social media sites, there are usually a few directories where you can register to be more easily found by like-minded folk. Sites like TweepML and Listorious also make it easy to create your own lists. I owe a ton of my followers from being included on lists.

Your social media profiles are the first moment of truth many will have with you/your personal brand. Profiles have to do a lot of work and you’re not around to provide context. Are your profiles doing you justice?

Comments

[Dan Schawbel]

Kevin, thanks for letting me know about this post. I think people should focus on providing more value, than self-promotion online. Sometimes I have difficulty with this because I have so much to promote, which actually forces me to work harder on the value piece. You become noise if all you do is promote.

[Elle Ferrer]

Thanks Kevin, enjoying your site - much needed advice for many out there.

[Susan Wenner Jackson]

Your blog is quickly becoming one of my "must-reads". Always discovering good tips here! Thanks.

[Chris Thilk]

Well first off I'd argue with your thesis that ABC means anything other than Always Be Closing. You've gone down a notch or two in my estimation, unfortunately, by even suggesting such heresy.

With that behind us, let me say I agree with your advice here, even if I've only started taking it myself in the last year or so. I'm not a big fan (at all) of the "personal brand" talk but even I'll admit that having a single (max 2) avatar across networks makes the whole thing better not only for the audience but also for the person who's profiles they are. Just as we would advise clients to use a consistent logo or artwork on all the sites and profiles they were setting up for a campaign so to we all should be doing so for our personal profiles, especially to the extent that we use them as extensions of our professional lives.

Good reminder, Kev.

[Kevin Dugan]

Thanks for everyone's comments.

Dan - I totally agree that self-promotion should not be the primary goal for you to gain traction on Twitter. My only argument is that it's a tool for doing so. If you do any one of the three content/conversation/commercial, you may risk becoming noise IMHO.

Elle and Susan - Appreciate the feedback!

Thilk - Good to hear from you. I was not prioritizing the meanings...just suggesting there can be more than one. Does this mean I don't get the set of steak knives?

[Violawu]

Cant agree more on "shamelessly promoting yourself" part. I think the point of using social media is to share usefule/helpful/meaningful information in a more efficient way. People are getting less and less patient in this world with overloaded information, either a conversation or a link should have some genuine purpose to be engaging.

[Paige Levy]

When it comes to breaking through the clutter and avoiding becoming the clutter, you gave some great advice. Many people become part of the clutter due to poor social media upkeep. I think that social medias are a great way to promote yourself but, when used wrong can damage your image. I agree with everything you said about spring cleaning of the media sites, and hope that everyone takes the advice to clean their sites up.

[Prof. Mario Hector Vogel]

Kevin, thanks for this post

Prof. Mario Hector Vogel
Manager
http://www.gerente.co.cc

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