Today, I did a little sping winter cleaning (Who does winter cleaning?) of some of my social media profiles. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but I did make it a little easier to navigate around my profiles.
The cleaning was needed badly, because I kept adding recommended friends, friends of friends and local friends. I thought I was only adding people that could add value to my network, but there comes a time when you no longer have the time to see the value they add. Their thoughts and links just got lost in the rest of the stream of data that is constantly hitting me in the face.
How did this happen?
Fast Expansion
I see recommendations everyday from friends and influencers about new people to follow. It is great to follow all of these recommendations, but I quickly got overwhelmed and never got to meet or introduce myself to the new people I was becoming friends with. That’s not a good thing.
It’s called social networking. Not introducing myself or joining the conversation with new friends meant that I wasn’t doing a very good job on the networking side of things.
Cleaning Up
In order to clean up, I did a few things. First, I made lists on the social networks that allowed for it. The process of making the lists helped me go through all of my friends and see which ones I really know. If I didn’t know them, I just unfriend them. The unfriending part of list making is almost as good as making the lists themselves.
Lists give me the power to filter my friends’ updates into nice buckets, so I can easily switch from list to list and keep up with only the stuff that is most important to me.
Future Prevention
Going forward, I am making a better effort to not recklessly expand my network on any social site. I need to be more strategic on certain sites than others, but as a rule of thumb, anyone that I add I want to interact with them in the first week. If I don’t, they will get axed.
That’s my new rule, but you can make your own as long as it keeps you organized.
Conclusion
It takes time to clean up your profiles, and I know that we all don’t have much of it. However, it is really worthwhile to go through your networks from time to time and just clean them up, or I guess you could just manage them better from the start. Either way, keeping your network manageable lets you build better and stronger connections with the people you friend online.
Image by juhansonin
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December 6th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I think this helps us to remember that social networks are a constantly evolving process. It’s not just a case of setting up a profile once and hoping it will manage itself.
You change the people you want to converse with, start using it in different ways and want to get more out of them, the more you use them. We’re so constrained for time now and need to optimise our consumption of content.
It’s worth taking the time (like you did) to work on your profiles and make sure you’re getting the most out of them.
December 6th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
As you know, I completely agree with your comment. I really like how you took it to a higher level about not just keeping it clean, but knowing that our landscape is constantly changing is a reason to keep your profile well maintained. Thanks for adding to the conversation.