Is your social media staying clean?

While recently helping some graduate school peers find participants for a research study, I realized that some of my contacts on Facebook are people I have not interacted with in many years. I do not view their profiles or really gain any benefit from maintaining these links other than just having them included on my friend list. I started thinking about all the people that I include on Facebook, Twitter, and other applications and how few are actually the users who I get information from and post comments with. It became clear that an essential part of social media use is to make sure you clean it up from time to time; getting rid of the useless blog subscriptions, followers, and friends. It is important to avoid becoming complacent and hoard needless companies, people, blogs, etc. that do not generate usefulness. At the same time, users should also search for new applications to participate in that potentially has more valuable content. Here are some quick tips to better organize and improve efficiency:

• Identify your most important contacts


• Unsubscribe from blogs you do not read and search for some new material you may be missing out on


• Unfollow those pages that produce little usefulness


• Maintain a good balance between personal and valuable professional connections

Please comment, I think we are all guilty of continually adding to our social media but I imagine we do not pay much attention to subtracting the clutter!