How to clean up your social media accounts

If you haven’t updated, organized, or cleaned up your social media accounts since 2009, it’s time for a deep social media cleanup. After all, the profiles and biographies you’ve created probably don’t reflect who you are now or even who you want to be.

Plus, it’s just good digital hygiene to maintain habits like updating your social media account passwords, making sure your profiles look professional, and decluttering your follow/friends lists for you ensure you are updated on the people and topics that really interest you.

Delete and archive messages you don’t want made public

The most obvious way to clean up your social media presence is to delete or archive posts that you no longer want to display publicly on your profile. If you only have a few messages here and there that you want to get rid of or archive (read: save the message, but keep it hidden from others), the process is usually quite simple. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, each post has its own menu of options, and tapping or clicking on that menu icon will bring up a list that includes options like “Delete” or “Move to Trash/ archive” or “Archive.”

But what if you need to do deep cleaning and delete many messages at once? Well, there are bulk delete and bulk archive options, depending on the platform. If you need to mass delete tweets, you’ll want to use a third-party tweet deletion service like TweetDelete or Twitter Archive Eraser. TweetDelete is a free web application that also offers a premium version of its service. Twitter Archive Eraser is a paid desktop application available for macOS and Windows PCs.

Instagram lets you archive and delete multiple posts at once, but this feature is only available in the social media platform’s mobile app. Facebook has a similar bulk delete and archive feature, and it’s available on the web version as well. To access it via the Facebook site, click on the Down arrow icon in the far right corner, then select Settings and Privacy > Activity Log > Your publications. From here you can select multiple messages and choose Archive, Wasteor Change audience.

Update outdated bios, URLs or usernames

Sometimes the biographies and usernames we’ve created for our social media profiles aren’t as timeless as we’d like to think. You can quickly refresh your profiles by updating your usernames, profile URLs, and bios. In most cases, you can edit these profile items by going to your profile page and selecting their Edit profile button or link.

However, changing your username may vary. Instagram allows you to change your username through the Edit profile button, but Facebook and Twitter will make you go through their Settings pages. It’s also worth noting that changing your username will usually automatically change your profile URL, so make sure your username is something that represents you well.

Disable or delete unused accounts

Now that we’re spring cleaning your social media accounts, it’s a good time to take stock of all the accounts you have and the ones you actually use. They are so easy to create and it is possible that a few of them have fallen into disuse over the years. Make a list of all your accounts, and if you notice that some of them haven’t been used in a while and you know you won’t be logging into them anytime soon, you might want to consider removing them. disable for the time being or even by deleting them.

As Consumer Reports notes, deleting inactive social media accounts can be particularly helpful in protecting your privacy and enhancing the security of your personal data. Having online accounts that you don’t interact with much (and probably don’t monitor) can leave you vulnerable to data theft, as online accounts tend to store personal information about you. It is important to minimize the number of online accounts that store this information. Limit yourself to accounts you know you will use.

Update all your passwords

If you’ve recently updated your passwords for your social media accounts, this tip isn’t for you. But if you haven’t updated your passwords since you opened the account almost ten years ago, or if you tend to reuse passwords in your accounts, you should change your pass. While the consensus is that you don’t need to update your passwords every few months, according to popular online security firm Nord Security, it’s good digital hygiene to protect your accounts by doing so. at least every year or so. Are you hesitant to change your passwords because it can be difficult to remember new ones? Go ahead and get yourself a password manager.

Clean up these friends/watchlists

Cleaning up your social media accounts isn’t just about updating your profile and boosting your online safety, it’s also about being more mindful of the content you consume. You don’t have to follow everyone and every page or follow every trending topic. If you find yourself in a situation where you follow people, brands, or posts that generate content that is not useful, informative, or entertaining, you should consider unfollowing them, muting them, and/or to delete them.

Take the opportunity to prune and organize your timeline and feed. Unfollow accounts that don’t resonate with you and follow those that do. Social media should be fun, so take the time to curate your feed with the content that really interests you. And don’t constantly submit to posts on topics you don’t care about from users and brands you’d rather not hear from. from.

In most cases, you can simply visit your follow or friend lists and unfollow/unfollow them from there. Or, you can go to their profiles and unfollow them or remove them from their friend list.

Organize the topics and interests you follow

You may not be interested in the same topics as a few years ago. Some social media platforms like Twitter will allow you to update the topics you follow. This can be useful for managing suggested posts that these platforms add to your feed.

On the Twitter website, you can easily manage your topics by clicking After then selecting Topics in the menu that appears. From there, you will be presented with two lists of tabs: Monitoring and Not interested. the Monitoring The tab contains all the topics you are currently following. Click on the Following next to each topic you want to unfollow, then tap No longer follow again to confirm. the Not interested the tab contains topics that you do not follow. If you want to follow a topic from here, just click on its To follow button.

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