Earlier this week, I Googled myself. It’s been quite a while since I’ve done that, and I was surprised to see how the various social media channels I’ve created over the last five years had crept up the results list. Channels that I set up to promote my newly published novel back in 2007. Channels that I originally used to create groups for various organisations that I’ve worked or volunteered for. Channels that I no longer update; the ones where I’ve been ignoring the ‘new comment’ and ‘new friend request’ emails. There they all were on Google, looking abandoned and unloved.
In the world of social media, having an abandoned or unloved channel is often worse than having no channel at all. The content quickly goes out of date. Followers drift away or become frustrated when they get no response. Given that I didn’t want to start updating them all again – I’m sticking to this blog, and my main profiles on Facebook and Twitter for now – I decided they had to go.
Try to delete a social media profile, and you get a lot of ‘Are you sure?’ screens and the occasional begging email. They’ll ask if they’ve offended you, tout their privacy settings, try and convince you that you’ll be really missing out if you hit that final delete button. However, I’ve been strong. My accounts on Bebo and MySpace are scheduled for deletion. I’m no longer in their target audience – if I ever was. That extra twitter profile I set up for a #4change chat, the one that ranked higher in Google than my official profile, that’s gone too.
I probably should have done this years ago. It would’ve definitely be easier to do so. Wait to delete a channel that you’re no longer using, and the ‘last updated in 2007′ messages aren’t your only problem. I’d registered with email addresses I no longer had access to and ones that no longer existed. I’d forgotten my passwords. Twitter had temporarily suspended my account settings. In short, it was way more difficult than it needed to be.
The lesson here: delete your social media profiles as soon as you’re sure you’re done with them. They’re probably not helping you or your organisation by being inactive, so let your friends or followers know if you’ve gone somewhere new, and then shut them down. I’ve Googled myself again today, and some of the old profiles are still there, but I’m hoping they’ll disappear over the next week or two.
In the meantime, I’ll be trying to update this blog more frequently with my thoughts on all things online. Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve got any questions or want to share your own experience about trying to delete a social media channel.
