Social Network Spring Cleaning
Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 9:42AM 
Opening the windows and giving your living space a deep cleanse isn't just for our physical house anymore. There's no time but the present to take the scrub brushes and oxi-clean to our social networks and make those streams of data sparkle with relevant content.
I recently devoted a Saturday to cleaning out my virtual attic. I went through my Twitter, Facebook, & LinkedIn with a fine toothed comb and really thought about who's on the streams of info that I check multiple times a day. This is becoming more and more important with the growth of my networks, especially in Twitter. The cleaner and more valuable information that your feeds contains, the more you get out of it...period.
My mantra for this exercise is, "relevance, relevance, relevance". Is this person posting valuable content? Is it entertaining, informative, thought provoking, or is it sending me to valuable content all around the web? If the answer is no, it's nothing personal, but you gotta go. My stream is just too important to me to muck up with content that doesn't make sense to me and my life.
Another thing that this task made me confront was the popular question, "do I follow you, if you aren't following me?" Go to Friend or Follow right now and see for yourself. Friend or Follow allows you to put in your twitter handle and instantly find out the people that you follow that aren't following you back as well as who is following you that you aren't following back.
You'll probably be surprised who's streams your not currently on ,and being a human, it's a little tough not to take this a bit more personally than you should. Don't let it get to you, like I said before, it's nothing personal and it's all about relevancy. You will also be surprised of the people that fell through the cracks and you aren't currently following.
So, do I follow people that aren't following me? Of course I do. I stick with my mantra and go with who gives me valuable content. However, if you are running into a lot of people that you think should be following you, that aren't, you can either start questioning your content or better target them. You could even reach out to them with a reply, next time they post something interesting or include them on a follow Friday post.
FACEBOOK & LINKEDIN
These streams are a bit different in my life. They aren't constantly streaming on my second monitor like my twitter feeds. I check both streams probably twice a day on my laptop and two more times by mobile. My Facebook to catch up with what my friends are doing and LinkedIn to see what people in my professional network are up to.
My LinkedIn was clean as a whistle. This is due to a rule that I setup from the beginning, only reaching out to people that I had worked with in the past and only accepting invitations from people that I know and who I have worked with in someway on a physical project. For now, this is making sense and keeping my LinkedIn very valuable.
My Facebook was a different story. I hadn't cleaned out my Friends since I signed up over 3 years ago. Since we were just figuring things out, I found that my bar to accept people into my network has really raised over the past few years. Before it was a lot about collecting and spying on old highschool friends and girls you had crushes on when you were 18. It was new and shiny and I certainly wanted to play with it.
Now, I can have a look through my relevancy filter, and find out who really needs to be there. That old high school buddy that I haven't physically talked to or even exchanged an email for 10 years that fills my stream with Farmville and Gangsters requests all day...You gotta go dude.
A rule of thumb that I'm starting to use is if I haven't shared a personal message with you for over a year. We probably shouldn't be following each other on Facebook.
Now with my feeds and streams sparkling clean and fully optimized to be most interesting and helpful for me, I feel like a new man! Getting more good content, sharing more and catching things that I may have missed before due to someone updating me on their ham sandwich eating or saying nighty night to twitter. Take my word for it, get this done sooner than later and put it on your calendar at least 2 times a year.
Reader Comments (1)
The real question is: Do you really need latex gloves to wipe a computer monitor?
Seriously, though, 'tis the season for cleaning the feeds. Last week I dumped a hundred or so Facebook friends. Farmvillains and high school connections were the first to go.
Thanks for the tip on Friend or Follow. I think I may have to piggyback off you and formulate a post of my own on this issue. W/r/t Twitter, I tend to base my following decisions more on whether or not I like what the person is saying than if they follow me or not, leading to my Twitter feed being full of awesome people I have never met and probably will never meet (looking at you, Roger Ebert). Furthermore, I am one of those losers who's following more people/entities than are following him.