I hope your social media isn’t as messy as your closet, because it can be a bigger problem than a misplaced shirt.
Spring cleaning was never intended to be a time for a social media checkup, but it makes sense, so why not embrace it?
Pick one, two or all five. From privacy settings to secure passwords to comments, they’re all important and all easy to tackle.
Clean up your privacy
In the spring-cleaning world, this is that window with the missing curtain that you’ve been meaning to fix forever. Let me be blunt: The neighbors can see you. And in this case, your neighbors could be billions of people. Go the settings menu on the social media network of your choice and just have a look around. As long as you aren’t daunted by all the menus and submenus, you’ll be done in no time. Pay special attention to any setting that allows ads to target you. If you prefer to share with friends and not the world, then that’s your right.
Clean up your passwords
123456 is not a password. Baseball is not a password. And the word password is not a password. Whether you make a list on paper and put it in a safe deposit box or create a Google doc, you need to have an organized list of passwords that are secure, impossible to guess and different for every network and website. That means the password you use for Twitter cannot be your banking password.
Clean up your comments
Spam happens, and sometimes it can look pretty, well, spammy. Check your Facebook posts and Instagram photos and get rid of anything that’s even remotely related to a sister-in-law who made $334 without leaving the house. (Spoiler alert: She didn’t.) If you post a lot, just go back a week to start. Some people attract no spam; others attract a lot. Find out where you fall, and then you’ll know whether or not you need to do this more regularly.
Clean up your friends
This will be a bigger job if you are on .TeamFollowBack, that is you follow every single person who follows you. Don’t do that, because you’ll end up with a noisy feed full of stuff you don’t need. Unfollow the people you never wanted to follow in the first place, and make it a golden rule to choose your future friends carefully.
Clean up your profile photos
They’re called avatars, and that little face associated with your account says a lot about you. On Twitter, you may have seen white eggs on brightly colored background. That’s Twitter’s generic avatar, and you need to make sure you don’t have one of those. Same with Facebook, where a generic avatar is an outline of a head and shoulders. Take a quick selfie, and add it in the settings menu. I’ll bet you a good avatar will even boost your following. My long-standing social media rule is to never follow an egg or default avatar. If you want to get my attention, you need to start here.
And just like that, you’re done. No paint splatters and no mysterious leftover screws.
Next up: That closet. Trust me, you don’t want my help with that.
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