Clean Up Your Social Landscape (Part I)

Social media are ever-changing. Legacy channels update services. New channels appear and popularize or disappear faster than the next season of your favorite sitcom. How do you keep up? Companies come to us with social landscapes wildly overgrown or – more often – deeply neglected. Does one describe you?

Don’t worry. Hope is not lost – and neither is access to that long-forgotten Facebook page. Let’s look at how to clean up your social landscape whether it’s too tangled to get through or in need of some serious TLC.

Welcome to the Jungle

Has your company created as many social channels as networks exist to maintain the latest and greatest social experiences? Have company silos bred duplicate Twitter accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn pages? Are you up to your ears in notifications?

Too Many Channels

Do you use the standard three social channels: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? These three rightfully have their place in your lineup because of their wide adoption.

But what about the other five or eight you’re trying to juggle? Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and Pinterest all serve different purposes, even if they serve the same audiences.

If you can’t answer what Instagram does for your company, why are you using it? If you find yourself struggling to create content for these channels or don’t know what purpose they serve, strike them from your strategy and revisit them again when the time is right.

Duplicate Channels

Duplicate channels are far worse for your business than juggling (and dropping) too many. Duplicates confuse your audience, disrupt your search optimization and prevent you from engaging with users who are using a Facebook page or Twitter account you don’t have access to.

Most of the time, duplicate channels are born from silos.

Example: Your remote sales team wants to talk about a last-minute offer on social, but they’re not connected to the marketing team at HQ. Sales takes matters into their own hands and – pop! – one rogue Facebook page after another is populated with two or three posts, and then left to dry up.

Changes to privacy and security settings throughout the social landscape have made it more difficult for someone to come in, claim and deduplicate your channels. Even if that someone is you.

Claiming an unmanaged Facebook page is fairly simple. Click here to see the steps. You’ll just need some paperwork. Claiming a managed page, however, isn’t easy.

We had a client who came to us without admin access to their Facebook page. We hunted for days for the admin, working back and forth with Facebook’s support team – who wouldn’t just give us the name. Getting access to Twitter and LinkedIn was just as hard.

Imagine trying to find which smartphone has the Snapchat credentials.

Clean It Up

Untangle your landscape with these tips:

• Write a social media policy and enforce it. Click here to read ours. Who represents your company on social? Hint: Not everyone. Not anyone. Just one person, team, department, etc.
• Create social channels you need based on your strategy and audience – and no more. Every product doesn’t need its own Facebook page.
• Search Google for your business and “Facebook,” “Twitter” and “LinkedIn,” etc. to find all the possible duplicate channels clogging your landscape.
• Username and passwords are easier to have than to find. Admin access is better to have than to get. Know who has access to these channels, and make sure you do, too.

If you need help finding and jumping through the countless hoops social networks put in the way of you getting access to your accounts, contact us. We’ve been there. We’ve got the scars to prove it.