How to spring clean your online life

Many people chose the start of the spring and summer months to clean their homes and often sort our their personal affairs. This means it’s also a great time of year to organise your online life a little better, so you can be more organised and make your working day as streamlined and efficient as possible.

Here are a few of our top tips to a thorough online spring clean:

Take advantage of Google Mail

A lot of the people we speak to use a range of different email providers, but Google Mail is considered one of the best because it offers such a vast amount of storage and a range of innovative features you won’t find elsewhere.

In your Google Mail account click Settings > Labs and here you’ll see a range of new ideas that the Google team are currently working on. Although some of these might change as new features are added, many are extremely useful and can make your working day much more streamlined just by sorting out a few email issues.

For instance, activate the Nested Labels feature to organise all of your emails in a much more thorough way than simple folders. Try the Undo Send feature if you often find you hit Send too early and should really proof your emails a little better. Or add Default Text Styling if you’d like to emulate your brand more throughout your emails by using a default colour and font style.

Be consistent

In order for people to recognise and feel a connection to your brand or business, it’s important you stay consistent across all online channels.

This is important from a personal sense, so make sure your avatar is the same across your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook platforms and also use the same bio or similar language when you’re describing yourself in your email signature or Twitter bio.

This is arguably even more important for brands, so make sure you use the same bio to describe your brand or business and the same logo or avatar no matter where you’re communicating online.

Clean up Twitter

There are many active users on Twitter who are worth following and engaging with and are also relevant to your brand and industry. However, there are also many spam accounts, or users that rarely tweet and participate with online communities. Therefore, it’s worth taking a look at the people you follow to see if they’re still of value to you.

This is not about playing a “numbers game” and decreasing the number you follow to make you look more popular. Instead, it’s more important to be following relevant people so the tweets you see in your stream are of use to you because they inform you or can the content can be shared and Re-Tweeted among your followers.

There are a range of tools you can use to help you so you don’t have to scroll through hundreds of avatars!

UnTweeps is a useful service which shows you the users that haven’t tweeted recently. Set the time scales for 30 days and unfollow anyone who hasn’t tweeted, as chances are they’re not using Twitter anymore.

TwitCleaner is similar to UnTweeps but also claims to analyse the people you follow and find spammers and bots, which are becoming more prevalent on Twitter and do need to be un-followed.

Cadmus is another application that’s really useful and can be used to find only the content that’s relevant to you from your Twitter feed. This is a great option if you see the value in Twitter but often don’t have enough time to read everything that might be important.

Twitter Lists are vital if you follow a lot of different kinds of people and want to only flick between certain groups on certain days. So maybe make a list for your clients, a list for news sources and a list of potential new business leads. You can then add these lists as columns into a social media dashboard like TweetDeck or Hootsuite to make them even easier to follow.

Plan ahead

If your business is active online, whether that be on a website or on various social media channels, it’s important that you have a strategy in place to react to things if they go wrong.

There are countless businesses that have made blunders in recent months, whether that’s accidentally revealing personal data, sending out offensive tweets or neglecting customer service issues. We’d like to think that none of these issues will ever affect you, but it’s still good practice to have a strategy in place if ever they do.

So this could include a holding statement for your website, a customer service strategy to contact current customers or just a friendly and reassuring tweet. You can’t pre-empt everything that might happen online, but its good to be prepared just in case.

If you’d like to spring clean your online presence but you’re not sure where to start, then get in touch with one of the Codastar team and we will be happy to give you some pointers.

Images via Google Mail and ivanpw’s Flickr.