PP 273: My Digital Marketing Purge

Kim Sutton  For the past couple months, I’ve been making a significant effort to do a social media perch. Actually not just social media but digital marketing perch. Now I know you may be a little bit confused and let me explain a little bit more. It all started with my Infusionsoft account. And if you haven’t listened to previous episodes of the Positive Productivity Podcast, I am an Infusionsoft certified partner. And I am working day in and day out in my clients accounts. But I also use Infusionsoft for my own email marketing, and e commerce services. I went into my Infusionsoft account a few months back in late 2017. And I realized that I had so many tags, campaigns, products, etc, that I have not even looked at in months, if not years. And I knew these all had to go. All these extras were creating a massive confusion every time I tried to create anything new or when I was looking for something specific. So although it wasn’t a short and easy task, I made a concerted effort to take a little bit of time until I got the whole process done every day to clean out all the extras. After I wrapped up my Infusionsoft account, I started moving to the social media platforms that I have profiles on, specifically, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Twitter was no doubt the most labor intensive of my purge processes, is that the right way to put it? But I realized that I was following way too many people that I had nothing in common with, probably wouldn’t be retweeting their content and I’m pretty sure that I would never engage with them at all. It took a few months, but by the time I was done, I had unfollowed almost 12,000 people on Twitter. I started by reviewing the home feed, I would just leave it open on any given day, retweet what I liked, engage with what was interesting to me, and then unfollow the people who were tweeting messages that were completely uninteresting to me, or to be completely honest, were offensive to me. I don’t get into politics on the podcast, and I will bring up my faith but I never say anything that I want to be offensive to anybody else. And I realized that especially with the state of our country, if you’re living in America, and to be totally honest with the state of the world right now that there was a lot of negativity on Twitter, and I really didn’t want any part of it. It was really easy to unfollow those people. And while I did lose followers in the process, I can say that my follower count has not dropped very significantly. And I’ve actually been getting more followers just because it’s been a lot easier to see the content that I did want to retweet. The same has been the case on Facebook and Instagram. People who have been posting negative posts on Facebook have been really easy to unfollow or unfriend. And I realized through this process that I had friended a lot of people that I didn’t even know. For quite a few of them, I would open up the messaging just to see if we had ever had a conversation. And in many cases we had never even communicated. I honestly don’t know why we had become “friends”. Moving forward, I’ve realized that I really want to keep my friends on Facebook, to people I have personally met, or have at least communicated with in one way or another. I’m not looking to have 5000 friends on Facebook, but I’m also not looking to slam anybody who does. Everybody has their own social media techniques, and I’ve realized what works for me. While I’m not saying that it’s necessary for you to go and do a digital marketing purge today. I do want you to keep your eyes open and make sure that what you’re seeing in your feeds really resonates with you and your brand. If it doesn’t unfollow or unfriend the person. It will be a lot easier to engage and build your network and even become an influencer if the people that you are following and connected with hold the same values as you do. Now with all this said, go for and make it a positive and productive day.