Improve Your Personal Brand’s Connections on Social Media

The goal of marketing online is for your personal brand to be seen as a valuable and trusted resource. What you may not realize is there are a lot of spam or fake accounts you may be connected with on social media. In order to be effective and encourage the right people to spread the word your brand needs to revisit who your fans and followers are.

Does Your Brand Have Too Many Irrelevant Connections on Social Media?

While a large number of people on your social networks may appear to be a good thing many of these may not be interested in what you have to offer. By taking a look at each account you can determine who is authentic and which fans or followers are counting against you. It’s well worth investing the time to do this, which will produce better results on the social media, and greater visibility for your brand. There are several steps you can take to identify these irrelevant accounts:

• Have you purchased fans and followers in the past? – If your brand was working to get your community numbers up you may have hired a service to help you grow your social media profiles. Unfortunately many of these people are not targeted for your niche, and are not interested in what you have to offer. They are less apt to share your content, and some of these could be spam accounts, which can be a nuisance to deal with. Typically these are easy to spot as you do a social media audit. Even though your numbers may decrease your quality connections will increase.

• Use social media management tools – There are low-cost and free tools available to help your brand manage your community. For example, on Twitter you can find inactive followers, people who have recently unfollowed, new followers, ect. As you remove accounts use resources like Klout and LinkedIn to connect with more relevant people.

• Evaluate and communicate – After weeding out your social networks keep track of new connections and make sure these are a good fit with your brand. Start the communication process with influencers and build better relationships. Valuable requests and new followers will soon follow as you establish a more credible community.

In order to protect your personal brand’s reputation online it’s important to check your social media accounts frequently in order to determine who you are communicating with and how your audience is responding to content. Spam or fake accounts are easy to remedy after putting forth the initial time and effort. A thorough audit can help your brand stand out online in a more credible and authentic way.

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