Time to give your social media accounts a cleanse? Here’s how

• Our social media accounts may be an extension of ourselves in both personal and professional settings
• Scrubbing our social media presence can help us keep content and posts that are still relevant

Our social media profiles reveal more about us than we realize.

Every like, share, comment, and even the type of groups or page you are following leaves a little bit of information or makeup of who you are as a person. While social media platforms are increasingly used for business purposes, with social commerce rising again in popularity, it can be hard to draw the line between our personal movements on social media and our professional network — especially when our work and personal lives are more overlapped than ever before.

Completely purging your social media accounts may not be an option for some; social media profiles are valuable for personal branding, business identity, and staying in the loop of the industry. So, why not opt to tidy up your existing accounts without deleting them.

Facebook

Facebook has a relatively wide range of user autonomy, whereby you can specify who can or can’t view your posts. There are options that let the users determine what kind of information is available for public users that aren’t friends.

Users can also manually control individual posts by selecting the “Manage Posts” option on the top right of the profile. This will take you to a page that includes your own posts and posts you’ve been tagged in.

Users are also given the power to undo reactions on Facebook. On the top right of a homepage, users can click on the inverted triangle and select “Activity log.” Here, users can choose to undo a reaction and even “remove tags.”

Twitter

Moving on to the Twitterverse, where a universe of opinion-wrapped tweets still awaits for commentaries, it may be high time to clear off some that may not reflect your current standings.

Twitter has emerged as a popular platform for networking purposes and also to directly connect with target audiences. If deleting your Twitter account is not an option, deleting some old tweets may be the way forward.

For Twitter, users can manually delete their tweets within seconds. However, for active users that have been tweeting for years now, manually deleting and sifting through individual posts may not be feasible. There are some free and paid web-based tools that allow users to wipe out tweets of a certain time frame (one month ago, six months ago, and so on), or based on a certain keyword.

Instagram

Lastly, for the visual realm of Instagram, users have the option of posting stories that only last 24 hours and are then automatically deleted. Though the idea originated from Snapchat, this feature is also available on Instagram, and its short lifespan is preferable for some users.

As for posts such as photos or videos that are posted on your Instagram feed, you can manually remove specific posts by selecting the posts and tapping on the three dots to delete. As an alternative, users may consider to simply set their accounts to private mode.