If you haven't updated, curated, or otherwise cleaned up your social media accounts since 2009, it's time for a social media deep clean. After all, the profiles and bios you created then probably don't reflect who you are now or even who you want to be.
Plus, it's just good digital hygiene to maintain habits like updating your social media accounts' passwords, making sure your profiles look professional, and decluttering your follow/friends lists to ensure you're updated on the people and topics you actually care about.
The main page of the TweetDelete website.screenshot Delete and archive posts you don't want public
The most obvious way to clean up your social media presence is to delete or archive posts you no longer want displayed publicly on your profile. If you just have a few posts here and there that you want to get rid of or archive (read: save the post, but keep it hidden from others), the process is usually easy enough. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, each post has its own menu of options, and by tapping or clicking on the icon for that menu, a list will appear that includes options like "Delete" or "Move to trash/archive" or "Archive."
But what if you need to do a deep clean and remove lots of posts at once? Well, there are mass deletion and mass archival options, depending on the platform. If you need to mass delete tweets, you'll want to use a third-party tweet deletion service like TweetDelete or Twitter Archive Eraser. TweetDelete is a free web app that also offers a premium version of its service. Twitter Archive Eraser is a paid desktop app that is available for MacOS and Windows PCs.
Instagram lets you archive and delete multiple posts at once, but this feature is only available in the mobile app of the social media platform. Facebook has a similar mass deletion and archival feature, and it's also available on the web version. To access it via the Facebook website, click the Down Arrow icon in the far right corner, thUpdate any outdated bios, URLs, or usernames
Sometimes the bios and usernames we came up with for our social media profiles aren't as timeless as we'd like to think. You can give your profiles a quick refresh by updating your usernames, profile URLs, and bios. In most cases, you can edit these profile elements by navigating to your profile page and selecting its respective Edit Profile button or link.
Changing your username may vary, however. Instagram lets you change your username via the Edit Profile button, but Facebook and Twitter will make you go through their Settings pages. It's also worth noting that changing your username will usually automatically change your profile's URL, too, so make sure your username is something that represents you well.
How to disable an Instagram account via the web app.screenshot Deactivate or delete unused accounts
Now that we're spring cleaning your social media accounts, it's a good time take stock of all of the accounts you have and which ones you actually use. It's so easy to create them, and it's possible a few of them have fallen into disuse over the years. Make a list of all of your accounts, and if you notice that a few of them haven't been used in a while and you know you won't be logging into them anytime soon, you may want to consider deactivating them for now or even deleting them.
As Consumer Reports notes, deleting inactive social media accounts can be particularly helpful for protecting your privacy and bolstering the security of your personal data. Having online accounts that you don't interact with very much (and probably don't monitor) can leave you vulnerable to having your data stolen, since online accounts tend to store personal information about you. It's important to keep the number of online accounts that store such information to a minimum. Keep it to just the accounts you know you will use.en select
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