There are times that businesses, for one reason or another, decide to stop the upkeep on their social media profiles. The reasons can vary: maybe they stop posting to Facebook, maybe they had someone managing their accounts for them and they decided to take it over themselves only to realize that they didn’t actually keep up with it, or maybe they really have closed up shop altogether. Regardless of the reason, you need to have an exit strategy. If you don’t, your business’ social media accounts join the social media graveyard. If you’ve already reached that point, you need to head back and clean up dead social media accounts.
Many businesses think that social media marketing is as easy as having a personal Facebook page. People think the pages are there as a placeholder, you can check in as you have time, and the people will just come to you. This isn’t really the case. The whole “if you build it –they will come mentality” only works if it’s built and actively functioning. No one is going to visit and follow a ghost town. This is why we highly recommend outsourcing your social media management to consultants, like us, who do this full time. You have a business to run and your employees already have specific job requirements –better to have a professional handle something that can have such a big impact on your business.
If you have created accounts and aren’t keeping up with them or have never done anything with them at all for one reason or another, it’s time for a plan to dismantle them. Every time a current or prospective customer finds these dead accounts online –you’re leaving a bad impression. You need to come up with a plan for shutting down all of those accounts. Obviously you should start by taking inventory. What accounts do you have for your business? Do you have access to them?
Go through one by one and delete the accounts. This can be hard to do, especially if you have a large following or a lot of great content already. You may want to consider having someone take over to manage the accounts for you instead of closing up altogether, but it has to be one or the other. Consider your social media accounts as your online storefront to your customers. You don’t want customers coming in to your store seeing old expired promotions, that the last visitor was over a year ago, or that you aren’t responding to customers’ questions and concerns.
While we think it’s important in this day in age for a business to have an online presence, we also think it’s important for businesses to close up shop online if they aren’t able or willing to update those pages regularly and post content consistently. What do you think when you see abandoned business pages? Is it bad business? Do you assume they’ve closed? Do you think social media marketing should be outsourced? What are your thoughts? Comment below!
