Deleting Poor Performing Social Media Accounts for Businesses?

[JCunningham]

I'm the Internet Marketing Manager for an ad agency and in charge of not only our social media and SEO but advising and hooking up clients with successful campaigns.

I've taken the liberty of signing us up for almost every major social media account.

Some are very successful (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Vimeo is ok (we use it over YouTube), Vine is picking up) and others are very not doing well (Flickr, Foursquare, YouTube really is low, Google+ is very mediocre).  I’ve been wondering if it would be more beneficial to just delete certain accounts.  I think I need to keep Google+ (Google values it and we are not doing terribly on it) but all the others listed in the bad column I think are really cancerous to our SEO (and make us look bad b/c we are doing poorly on them) but I really don’t know.  I used them kind of to see if they would work for us and to demonstrate that we knew what we were doing in these social networks, but I think they may be doing us more harm than good both from a PR standpoint and SEO.  Doesn't it hurt your website for Google to see poor performing social media accounts, just as the opposite would be true (good sm accounts and mention/activity would give you klout & SEO...)?

What do you think?

I'm no novice but no master either.  Love this forum.  Thanks in advance.

[TomRayner]

Hey there

First off, we can rule out one thing: having poor performing social media accounts won't be cancerous to your SEO.  It won't have any negative effect SEO-wise just because the follower or engagement count might be low.

Now, PR is a different story.  I can certainly see the argument that a social media channel with very few followers might make the company look 'amateurish', although I don't necessarily subscribe to that chain of thought.  I think what looks a lot worse is an inactive social media account, one that hasn't been updated for weeks.  To me, both professionally and personally, looks like a company or business that doesn't care about social media and/or it's client-base very much.

Which leads me to my main argument - if you are on those channels and have the time to update them frequently, I would definitely keep them.  It's always good to cover all of the basis and gauge engagement and I don't see a low follower count as a bad thing if I can see that the company is really trying to engage with the audience by posting regularly.  I think it's important to be as inclusive as possible with social and not to segment your client base.

However, that's the theory.  The reality of it is - can you really be that active and creative on all of those channels? That's an awful lot of channels to be active on, which in turn requires a lot of time and resource.  Definitely see the value of getting on the channel initially and seeing if it works (the best data is your own data), but if you can't maintain all to a high quality, perhaps dropping a few is a good idea.  If you feel the need to scale back, I'd certainly look at the "quality" of followers you have on your social media channels, briefly ranked by volume, conversions, engagement levels, and prioritise certain channels over others.  Once you're happy with a workload, really push for those channels.

That's my take on it.  I'm very confident that you won't be having a "negative" social-SEO effect by having a few poor performing social channels. The rest is just my take on things from a bit of experience, but I hope you find the insight useful.

[JCunningham]

Thank you Tom.  That is good to know.  Good to know there won't be negative SEO and yes, from a PR standpoint I will look into deleting some of the accounts.  Certain are less active just b/c they are more obscure and we'd rather focus on, like you said, those that convert.  Thank you for your reply.