Deleting Poor Performing Social Media Accounts for Businesses?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does social work for e-commerce?
So, social these days is hot. But is there anyone who can report some figure about a real, documented, analytically documented, success in using social for e-commerce? There's a lot of presentations like this one saying it's great, it's a big impact, etc... But how? And what about figures of sales, or traffic, or something you can measure... Which had a significant spike thanks to a social network attempt? I am asking because I tried myself to use facebook for e-commerce, and we tried a lot: like and share buttons on content (pointing to the url of the content) like and share button on homepage (linked to the fan page) regular (three times a day) content being published on fanpage, original quality content (guidelines on products, independent test), well crafted (copy including catchy questions), original images designed by a graphic designer following all facebook guideline (smiling people, plain background) facebook ad campaign to increase likes (target audience = fans of brands sold) facebook ad remarketing facebook integration on the website publishing (with user consent) product reviews, buying action, website reviews, on their wall/user-feed (all with dynamically generated images showing happy smiling faces, product bought and catchy phrase) After 6 months and around 15k euro spent the result is: above 10k likes on fanpage above 1k likes on content pages orders originated by fan page negligible (less than 10) orders originated by facebook ads negligible (less than 80 with a coverage of 2.5M users, declining through time with 75% of the orders in the first two months and less than 5 on the sixth month) orders originated by remarketing negligible (less than 10 with a coverage of 7k users) orders originated by customer reviews... so and so... 8 orders out of 300 customer reviews (coverage is unknown but 15 out of 300 would be a decent 2.5% CR even with just 300 users seeing the reviews) My conclusion is either we are really dumb at using social for e-commerce, or we wasted our time... Anyone had some experience to share?
Social Media | | max.favilli1 -
Measuring reach and engagement on all social media platforms
What's the best tool for measuring reach and engagement on all social media platforms (or at least Twitter, Google+, Facebook) ?
Social Media | | RikkiD220 -
Google & Social
Hi Folks It's been made very clear to us that Google is paying attention to social signals. My questions are: How would I check that Google is aware of my Facebook activity and similarly of my Twitter and Pinterest work? If Google is not aware of these what are some steps I can take to inform them that a particular account is related to a my business site? Finally any must read articles on this topic would be appreciated. Thank you for your time to help me out
Social Media | | PHD1 -
Best strategy for Multilanguage Google+ Business Page(s) & rel publisher
Hello! I have many troubles defining a clear Google + strategy. Let's say I have one brand, say "reallycoolbarcelona" (because Barcelona is really cool!), 1 google place in Barcelona, and many websites with local ccTLD to promote the brand in different countries: reallycoolbarcelona.fr, reallycoolbarcelona.es, reallycoolbarcelona.co.uk, reallycoolbarcelona.it, reallycoolbarcelona.de. 1/ Now, how to handle that in Google+?
Social Media | | antoine.brunel
==> Shall I create one single page for all languages in Google+? (But then I cannot transfer Google Place to Google Local +?)
Then I would put the rel publisher of this page on all my websites? ==> Or shall I create one Google + page per language?
Then I would put the rel publisher of each language page on the corresponding website based on the language (french Google + page publisher on the french website only)? 2/ Now how did you manage to create a +SEOMoz page in Google+? By that, I mean a page with a clean url plus.google.com/+SEOMoz (that's so cool!) and not the scary url https://plus.google.com/b/1234567890 Thanks for enlighting my blurred mind about Google + multilingual strategies!0 -
SEO Master accounts?
We just got off the phone with our current SEO/ SEM provider and was shocked to hear that we are essentially renting the FB pages and Google + pages we paid them to create for our 100+ locations. We were told that all the pages have been created under a "Master SEO" account and we would immediately lose any juice from these pages if they are not under their account. He claimed the pages were given their rankings because the account they are associated with vs. the actual SEO done. Can anyone shed some light on this claim. I have never heard of such a thing.
Social Media | | Buddys0 -
Facebook Account Architectures (Pages, Groups, etc)
I'm looking for help with how to setup/manage a community on Facebook. Here is the scenario: You have a bike store owner. Out of the store he also organizes different biking training groups, for people who want to be able to meet certain personal goals. These groups like to interact with the other members inside their groups, but not across groups. Does the following architecture make sense? The business would have 1 Company Page. Then for for various different training groups, the company admin would create Facebook 'Groups' which allow for interaction amongst members that way. Does that make sense? Or is there a smarter way to do this? It seems like this isn't very unified, because there could be a bunch of different groups. Is there a way to set this up inside the business' page itself? Any other thoughts?
Social Media | | brianspatterson0 -
What is the best social backlink checker available right now?
I want a tool that i can enter a domain into and get all the social backlinks available. Preferably the tool that keeps the most recent database of this information. I'm willing to pay for the tool, it does not need to be free. Not sure if i'm using the right terminology here, by "social backlinks" i mean Facebook Shares, Twitter RT's, Google +'s, etc.
Social Media | | adriandg1