Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
On a website, is the most effective user experience for the social media icons to open new tabs?
There is debate around what is most effective for user experience. When a user clicks on the social media icons on our site, should a new tab be opened for the social media page or should the website redirect to the social media page?
Social Media | Feb 25, 2016, 7:58 PM | Sable_Group0 -
Yoast Social Accounts URL Section
Hi When you click: Social within Yoast plugin it defaults to 'Account' tab and displays a list of fields to enter your social media account urls. Sentence above list says: "To inform Google about your social profiles, we need to know their URLs. For each, pick the main account associated with this site and please enter them below" What does that mean exactly and does it effect links on the site etc or literally is just Yoast telling G ? Also if you have sub sites for different language versions (WP on Multi User setup), which in turn have their own language specific social media account versions , should you enter those urls in the sub site language version own Yoast plugin fields OR , as per "...pick the main account associated with this site and please enter them below" use the primary social account and not the language specific social account or just leave them blank ? Many Thanks Dan
Social Media | Oct 27, 2015, 7:06 AM | Dan-Lawrence1 -
UK home improvement - building links or social shares?
Hi We are a regional UK installer of double glazing windows, doors and conservatories and I am looking to build the amount of quality links to the website to help improve our search position - 1st page for keywords such as conservatories, double glazing, pvc doors, pvc windows, composite doors What is the best approach to do this? Search for double glazing inurl:forum pvc doors inurl:forum and locate forums, but what is the best approach answer questions with the web address in the signature of the post? Looking at the major national players in opensite explorer such as anglianhome.co.uk
Social Media | Jul 20, 2012, 9:30 AM | ocelot
safestyle-windows.co.uk
greenwayupvc.com
everest.co.uk
valuedoorsuk.co.uk
yaledoor.co.uk/ Their backlink profiles look quite spammy? as they mostly point to web directories So is there a gap that I can take advantage of? We have little budget for sponsored articles on sites like what anglian have been doing looking at the backlinks but are there any other articles that I could write for our site that would help improve quality links to the site for keywords such as conservatories, double glazing, pvc doors, pvc windows, composite doors Same with their social profiles they seem quite poor, what would be the best approach on Facebook and Twitter to attract local followers - the majority of social followers I have seen have been fellow marketers or rival companies on the follower lists of twitter Many Thanks0 -
Should my small business website link to Yelp?
I'm kind of on the fence about this one. Should I include a social media icon for Yelp on my website? We have great reviews, but so do most of my competitors. I'd like to share my reviews, but I also do not want to send traffic away from my website to another website (Yelp) that lists my competitors. What do you think?
Social Media | Jul 5, 2012, 7:36 PM | pharcydeabc0 -
Social Media Approaches for a Pest Control Company
Hi Everyone, I am working with a pest control company that is looking to branch out into social media. Their primary goal is to connect with their existing customers to improve retention. The secondary goal is to potentially pick up new clients. With that said, I wanted to see if you all had some ideas on things that they could tweet/facebook about on a regular basis? Posting about bugs on a daily basis gets pretty boring. I know Rand has been talking a lot lately about not being so narrow, so maybe we should talk more about general home improvement? Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks! EDIT: I should clarify that this is a company that has maintenance plans. You don't call them only when you have a problem. You sign up with them, and they treat your property every 3 months, or whenever you call. Only about 2% of their customer base is one-off phone calls to fix 1 problem and never come back again. I don't think their existing customer base will have any issues with Liking them on Facebook or following them on Twitter. The initial plan is to incentivize them to do so, but once we get the like/follow, we want to continually be in front of them with interesting content, contests as Jay suggested, etc.
Social Media | Apr 4, 2012, 3:30 PM | brianspatterson2 -
How can you bulk search by email for social networks?
Hello Everyone! We're trying to launch a Social Media campaign for our website and in order to reach more people and follow/invite them to our social profiles we thought of finding them by their email addresses (i read a post somewhere - maybe seomoz, maybe not can't remember). Can anyone suggest a tool or best way of researching ~20.000 email addresses to find out / filter what social networks have this email registered? Much appreciated! Alex
Social Media | Mar 15, 2012, 11:55 AM | pwpaneuro0 -
Multiple twitter accounts for Different countries...
Ok, so we currently operate in the UK, Australia, Ireland, Spain and France. Currently we have a different twitter accounts for each Country. This can be difficult to manage as we are going it all from the UK. I can understand that having separate accounts for foreign language countries is perhaps suitable (we have foreign staff tweeting in their native tongue), but my question is this: Is it worth just tweeting all English speaking activity from one account. I mean at the end of the day we are one company, and also our activity in other countries won't effect our followers, in fact wouldn't it just make them realise we are a global brand? What are the advantages and disadvantages of gradually deleting the other accounts and tweeting all English stuff from the one account? Cheers,
Social Media | Sep 21, 2011, 12:33 PM | esendex0 -
Social Media Adult Websites
Hello, Do you recommend using the buttons (facebook, twitter and google +1) on pages with adult content? For adult seo marketing google uses this metric? Thanks, Stroke
Social Media | Aug 31, 2011, 8:35 AM | stroke2