I decided to get rid of all my social media accounts. Apart from Twitter and Facebook. I really didn’t realise how many platforms I had a ‘presence’ on. A lot of these hadn’t been touched in months/years.

• MySpace – Ha! I didn’t take to it because of the HTML/CSS customisation! I now make websites… goes to show.
• LinkedIN – Never found it useful.
• Yahoo – Needed only for Flickr – which is also gone.
• Flickr – Downloaded my pictures and closed up shop.
• instagram – Now Twitter has a built in photo filter editor, perfect!
• Hotmail – My spam account holder is now gone.
• Friends Reunited – wow blast from the past – Delete.
• Google+ – Looks nice just doesn’t have anyone there.
• YouTube – Phasing this out and using Vimeo instead.

I’ll most likely add to this list as they come to me. I never knew how hard it would be to get rid of all these things. I’m not saying these are bad platforms but to make them worthwhile you do need to invest in them and simply having an account doesn’t really add anything to your work or quality of your online presence in fact it probably is detriment to you or your company.

Instead I have decided to focus on two platforms Facebook and Twitter. In and ideal world it would be just twitter but friends and distant family don’t have Twitter accounts (Thank the Lord) but I still want that connection. I’d rather have a smaller condensed presence online. I speak to many people who say LinkedIN is great for networking and for business connections, personally I have never found this site engaging, it seems to be lots of people saying ‘hire me, hire me’. Are they any people who are actually hiring? To be honest I never invested enough time to find out but I think personal connections and word of mouth is a much more organic process. I rather direct people to a personal, beautifully designed online portfolio rather than a generic ‘profile’ on LinkedIN or other sites (sorry LinkedIN you are just an easy target).

Feels good to get rid.

But i’d be interested to know how many social media accounts people have? Do you use them all? Which ones do you think are useful?