Maddy Washburn May 19, 2018

How to Refresh Your Social Media

Time to hit that restart button. Let’s talk about how you can refresh your social media.

Refresh Your Social Media | Photo by Monica Henriquez

Spring has officially sprung here at H and that means it’s time for a little spring cleaning – and we don’t mean in your closet. Our social media platforms go through a lot of transitions, algorithms, and trends through the year so it makes sense that they’d need a little dusting every now and then.

This is the perfect time to do a deep dive into your favorite platforms and optimize them for maximum awesomeness. Here are some of our favorite ways to refresh your social media channels this spring:

How To Refresh Your Social Media

Set New Goals

Before you can even begin to start updating your profiles, you are going to need to set new goals for what you want your social media to accomplish for you.

Do you want to drive sales for your Lightroom presets? Are you trying to build brand awareness and engagement? Each platform may also have a different purpose so be sure to go through individually to determine each one’s own goals.

For example, you may use Facebook to push sales while using Instagram to build your brand or business. It can also help to look at your current goals and ask yourself: is my social media working with me or against me? Your channels should be helping your business – if they aren’t, it’s a clear sign it’s time to regroup and brainstorm some new ideas.

Find What Works

Did you have a certain photo or blog post go viral this past year? Or maybe one of your images performed better than the rest?

Take a moment to go through your past content, even 6 months back will do, and jot down all of the things that both performed well and fell flat. Once you have a list, you can quickly run down and brainstorm why some pieces may have done better than others.

For example, one photo may have used certain hashtags that led to a big feature or a blog post was shared by a large influencer which brought traffic to your blog. Once you know what works, you can use that to recreate even greater content in your future strategy.

Update Your Graphics

Sometimes change can be scary, but we all need a new profile picture every so often! Go through your current social media sites and update your graphics.

These can include profile photos, YouTube headers, Facebook images and more. You may even find a few images that have out-of-date sizing or an old logo that needs to be replaced.

We recommend also double checking your bios and other information while doing this so you can edit any URLs that need changing or add new skills to your profiles such as LinkedIn.

Scope Your Competition

While we definitely aren’t suggesting you steal anything from your competitors, it’s always helpful to see what their strategy looks like too.

Did they recently run a giveaway that performed super well? Are they working with different influencers that are bringing them more followers?

We recommend writing down a list of the top competitors in your niche or industry. Then write down all of the things you like (and what you don’t like) about their brands or businesses. Maybe you love one of their website layouts and want to incorporate part of that design into your own.

Use all of your research to build an even better brand for yourself that stands out from the rest.

Create a Plan of Attack

While you don’t need to plan out an entire month or year’s worth of content, spring cleaning is the perfect time to refresh your mood board, branding colors and more.

By now you’ll also have a list of content that’s performed well for you in the past. Consider repurposing that content and reposting to see if you get the same, or better, results. We recommend also downloading a list of holidays throughout the year so you can incorporate those into your postings.

Many of these will be trending such as “National Ice Cream Day” or “World Chocolate Day” so you can jump on that engagement and put your content in front of new eyes.

Do you feel ready to refresh your social media? What are some of your favorite ways to update your sites? Share with us on Instagram at @h_collective