Social Media: The KonMari Way

The KonMari Method is taking closets everywhere by storm. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a system of decluttering that focuses on keeping only the items that spark joy in your life. And though the book that reveals the system, The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, is all about organizing your belongings at home, you can use it for social media too. Here’s how to organize your social media the KonMari way:

Purge

One of the basics of the KonMari Method is the purge. You are to ruthlessly discard what is unnecessary before you start organizing anything. Take no prisoners. All those sites you bookmarked (because maybe someday you would need them) but have never actually cared to visit? Delete them. The groups you joined because you thought they might be helpful (but they weren’t)? Remove yourself. Those lists of links you thought you might share with your audience (but they kind of sucked)? Delete them. Apps that seemed useful but just clutter up your devices? Uninstall them. Getting notifications from a million pages you don’t actually want to follow anymore? Unfollow them. And last but not least, drop the social media platforms you joined just because everyone else did. If your audience isn’t there and it won’t yield the kind of exposure you need, it’s just taking up space. Drop it like a bad habit.

Make Sure It Sparks Joy

Once you’ve discarded a bunch of the social media clutter that’s been inhabiting your online space, take some more time to evaluate what you have left. With the KonMari Method, you’re supposed to discard anything that doesn’t bring you joy. In this case, not only should your content bring you joy, it should bring joy to the people that follow you. Everything you keep should do one of the following:

• Help you better reach your audience
• Help you demonstrate skill and knowledge relevant to your industry
• Make it easier for you to provide your audience with valuable content
• Help or inspire your audience
• Enable you to be better at your job
• Connect you with people likely to help you reach your goals

Organize

With the KonMari Method, you don’t organize one entire room and then move on to the next. Instead, you organize by category, something you can do with social media as well. Here are some smart ways to organize your social media:

• Create an editorial calendar, organized by type of content, topic, and date. Include categories for images and links, so you always know at a glance what you’re posting, and when. You don’t need several different calendars (one for each social media platform) either. Use one calendar to cover them all.
• Use your editorial calendar as a guide to schedule posts ahead of time, in bulk. This can be a huge time-saver and make publishing social media content less of a hassle.
• Create a file to store all of your links and notes for content resources. When you need to post timely, relevant content for your audience to enjoy, you shouldn’t have to waste time searching for it.
• Use an RSS reader to stay on top of the latest news and content from multiple blogs.
• Create a folder to house images for an entire campaign. Let’s say you’re implementing a campaign across several different platforms. Creating the campaign images ahead of time and keeping them organized in a single folder can work wonders for your efficiency.
• Create a uniform identity across all of your social media networks. This means branding with the same or similar handle/username and using the same logo and colors on all your accounts to ensure that you are easily recognizable (and memorable). Likewise, it’s important to have the same professional profile image across all of your platforms. This give you a single, credible identity.
• Use a social media aggregator, such as HootSuite or TweetDeck to see content from your social media feeds in a single place rather than going from site to site to see the latest activity.
• Create a social media folder for your email. Keep your social media notifications, promotion information, comments, content others send to you to share, etc. in this folder to ensure that the information is right at your fingertips when you need it.

Appreciate Your Social Media Tools and Resources

How you care for your belongings is also important with the KonMari Method. In keeping with this system, take the time to back up your files and maintain your blogs, websites, and social media accounts with up-to-date information.

We can all use a little KonMari in our social media. It’s a system that makes simplicity and joy paramount. Use it to get your social media organized and keep it that way.