The only place where clutter is "art" is at MoMA. Don't try this at home!

While taking a stroll in our neighborhood earlier today, I was surprised to see a chest of drawers and a butcher-block island on wheels stacked up outside a townhouse on our block.

A handwritten note was taped to the unit’s front door: “Furniture sale. More furniture inside!”

My husband shook his head and said, “We certainly don’t need any more furniture!” and we chuckled and continued on our way.

In our culture, we just can’t seem to avoid clutter. (Just stop by Goodwill on any given Saturday and observe the heaps of bags and gadgets and gear being unloaded by well-meaning donors.) It’s enough to make a person overwhelmed—and maybe even a little crazy.

Unfortunately, clutter isn’t just for physical objects—It’s taking over our intellectual space as well. There’s probably little we can do to stop the proliferation of junk, especially all over our cyber airwaves, but there are a few steps you can take today to ensure that your social media tools are consistently providing value, and not perpetuating junk, to your readers:

Before you publish an article or an update, ask yourself: “Will someone actually care about this?” and then take it a step further and challenge yourself to identify, specifically, “who?”
Keep it short and simple, and ask someone else to read it before you post it to make sure it is actually achieving the goals you want.

Make it easy for your readers to understand what you want them to do.
Are you providing information that you want them to react to? Is it purely informational? Are you simply sharing an entertaining story to add a little levity? Be clear about what action you want your reader to do next.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Take a lesson from rookie linebacker Robert Henson of the Washington Redskins, who has played exactly zero minutes in the NFL—ever—and yet felt compelled to issue a string of “tweets” raging at fans for criticizing the team’s horrible season, calling them “dim wits” and waxing on that “The question is who are you to say you know what’s best for the team and you work 9 to 5 at Mcdonalds.” (Let’s be honest: The typos in his barrage of messages also didn’t help his cause.)

It’s tempting to hop on Facebook, Twitter or other tools to fire off a missive in the heat of the moment, but don’t. Just plain old don’t. It makes you look stupid and, frankly, there is enough of that out there as it is.

Be judicious about how much information you’re pumping out.
Social media offers great tools that run 24/7 – but that doesn’t mean that more is necessarily better. Most readers prefer quality over quantity. When you issue information, be judicious and always make it count.

And, if you doubt for even a second that the content you’re pushing out might be “junk,” take a cue from my neighbor with the yard sale— and purge, purge, purge!

For more information about curing clutter in your business’s social media efforts, or to discuss a project, contact us at Jennifer@socialmedia123.org or brian@socialmedia123.org, or visit us at www.socialmedia123.org.