_{Photo: Flickr}

Social media is pretty awesome (have I mentioned this before?). It’s easy to get caught up in its awesome-ness, adding awesome friends and posting awesome pictures and signing up for more and more awesome networks. That is, it’s awesome until you get awesome-ly overwhelmed.

In the midst of burying yourself under all the awesome, you can find that you’ve buried yourself so deep that you can’t get out. Who are these people? Why are they all getting married and having babies? Whose cats are these?? What is Snapbookspace and when did I sign up for it?!?

However, if you know how to manage social media (maybe you are coincidentally a social media manager), you can make things awesome again. Here’s how:

1. Twitter Lists

I swear by these things. With Twitter lists, you can still keep track of all your favorite accounts without having to follow 50,000 people. Being selective about who you’re following is a good thing, because you can tailor what content you see. You can take that one step further by tailoring content by category. That’s right — you can separate your favorite Tweeple into lists of musicians, famous finger painters, parody accounts and more to keep tabs on the best of Twitter while keeping your Twitter following ratio pristine.

2. Twitter Muting

You know your funny college friends who tweet every 90 seconds? Kind of clogs up your feed, doesn’t it? I know, you don’t want to offend them by unfollowing them, so add them to a list (see above) and then mute them… you can still check their hilarity without it being the only thing you see.

3. Organize Your Facebook

Yup, this feature exists. You can go through small clumps of your Facebook friends at a time and add them to your “acquaintances” list. Kind of the same thing as Twitter muting — they won’t show up on your feed, but you don’t have to unfriend them. And Facebook does it in batches. Which is genius. You can also take some time to visit your friends list and just click “unfollow” on basically everybody until you’ve curated the perfect feed. This is easiest to do in the app (for iPhone, go to More > News Feed Settings > People – or Pages – and go on an unfollowing spree).

4. Say Goodbye to Ghosts

Not only is Twitter full of inactive users, Instagram has those awful spambots that follow you rapidfire and then never do anything. ManageFlitter is my favorite Twitter-cleaner-upper for many reasons: not only does it tell you who unfollows you (like those people you only followed our of weird friendship obligations), it sorts out inactive users you’re following, people who don’t follow you back, and users who may potentially be spambots. You can unfollow all of these people right from ManageFlitter. Easy fo’ sheezy. IGExorcist has the same ideas — it also does its best to identify spambots while giving you a list of users who haven’t recently interacted with you. Unlike ManageFlitter, though, it doesn’t unfollow the users, but makes them unfollow you (thus cleaning your followers list, not who you’re following).

5. Clean Your Permissions

How many external apps have access to your social? Do you know your Targeted Ads can be based on these apps? Do you know that these apps often have access to your personal info (eek!)? Do you even play Farmville anymore? You can easily clean up your app permissions just by heading to your settings page and revoking access. Here are some quick links for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

How do you clean up your social media? Tweet us some of your best tips @mettermedia or comment below!

Metter Media LLC is a Boston-based social media management company that implements community-based, localized social engagement strategies for small businesses and corporations alike. Need help with your social media? Email Lauren today.