We all have our favorite social media platforms, and we all have those posts we regret. We can’t avoid the occasional cringe-worthy photo or regrettable rant, but there are plenty of ways to erase your online presence.
In this article, we’ll show you how to delete your social media accounts and get that green check mark next to your name.
If you’re ready to cut ties with Facebook for good or Twitter is causing you nothing but trouble, it’s time to start prying the fingers off the mouse. These few steps will help you do just that – without feeling like a total loser (even if it might feel like a bit of an overreaction).
Download all of your data
This is another link that should be pretty straightforward – but it’s easily overlooked when you’re so focused on the deletion process itself. Downloading your data will make it easy to start over somewhere new. This includes anything you’ve uploaded, like photos and videos. It will save them on your computer, so don’t forget where you put them.
Figure out what information you want to delete
Now that you’ve got all your data downloaded, it’s time to figure out what should be left online. It’s important to understand that just because there’s a button you can push and an option you can select, doesn’t mean the information is gone forever.
What happens after deletion is that the information becomes unreadable and essentially erased – so everything needs to be treated like sensitive data. Once deleted from your social media platforms, anything not marked as private data may still be read and saved by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, but it will not be publicly available.
You don’t necessarily have to remove all your content at once. The best thing to do is go through each post and remove any and all information that you no longer want associated with or visible to others.
This includes photos, videos, posts, notes, replies or any other element that can be uploaded to the platform.
Deletion of accounts
A quicker step for doing a complete purge is the deletion of your social media account.
Just open up the social media app and navigate to the advanced settings page. From there just search for an option to permanently delete your account along with its content. While you delete your content from the actual platform (e.g., photos, videos, tweets, status updates), you should also remove your login information from any apps that include it.
Don’t forget to change the usernames and passwords for other accounts that use the same or similar data.
Delete email addresses
If you want to go one step further, you can delete the email addresses associated with your social media accounts. Then, you can start completely fresh with all-new accounts.
However, deleting your email addresses isn’t always a must, and it can be difficult to do so. You might still need your email address for friends communicaion, work, or for maintaining certain other accounts.
A better alternative
If you’re ready to leave Facebook for example, but are worried about missing out, Twitter is a good alternative. In fact, you can use some of your existing Facebook friends to build up your Twitter following. Consider this: It took the social network site just eight years to reach 1 billion users, while it took Twitter six years to hit half that number. And nearly 800 million of its users log in each month.
Finally, remove the unused apps
This is something everyone should do after they deleted their accounts. While not necessary, it can feel good to get rid of all those apps you don’t use.
Once deleted, these apps can still be installed and accessed, but essentially they’re useless once their data is gone. And that’s it. You’re free from social media for good! It’s not as scary as it might seem.
