30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 5

Day 5 of our 30 day small business cleanse!

Yesterday: Take a look at your social media accounts. Refresh your about pages, change up your profile pictures and cover images. Have you combined work and personal accounts? Does that work for your business or brand? If it doesn’t, then think about creating a separate account for each. Also look at the people and businesses you follow or like. Carefully evaluate who or what you can unfollow or unlike.

Our new Twitter design, including the profile photograph taken by Duran Castro for his blog The Diligent Hand. The background photograph was taken by Rosemary atop the Ace Hotel in DTLA on a very cold day in January of this year.

Yesterday's assignment was to breathe some fresh air into our social media accounts. We'd been toying with some new ideas on various platforms for the last few weeks but as part of this exercise we unified them all under variations on the same design.

We were particularly excited to finally use one of the photographs taken of us last year by Duran Castro during the photo shoot we did in our studio space for his blog The Diligent Hand. We like all the photographs that he took that day but especially love this one of us proofing prints while setting up the press.

We also devoted a great deal of time to tidying up our social media accounts. While we share a lot of media across different platforms, we've found it increasingly frustrating to look through them. We had never really found the time to systematically go through each and every person, page or business we liked or followed. There were a number of inactive or neglected accounts, an inexplicable amount of pages that we had no recollection of ever following and several accounts that made sense during our earlier and less focused iterations.

L-R: our blog yesterday before we refreshed our design and afterwards.

It was really interesting to sort through who and what we wanted to follow. It led to numerous conversations about who we are as a company and what our brand and thus scope of interest should include. As we've grown and shifted over the past nearly three years, we've assumed and shed several identities as a company. We've moved further away from our fine art studio training and are really learning how to function more in the sphere of graphic design and illustration. It was fascinating to see how our Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter feeds changed almost instantly as we pared things down.

As part of this task, we also closed down a number of profiles on social media platforms that never quite panned out (ummm, we still don't know what to do about ello!). We've always known that it's important to keep an eye on our online identity, but it's sometimes hard to find the time. Now that we've really gone through and streamlined everything all at once, it should be a lot easier to keep up with as we go along. And we look forward to utilizing tools like Twitter and Tumblr much for frequently now that they're much more manageable.

Today: Clean up your inbox, organize your email. Unsubscribe from any mailing lists you don’t read regularly.

This is one job we are definitely not looking forward to!