From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram: Useful tools to help clean up your social media accounts

Any time is a good time to clean up your social media accounts, removing posts or photos that are embarrassing or that you just don't want to see any more. Fortunately, there are tools to help.

To remove posts and likes on Facebook, you can go into the activity log where almost every user action is recorded chronologically.

However, there's no batch delete option and you'll have to delete posts one at a time. So this can be very time-consuming — especially if you use Facebook every day.

One tool that can help is the Social Book Post Manager extension for the Chrome browser. You can set conditions such as year, month or "Text contains" and the tool will scan through your activity log and delete posts that meet those criteria.

On Instagram, there are bound to be photos you regret - or at least no longer want to see. One way to remove them is with the Android app Cleaner for Instagram.

Although it is a search engine and not a social network, Google can store lots of information about you - old and new, wanted and unwanted.

To see what's out there about you it makes sense to set up a Google Alert on yourself - not just your actual name but also usernames or nicknames that you use for various services and networks.

When it comes to YouTube, you can go into your history and delete comments you made on videos that you no longer want to be public.

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On Twitter, there are tools to help you delete embarrassing tweets from the past. Tweetdeleter offers a good tweet overview that allows you to filter according to various criteria and then delete those messages.

Another option is Tweetdelete, which can automatically remove tweets older than a period you have specified.

Tokimeki Unfollow shows the most recent tweets from accounts you have followed and gives you the option to stop following them.

After the clean-up, you should follow a new rule: before you post anything or like anything in future, think about what impression it creates and what someone who is not particularly benevolent towards you could do with the information.