Managing social media accounts for business or for clients can be a hectic process. This book will help you develop the skills and best practices to streamline your management processes and ensure that your accounts are effectively managed.
Learn the basics of social media management, help you effectively manage social media accounts for your business or clients, and use social media management as a way to build stronger relationships with your audience.
Pros and Cons of Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of social media management, it’s important to understand the reasons for and against creating multiple accounts for single brands.
Pros
Establishing many accounts means you can talk to different audiences. Segmenting followers allows specific accounts to focus on certain topics as opposed to trying to engage everybody at once. This is particularly helpful if your business serves both consumers and other companies.
If your business has multiple locations across the state or country, having a separate account for each could help you serve the unique needs of customers in the area. They will feel as though they’re being catered to, which can increase engagement significantly.
Multiple accounts also give users a choice in the type of content they wish to consume. Even if you have one umbrella account, you may want to branch out with specialty ones. If you wish, all of this content can feed into the umbrella account, but if people find they only want one thing from you, they can find it easily.
Cons
On the flip side, owning multiple accounts can cause confusion among your audience. They may not understand the purpose or value of each account. Should they follow all of them or just the ones with the information they need? People might believe they will miss something important if your content is posted across different accounts. You also run the risk of dividing up the people you want to reach.
Having more than one account, of course, means more work for Social Media Managers. Time management may become difficult, not to mention staff may also get exhausted. If your social media team doesn’t have the resources to run multiple accounts, it’s time to reconsider your strategy.
Brand management may also suffer through the use of multiple accounts, especially if different departments are left to run their own social media channels. It’s more difficult to ensure everything stays on message if social media duties are spread around. This is a situation where a social media policy comes in handy.
Signs You Need Multiple Social Media Accounts
Are you certain you need multiple social media accounts? If you’re a single brand, there are a few things to consider.
Complaints Occupy Most of Your Feed
More people are using social media to get in the ear of companies. In fact, research has shown 47% of consumers have taken to social media to complain to brands, which ranks only second to in-person complaints.
If your social media team finds that addressing complaints makes up a majority of their posts on a general account, it may be beneficial to start a separate account for dealing with support problems. It gives customers an easily identifiable avenue for complaints and sends a clear message to them you care about solving their issues.
Separate accounts for complaints can also function differently if you implement an efficient protocol for addressing the needs of customers, such as a support ticket system.
You Have Several Departments or Locations
If your business has a handful of departments with wildly different target audiences, it pays for each one to have its own social media account. The voice a company uses for marketing between departments will likely be different for each one, and it should be the same for your social media content. Customers can follow the account, which promotes only products or services as it related to their industry rather than be forced to consume everything at once.
Same goes for companies with multiple bureaus or franchise locations. Separate accounts allow customers to find the information they need much faster. It’s okay if these accounts share identical content that’s relevant, but also be sure you can address the unique needs of customers in your area.
You Have Varying Products or Services
Larger companies tend to sell different types of products and services, which address different problems and are only relevant to completely different audiences. If you’re known for selling both sports products and technology services, for example, there’s likely very little crossover among consumers.
Maintaining social media accounts for different products and services can help avoid confusion and streamline the buying cycle. Everybody knows exactly what they’re getting into, and you can cater to the changing needs of separate audiences.
Social Media Management Tips to Save Time & Improve Results
1. Focus on Quality
It is always good to have a constant flow of content and announcements, but I would much rather have nothing at all than abysmal posts with incorrect information. We want to make sure that we are sharing content that is good enough to be re-shared or retweeted, passed on to colleagues across industries.
We also try to look for content that will last, not just trend for a week and disappear. If you are able to produce content or develop insights that will stay relevant in the industry, these are gold! For us, social media content does really well on—surprise!—social media. This tweet was posted in mid-June and I’m still seeing it being retweeted even now.
It’s a bummer that this doesn’t direct to WordStream, but we have content posted on it, too!
Think about it this way, if someone writes a terrible post without citing sources and shares it on social media—are you going to interact with it? And what does that post say about your credibility as a brand?
2. Analyze Data to Find the Perfect Quantity
…and almost as important, quantity. Because let’s face it, social media is about what is going on NOW, right this second. This is especially true for Twitter; we recently found that engagement rate increased 46% week over week after publishing 30 more tweets than the week prior. In fact, those 30 extra tweets helped push 30% more traffic to the website with 60% more link clicks than the previous week.
During the week with 30 extra posts, there was an average of 5.9K link clicks daily.
It can be hard to get visibility as organic reach continues to decrease, and the one way we’ve found to combat this is to post more often. My favorite trick is to re-post content multiple times—for blog posts, I’ll share it on Twitter up to 5 times on the day it is published. Just make sure you’re not being spammy on Facebook! People hate that. Truly, I’ve seen the comments…
Another good trick is to stay aware of demand—keep your eye on trending topics in your industry’s sphere. Chime in when you can! This will increase your social media engagement rate and potentially garner more followers.
3. Be Charming (Tools Can Help!)
When my mother complains about social media, she references her friends that only post to brag. “Tommy got into Harvard AND Yale! Such a hard choice!” *Insert picture of the son as the homecoming king*. But, being the charmer she is, she will congratulate them (with a “xoxo”) and as a result, they will like and share and comment on her posts as well. Be my mother! What goes around, comes back around: engage with others and they will engage with you. Though this sounds silly, Larry swears by it.
Yes, my mother’s last profile picture was a flower pot. For 4 years.
One of my biggest challenges is finding content to tweet and post about! A way to tackle this is through social media management tools like Mention and Buzzsumo, which will send alerts your way when a keyword you select is posted online. I currently use keywords like “WordStream” or “Larry Kim” to see if others are posting about us. Then I can retweet their content!
Another great resource is Feedly, an RSS feed website that helps you read your favorite blogs all in one space, or Klout, which suggests original content that hasn’t been seen by your audience yet.
4. Use Scheduling Tools
Because no one expects you to manage your social media accounts so intensely that you are manually posting 20+ times per day. Actually, who is reading these daytime posts?! Procrastinators, I see you…
I personally use Hootsuite, which had been conveniently set up before I started working in social media. I’ve also tried Buffer, which works similarly. For a complete list, check out our post on Social Media Management Tools.
Hootsuite dashboard for WordStream
I have found that the most important part of these tools (other than the obviously time-saving) is their ability to auto-schedule posts when your account is most likely to see high engagement. It takes a certain amount of brain power to pick times for 10+ posts per day, and this a huge help. If you’d like to simply analyze your twitter sphere timing, Hubspot has a handy tool called TweetWhen which will select your most retweetable time of day, and Tweriod will select the best times to tweet.
5. Automate Repetitive Tasks with IFTTT
IFTTT, short for If This, Then That, is a social media recipe website! In a series of simple steps, this website will help you set up simple commands which link up different applications to automatically perform actions if triggered. For example, IF the weather app tells you there is a high UV index, THEN a reminder to put on sunscreen is triggered. IF you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, THEN save the photos to dropbox.
At WordStream, we have a few blogs that we follow and trust to post quality content consistently that is of interest to our audience. We were able to set up a recipe that automates the sharing process. IF a certain blog posts new content, THEN tweet the post to our followers on twitter.
Why is an efficient social media management process important?
The business potential of social networks is immense. Brands can leverage social media platforms to successfully drive their objectives across the marketing funnel, from raising brand awareness to increasing store visits.
But to be able to accomplish this, they need efficient social media teams. The more goals you want to achieve through social media marketing, the more people dedicated to this channel you are going to need. This demand will eventually lead to building complex social media team structures.
If you are a large brand, you might even have multiple teams in different offices and regions of the world, leveraging different strategies to meet different targets.
Now, how do you make sure all these people work together hand-in-hand to deliver maximum value from social media?
The answer is: build an efficient social media management process.
Conclusion
Managing social media accounts can seem daunting, so we’ve put together some helpful tips to get you started. We’ll cover how to set up a company account, how to budget your time, and best practices for scheduling posts. By the end of this guide you’ll have all the knowledge you need to manage social media effectively!