It is sometimes easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you should increase your social media presence by having lots of different accounts for all your product lines or different business areas. If you look at a company like Google or Amazon you will see that they have multiple Twitter accounts and multiple Facebook accounts – each focused on separate parts of their business. You may think this is good practice – shouldn’t each division within your business establish a separate social media presence?
Although there are some genuine reasons for having multiple accounts, for most small firms (and even many large ones), having multiple separate accounts will not help you grow your following – rather it will dilute your effort, and make it a lot more time consuming to manage your social media presence.
This article explores key reasons to avoid having multiple social media accounts to promote your business, as well as the instances where it can make sense.
Reasons to avoid a portfolio of social media accounts
Reason 1: Time required to manage multiple accounts
Managing one social media account takes time. Managing one per line of your business can scales that time up – suddenly you are required to generate so much more content.
Reason 2: Difficulty finding content to post
Finding content to publish for one social media account can be difficult. If you split your firm’s presence too narrowly, this task becomes even more difficult. While you may have a limited number of new product and feature announcements, it is a lot harder to come up with lots within each individual area of the business.
Reason 3: Makes it harder to cross-promote parts of your business
If each part of your business has a separate social media account, this makes it more difficult to cross-promote areas. Maintaining a single account makes it easier to drive interest across all areas of a business, exposing your social media followers to parts of the company that they may not be familiar with.
Situations where it can make sense to have multiple accounts for a business
Posting in different languages
Posting in multiple languages from the same social media account generates a particularly poor user experience. If you have a global audience, targetting customers in different languages, you may naturally want to post in a variety of languages. However, doing from the same account will mean that your followers will start to see posts in languages that they don’t speak, and quickly unfollow the account.
Establishing a separate account per language is a more appropriate approach to take – this way, users are able to take, allows your English speaking customers to follow your English account, your French-speaking customers to follow your French account finally your Spanish-speaking customers to follow your Spanish account.
Each division has a very distinct identity and audience
Another situation where it can make sense to have separate social media accounts if every division within your firm is distinct – rather than having a unifying corporate identity, each part of the business is unique, with its own branding.
If you do have multiple distinct parts of your business (each in different areas), having separate accounts makes sense – customers are unlikely to recognize your corporate identity, and there may be limited opportunities for cross-promoting different lines.
There is a specific purpose for a separate account
Occasionally businesses may have a specific purpose for having a dedicated account. One example is having a Twitter account that posts solely on website or other service downtime. This may not be information that you want to directly publicize on your main account. Having a dedicated channel for this is also unlikely to increase the work load of managing the accounts – a service downtime account need only get sporadic posts associated with service disruptions.
Final thoughts: Difficulty consolidating accounts
A final reason to avoid creating a portfolio of accounts is that it is quite difficult to undo. Social media platforms typically don’t allow you to combine together accounts, and if you start off with lots of accounts, you may be stuck with a user base spread over lots of different areas.
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