How to Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts

Wondering how to manage multiple social media accounts for your own brand or your agency clients? Read on.

The ever-growing number of social media platforms provides brands with more opportunities to connect with their audience in different ways. 

But it can also be an operational nightmare (for both brands internally and agencies externally) to manage everything smoothly.  

So in this guide, you’ll discover a systematic approach to help you manage multiple social accounts efficiently, both as a brand and as an agency.

Benefits of Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts for Your Brand (or your clients’ brands)

Here are five benefits of managing multiple social media accounts:

Growth 

Multiple social media accounts allow you to be where your audiences are, and at the same time, reach new audiences.

Diversification 

Multiple social media accounts mean you’re less dependent on one platform’s algorithm. For instance, if Instagram changes its algorithm that initially affects your reach, you can still reach your audiences on other channels.

Complementarity of content formats 

Multiple accounts also give your audiences different types of content to consume. Some prefer visual content like photos and videos, while others prefer text-based content.

360 approach 

Multiple accounts allow you to tailor content to different customers in various states or countries through various channels.

Compounding effect 

Multiple accounts let you cross-promote one account from another. For example, you could invite YouTube viewers to follow your brand on Instagram.

Challenges of Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts for Your Team (internally as a brand or as an agency helping clients)

Managing multiple social media accounts also has its operational challenges:

Workload 

The more social media accounts you have, the more work you have. There are more posts to produce, more channels to monitor for engagement, and more platforms to measure in terms of performance. 

Consistency 

Multiple social media accounts make it harder to present a unified brand image across all channels, especially if you have different teams on each platform.

Customization of content 

Multiple accounts mean you have to adapt each post to each channel based on the codes of that channel. For example, audiences on LinkedIn do not have the same expectations as audiences on Reddit.

How to Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts Efficiently 

If you want a systemic approach to efficiently managing multiple social media accounts, you’ll have to follow the six steps below.

But first, there are a couple of prerequisites:

1. Document your strategy

As highlighted above, one of the challenges of managing multiple social media accounts is maintaining brand consistency across your channels. That’s why it’s essential to document your social media strategy first. 

A social media marketing strategy summarizes everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media, including:

• Your goals
• Your audience
• The social media platforms you want to use
• The type of content you want to publish
• The results of your strategy

Having a single source of truth keeps your content on point on every account.

2. Choose your social media management software

Trying to manage multiple social media accounts using different apps and opening and closing tabs is time-consuming and inefficient. 

It’s much better to invest in social media management software such as Loomly to help you manage everything in one central location. 

With those two prerequisites covered, here are the six steps you need to follow to manage multiple social media accounts efficiently:

1. Plan your content ahead of time
2. Produce high-quality content
3. Schedule your content
4. Respond to your audience
5. Measure your performance
6. Rinse and repeat

Step 1. Plan your content ahead of time

Planning your content ahead of time becomes more critical when you’re managing multiple social media accounts. 

Consistency is vital, and planning helps you tell a consistent and compelling brand story over time that unfolds with every new post.

To make sure you stay on track, use an editorial calendar. 

A social media calendar (also referred to as an editorial calendar) helps you plan and publish high-quality social media content consistently so that you can keep your collaborators, clients, and the audience happy.

You can build a social media calendar using a free online template or a professional, dedicated tool, such as Loomly.

The beauty of using an editorial calendar is that it puts everything all in one place and provides a central reference for everyone. It’s also helpful for spotting gaps or missed opportunities in your publishing schedule.

Step 2. Produce original, high-quality content

Next, it’s time to start creating and customizing content for each of your social media accounts. 

For each piece of content, you’ll need to consider:

1. The best publishing date and time

For each social media account, you’ll need to determine the best publishing times for your audience. You can either use previous experience or, if you’re just starting, make some informed guesses of the best times, such as the daily commute or lunch break, or refer to third-party research studies.

2. The text

Different platforms have different character limits, community best practices,  and audience expectations, so you’ll need to adjust your written content accordingly. 

Besides the words, you can also include links, hashtags, mentions, and emojis.

3. The visuals

The visual element of your content is crucial, especially on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, as it attracts attention and drives action.

You can use various visual assets, including images, GIFs, videos, slideshows, carousels, Stories, and Live presentations. 

But how do you ensure you customize the content for each social network?

Approval workflows

There’s one further step to ensure you produce high-quality content, and that’s to review and approve your posts.

Ideally, you want a social media workflow system that allows you to keep track of team feedback, save post changes, and make collaborators accountable for their actions. Depending on your organization, you could have a cross-functional review team that brings a holistic perspective to the process to ensure that only on-brand, proofread, appropriate, and compliant content is published.

1. Review your posts

First, make sure reviewers have a clear preview of the post as it will appear on each social network, like this:

2. Approve your posts

Next, as well as checking for typos and grammar errors, you’ll want your reviewers to check your posts for:

• Message: consistency with brand values.
• Format: compliance with brand guidelines.
• Goals: alignment with brand strategy.

Step 3. Schedule your content

One of the best ways to manage multiple social media accounts is to schedule as much content as possible in advance.

Your planning will already have highlighted that you need to publish at different times on each network to reach your audience. Scheduling your content helps you achieve this efficiently instead of hopping from one network to another.

Once your posts have been reviewed and approved, you can schedule them at the planned publishing date and time for each account.

Step 4. Respond to your audience

After you’ve scheduled and published your content, you need to engage and interact with your audience on each social media channel.

For example, you can:

• Stimulate conversations by asking questions in your posts.
• Answer questions or respond to comments on your posts.
• Build your community by sharing user-generated content. 
• Monitor other feedback about your brand with social listening. 

Trying to manage every interaction on each social media account is neither efficient nor effective. In fact, you’re likely to miss something or duplicate a reply.

Using a social media management tool allows you to manage your community with short response times and accurate replies at scale.

Step 5. Measure your performance

Measuring your performance across every platform is an essential step in managing multiple social media accounts.

Tracking performance metrics and social media KPIs can help you identify what worked well and what went wrong for your content on each account so that you can plan, produce, and schedule better content next time.

There are a couple of ways to measure your performance:

1. Native social media analytics

Each social media platform has native analytics, which is fine when you only have one or two accounts to monitor. However, managing multiple social media accounts across several platforms is tiresome.

2. Dedicated social media analytics 

For multiple accounts, it’s best to use a dedicated social media analytics tool that pulls all the data into one dashboard.

You can compare your performance insights across multiple social media accounts and streamline your analytics, reporting, and optimization process with a premium analytics tool. 

Step 6. Rinse and repeat

Managing multiple social media accounts is not something you can set up once and then forget – it requires constant measuring, learning, and experimentation to improve continuously.

At the end of each cycle (week/month/quarter), measure your results to see if you achieved your goals. Take the time to learn what went well and what didn’t so that you can make adjustments next time.

And as you add more social media accounts, either to your brand or for your clients, make sure you adapt your content plan accordingly.

Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts, in a Nutshell

Managing multiple social media accounts efficiently, either internally or with your clients’ brands, presents both benefits and operational challenges.

But with a documented strategy and the right social media management software in place, you can achieve brand success by following these six steps:

1. Plan your content ahead of time
2. Produce high-quality content
3. Schedule your content
4. Respond to your audience
5. Measure your performance
6. Rinse and repeat

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