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.
Here are five benefits of managing multiple social media accounts:
Multiple social media accounts allow you to be where your audiences are, and at the same time, reach new audiences.
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.
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.
Multiple accounts allow you to tailor content to different customers in various states or countries through various channels.
Multiple accounts let you cross-promote one account from another. For example, you could invite YouTube viewers to follow your brand on Instagram.
Managing multiple social media accounts also has its operational challenges:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Loomly Tip:
Loomly allows you to manage all your social media content from one platform, so you can:
With those two prerequisites covered, here are the six steps you need to follow to manage multiple social media accounts efficiently:
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.
Loomly Tip:
Loomly’s social media calendar gives you the best of both worlds with a List View and a Calendar View.
Loomly’s List View shows all of the relevant information for your social media posts in a spreadsheet-like format:
Loomly’s Calendar View allows you to view your entire editorial calendar in one place – like a bird’s eye view – so you can effectively plan when to publish your social media updates:
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.
Loomly Tip:
When you create a post in Loomly for multiple social networks, you can define some generic content to apply by default to all channels and then customize that generic content for each platform.
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.
Loomly Tip:
You can store all of these visual assets in your Content Library so that everyone uses the right asset for the right post.
You can access your Content Library from Post Builder (see below) and simply select a file – or multiple files – on the fly when creating a new post:
But how do you ensure you customize the content for each social network?
Loomly Tip:
Loomly’s Post Builder takes content customization into account by allowing you to keep some common elements for each channel and then fine-tune the main body of content:
You can see a preview of your post for each channel right when you create it, and you can update it in real-time.
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:
Loomly Tip:
Loomly includes a collaborative review and approval workflow, with end-to-end post history:
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.
Loomly Tip:
Loomly includes a built-in scheduler that allows you to automatically schedule your posts once they’re approved and saves you copying and pasting from spreadsheets.
You can automatically schedule in advance for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. And get reminders (via the Loomly mobile app) to publish manually on Snapchat and TikTok and the desired time.
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:
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.
Loomly Tip:
Loomly Interactions is a powerful community management system that allows you to engage with your audience on:
In other words, you can reply to, like, hide/unhide, and delete comments from your fans and followers, right from Loomly:
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.
Loomly Tip:
Loomly’s Advanced Analytics lets you measure your performance across all your social media accounts. You can quickly identify which topics and content types interest your audience most on each network and feed this information back into your planning process.
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 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:
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.