Best Practices for Managing Social Media Accounts

You're considered the social media maven of the marketing department, but are you ready to manage the corporate accounts? There's a lot to keep in mind when it comes to managing an organization's presence on social media.

Are you staying on voice? Which voice are you supposed to be using for that account again? Did you remember to re-post the content from one account over to the other one the next day? Are you on top of mentions? Did a customer comment go unnoticed? Which account are you supposed to use to respond to that feedback? Are you looking at Social Media for B2B or instead looking to engage e-commerce customers?

Here are some general ideas to help manage multiple accounts, whether all within one company or for separate client companies.

What to know

You'll need to know some fundamental things before tackling a portfolio of accounts. Each of these things is relevant for each account you're in charge of, be it separate accounts for departments within your company or if you're a marketer with several client companies.

Your audience

There are some universals when it comes to marketing on social media. Gone are the days when you could sell, sell, sell, using your presence for nothing more than pushing your widget to the world. These days, brands are using social media to present their human side. Content needs to be informative, helpful, and engaging. Remember, people are interacting with brands here because they have a question, a problem to solve, or they want information about the brand and it's industry.

People on social media do not want to be sold to. They do not want to feel like they are being targeted for a pitch. They want to be entertained and informed and feel they can relate to the brand. They want to be able to see the person behind the account and that they are understood by that person.

Your brand

Maintaining brand voice is key to building trust with your audience. It also boosts engagement. Why? Because people are more willing to strike up a conversation with an account, they can relate to and feel represents the company accurately. This means you need to be able to keep your brand voices straight if you're representing multiple companies.

It also means that you should probably avoid internet slang or trending phrases. These can make you seem out of touch with your audience and easily slide into tone-deaf cultural insensitivity. It's extremely difficult to recover from once a faux pas of this sort is made. So keep to your brand voice, and remember to stay professional.

Your channels

There are many social media platforms, and it pays to remember which one you're on at any moment. This relates strongly to knowing your audience in that you need to know what they're expecting so you can deliver appropriate content no matter the medium.

For example, many companies use Twitter primarily for customer service-related communication, while Instagram is a better place for creative, audience-growing efforts. Keeping in mind the main focus of each channel you're present on means you won't mix up these different content types, which can confuse your audience and lead to them ditching you to follow a competitor's account that stays more on point.

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What to be

Along with staying in tune with your audience, brand, and channels, there are some things you need to remember to BE. These tips will help when interacting with your audience and helping you convey your brand message.

1. Engaging

Social media is about the conversation. It’s not just for posting links to your product pages and forgetting about it. People want a friendly face when they interact with a company online, and as the company's representative on social media, it would behoove you to be there when they ask questions or post comments.

Pro tip: Turn it around on your audience by asking them questions. This shows a deeper level of engagement, especially if your questions are topically relevant. Now, you're not only answering their questions but showing interest in their opinions, feelings, and thoughts by asking for input.

This extends to all forms of social media, from Facebook comments and likes to Tweets and mentions. When a follower retweets your content, remember to thank them and even retweet something they post. And when they like a blog post on Facebook, read something of theirs and make a thoughtful comment. This reciprocal approach shows a deeper attachment between your followers and your company and continues building the trust that began with your brand voice.

2. A person

Accounts that feel like they're staffed not by a human person but rather by a bot don't retain followers. Neither do accounts that do nothing but post promotions and never say anything useful. In fact, according to a Sprout Social poll, the top two reasons people become disenfranchised by a brand on social media are because it's posting too many promotions and using too much slang.

We covered both under the "Know your audience" section, but they're worth repeating. When you're sitting at the coffee shop chatting with friends, is work all you talk about? Do you use internet slang when talking with coworkers about a new campaign? Most likely not.

So why are you posting this stuff to your company accounts?

Something else to remember: it's more than OK to go off-topic sometimes. Back to that coffee shop conversation, if all you talk about is work, you'll have some seriously disinterested friends, right?

Remember, you're the human voice of the company, so post like a human.

How to accomplish all this

The single biggest tip we can offer here is to automate. Automate, automate and then automate some more. Several great tools support multiple accounts, full automation, and additional analytics to track your performance in the above areas.

Social media automation tools help you keep your accounts straight so you don't use the wrong company voice at the wrong time. They also help you by allowing you to track analytics for each account, campaign, or channel. This is key to knowing what's working and what's not. Maybe Twitter isn't paying the dividends for the job listings, but it's going quite well for the customer service account. Or perhaps you find LinkedIn is the better choice for the long-form tutorials you've posted to Facebook. Whatever the specifics, the metrics and analytics offered by automation software are often worth their weight in gold.

These statistics will help you fine-tune each presence to get the most out of your time spent with each account, on each platform, and for each brand you're representing. By automating as much of your presence as possible, you're saving yourself the effort of remembering all these details, which lets you spend more time in authentic conversations with your followers.

Want to ensure you keep your brand voice consistent across social media? Download our free checklist below!