How to manage multiple social media accounts for business

Flicking between several tabs and tools for every social media account for your business can become time-consuming and a roadblock to your productivity. To start using your time better, keep reading to discover how to manage multiple social media accounts for business. We will cover:

• How to choose the right social media management tool
• How to use platform features to save time
• How to use analytics and record your performance
• Why building a library of images is important
• How to tailor posts for each platform
• Why community management is important

Select a management tool that can house all your business social media accounts in one place.

Do your research and choose a tool or software that allows you to effectively track your social media goals while saving you time. Some popular options are Hootsuite, Later or Buffer. These have apps and desktop versions to work for any type or size of business.

Once you have connected the business accounts to the management tool, you can choose between your scheduled posts, feed, mentions, or drafts to create a dashboard that gives you a complete picture of your social media calendar. 

To get the most productivity from your dashboard, consider where you spend your time. Do you spend ages responding to comments or messages? Or do you waste minutes jumping between tabs to check drafts on each platform? 

Let’s say you have a business account on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. You might choose to create one dashboard with the scheduled posts for all three platforms on one screen to view the posting schedule. A separate dashboard could show your mentions and tags, so you can handle all replies in one place. 

Making your management platform work for you will be the best step toward better productivity when handling multiple accounts. Do your research and take your time to find the best way to streamline this process.

Remember to take a tour of your social management tool. Each provider will have unique features that could save you time or help you learn something new. 

For example, many social media tools include an ‘Optimal Posting Time’ button. When drafting a social post, the platform will analyse your account to identify the best time to post based on your past engagement rates. 

Testing the special features will optimise your posts without you spending the time learning what works best on your own. 

Once you have connected your accounts, don’t forget to turn on the management tool analytics to learn more about your customers. Depending on the software, you may be able to personalise the report for your analytics, too.

Generally speaking, the management tool won’t pull in your historic data, but it will start to gather insights once you turn it on. You can still get any past data from the social media platform itself. 

Your management tool may already have a report section where you can keep an eye on social media performance. If not, you can always create a report yourself using Excel and set a reminder to check your stats weekly or monthly. 

Each platform has different metrics to measure impact because social is no longer all about the likes. Choose the stats that match your goals and monitor if your activity is successful. As well as followers, likes, shares and comments on every platform, you can also track:

• Facebook: reach (this indicates how many people your post has reached).
• Instagram: saves, reach, engagement rate (this is calculated for you on a business account), story views and mentions.
• Twitter: mentions, retweets, the amount of conversation or comments happening on a tweet.
• Linkedin: reach, engagement rate, brand mentions.
• Tiktok: video views, profile view.
• Youtube: views, length of time watched.

These different features and records of your success will allow your marketing to become more effective over time.

To save you time when writing posts, it can be a good idea to upload a variety of images to your dashboard. You can create a ‘media library’ to store your logos and any special imagery you have designed, so you don’t need to hunt them out every time you draft a post.

Images also tend to draw people’s attention more than just text alone, so an interesting image and caption can help improve your social media performance.

The audience on every social media platform will be different, so you will have to craft varying posts for each one. You can discuss the same topic but change your language. This may be the time-consuming part of managing your accounts but can mean your messages land better with each audience. Business accounts usually have follower analytics, so you know exactly who you talk to. 

Here is a general overview of platform demographics that may apply:

• Facebook – largest group (61%) of users are under 35, but the fastest-growing group is over 60s.
• Instagram – a third of users are 25-35, whilst teenage demographics lean towards Tiktok.
• Twitter – biggest group is between 30-49. Slightly older and more conversational than Facebook. Be mindful of the limited character count per tweet.
• Linkedin – mainly for B2B, with their biggest audience the oldest at 40-59.
• TikTok – most popular amongst 18-25 ( many users are younger than this).
• Youtube – biggest age group 15-25, but as the second-biggest platform (after Facebook) and the second-biggest search engine (after Google), there is massive scope for the audience on here.

While you may be tempted to use the same version across all channels, alter the messaging for your specific audience while remaining on topic to craft posts that work for each platform.

You may spend a lot of time responding to comments or mentions on your business socials. Your dashboard can help streamline this by showing you post notifications in one place and allowing you to see different topics across each platform.  

Responding personally to replies, comments and shares will build trust and loyalty amongst your followers, as users like to feel there is a person behind a business account. Therefore, community management can help add value to your business for your customers.

This article has shown you how you can save time when managing several social media accounts for your business.

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