Recommendation: Have one social media account per network

Businesses love creating various accounts for themselves on social networks. For example, a business might have an account for their overall US brand messaging, then another account for an overseas division, then another account for their HR department. Each account serves various purposes, such as the HR account focusing on posts regarding open positions. However, is this strategy the best for your business?

Royal Caribbean has several verified accounts on Pinterest, which can be confusing for consumers. Which one should they follow?

For many businesses, multiple social media accounts aren’t necessary. For one, it causes confusion for some consumers. What is the appropriate account to follow? Should they follow all of them? Secondly, undertaking several social media accounts can be overwhelming for many business owners. It’s often hard enough to manage one. Responses to consumers on social media accounts are key to survival on social networks, and being able to manage several is tough. Additionally, getting people to follow the appropriate accounts is hard- it’s hard to even get followers on one account. Adding multiple others only makes things more difficult. Businesses can forego these difficulties by sticking to one main account. Businesses need to remember this is the world wide web. Targeting messaging through separate accounts is an extreme undertaking, and the value can be tough to get. A few things can be considered when deciding if multiple accounts are right for you:

• Other than different languages, how different is your brand messaging between different divisions? How will it be perceived if you make one division your main page? With consumers targeted for the other division feel “left out”?
• For HR-related accounts, how will they be used? To post new jobs? To inform current employees? Does the social network allow anyone to follow these accounts, making an employee-only page unwise (platforms such as LinkedIn can offer groups that are invite only- otherwise, do you really want to share work-related posts to non-employees?). How often are you posting jobs? Could these HR posts just be mixed in with brand messaging, since these followers are already interested in your business, and therefore, might be great potential employees?
• For promotional activities, such as a contest, does it make sense to create a separate account? How will consumers find the account to follow? Could this be combined to your main brand page for better communication purposes?

The moral of the story is to consider your business. Can you manage multiple accounts? Does it make sense to have multiple accounts? Different strategies can work differently for different businesses. But overall, it seems multiple accounts are overused, and it’s often just a case of multiple groups in the businesses wanting to manage their own pages. If this is the case, develop a social media strategy for your business internally, which outlines ways for various internal groups to work together and manage one account per social network for your business. – Bryan Nagy