Managing (or wrangling) multiple accounts
If you work in a university, museum or science centre, you’ve likely got to deal with many social accounts doing slightly different things. Here’s some advice on how larger organisations handle it.
Each department want their own twitter account. Should we have a new Facebook page for that new project? Of course, the answer to questions like these depends entirely on each situation, but getting the tone of voice right across multiple accounts and platforms, and judging when to commit to (or allow) new ones is a common conundrum for social media managers. The structure of most science organisations makes us particularly susceptible to this, so it’s worth some consideration.
Tone of voice(s)
Voice and personality is at the heart of social media. This from Russell Dornan on why museums (or, really, any educational organisation) need personality on social media, and why that comes from you, is well worth a read, and also take a look at this page on imbuing your science content with personality.
But it’s important that that personality is the right one for your organisation. Brice Russ, who looks after social media for Science, for example, stresses that memes and gif reactions aren’t always the right personality. Keep in mind that ‘personality’ implies something unique to you, not just snappy and ‘fun’, and different accounts from your organisation should work together, but don’t necessarily need to have the exact same personality and tone.
When to split off
The American Chemical Society have a good feel for this idea of personality, and know that much of their audience just wouldn’t appreciate too much frivolity. But they wanted to create a new online series targeted at a younger audience, with a very different tone. As a result, when they made ACS Reactions, they gave it a whole new YouTube channel and social accounts and it’s grown well. It exists alongside their ‘core’ platforms, is clearly signposted, and is available to their members, but has been allowed the space to find its target audience.
If you’re relatively small organisation though, in either physical size or public profile, this is the exception, rather than rule. Before creating parallel accounts, be sure that they are for a particular, different audience, and that there is sufficient resource to manage the new accounts, and sustain them, over time. Make sure you ask whether you’re creating new accounts to better serve the audience, or just to reflect your internal structure/departments. Remember, the rest of the world doesn’t really care about how your departments are separated, so don’t let that decide what accounts you create.
Because if you’re not careful, it can get almost impossible to keep track of. When I spoke to Ryan Dodge at the Royal Ontario Museum, they had just made the decision to condense their many accounts down to just a few. He goes into some very useful detail in his post about that here (and see another example from the Fondazione Torino Musei here). But a key finding from his, and several other managers I spoke to, experience is that it can be a real challenge to maintain consistency and quality across several accounts managed by different people. Are your new accounts going to be managed by staff members on top of their usual workload? If so, no matter how enthusiastic they are, the accounts are always going to be at risk of slipping as soon as other priorities pile up.
Maintaining standards is hard, and if you have a small online profile, be wary of splitting your audience further. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it — I’ve been involved in projects where we’ve resisted creating new accounts for fear of having to build a brand new audience from scratch, and later regretted it, but be cautious with it, and try to think about the long-term impacts.
Handling many accounts in many hands
Sometimes having many different accounts is the right decision (or simply unavoidable). For an organisation as huge as NASA, it’s inevitable. And there are a few key things to learn from them, whether you’re in the middle overseeing a whole network, or managing just one detailed account at the tip of a larger organisation’s tentacle.
For the team at HQ, it’s about trying to institutionalise learnings and provide guidance, rather than micromanaging every account. When there are hundreds of accounts under your umbrella, you can’t get bogged down in the details of any one profile. Instead, they aim to empower the social media professionals throughout the various missions and research centres to create great content of their own, and encourage them to play to each site’s unique strengths. Rather than dictating a particular tone of voice, the central team are most interested in whether the right messages are being communicated.
They see themselves as a consultancy for the rest of the organisation. A weekly newsletter goes out, packed with practical, actionable advice to help improve practise (for example: We’ve realised that you have to re-introduce your Facebook Lives about every 4 minutes, or you’ll find the same basic questions coming up again and again or Here’s an example of last week’s most successful piece of content, and these are the key characteristics of it that you might be able to include in your own posts).
This regular dissemination of knowledge keeps everyone growing together. It’s also reliant on information being fed up from below, though. There needs to be a clear route for the managers at the various institutions and missions to feed back, and a receptive team at the centre.
For those managing the more niche accounts, it’s important to consider, and highlight, what content will work for the more general audience of the central accounts. For example, while your dedicated followers might really appreciate that overly-detailed dive into a particular new finding, remember to also share a version of that post that might work for the broader interest audience of the main accounts. You can then draw that post to the attention of the central team, and the network can really work to support itself.
This post forms part of the publication, ‘Communicating Science with Social Media’, which is the product of a 2017 Winston Churchill Fellowship. Read more about the project here, and for more about me, including examples of my own work, visit anthony-lewis.com.
