How to Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts
Our 11 best time-saving strategies and tools
Maybe this sounds familiar to you:
I used to log in to each and every individual network to compose new posts, check what’s happening in my streams, follow up on conversations and follower requests, and basically perform any other little bit of social media management that was on my plate.
I switched to dashboards and tools, and my productivity has soared.
I’d love to share a bit about how I made these changes and the best social media management strategies and tools I’ve used for handling multiple social media accounts .
(This is a shorter version of the original blog post. If you would like to read the full blog post, you can find it here.)
The 6 best social media management strategies
1. Add your social media profiles to a dashboard
The single biggest help for managing multiple social media accounts is the ability to access everything from one location.
Think of it like grocery shopping: You’ll save time if you can pick up bread, orange juice, ice cream, and napkins at one supermarket rather than stopping off at four different locations.
Social media dashboards are ideal for this. It’s one of the most popular time-saving social media tips out there.
2. Schedule posts ahead of time
Scheduling your content does a couple great things for you:
- It helps save you time by letting you batch your social media updates all at once and still share at multiple, best times throughout the day.
- It helps make sure that you maintain a consistent publishing schedule and always have good content coming up next.
The social media management tools listed below each allow for scheduling.
3. See who is engaging with your posts
Engagement stats like reshares and replies are some super signals that people are excited to connect with you.
Finding and replying to these people is a great social media strategy, made easier when you can access all this interaction from one place — your social media management dashboard.
4. Segment your audience so you can follow easier
Let’s say you follow 1,000 people on Twitter, 500 people on Facebook, and 50 people on Instagram. That’s a ton of content to keep up with on a daily basis!
One way to help out with managing these multiple accounts is to place the accounts that are important to you into their own silos.
- On Twitter, you can create a Twitter list of followers or track a topic with a saved keyword search.
- With a tool like Nuzzel, you can see the top content being shared among all your followers on Twitter and Facebook.
5. Compare your social media stats to a benchmark
A popular method of displaying stats on social media is to show them as week-over-week growth.
This is great in so many cases. Yet, sometimes it can be a bit misleading. What if you had a really spectacular week with a number of unique events and happenings? It might throw off a bit of your analysis in the weeks surrounding it.
Creating a benchmark is a bit of an easier way to measure performance week-over-week and post-over-post.
We’ve found post-over-post analysis to be especially helpful. For instance, on Twitter we identify popular tweets as those that gain 200 or more clicks. So when it comes time to check the stats, we can see at-a-glance which ones met those standards (and reshare them accordingly).
For example, AgoraPulse can show you some of these benchmark stats for your Facebook page, customized for your specific size of followers (e.g., you’ll see different numbers if your page has 1,000 fans versus 10,000 fans).
6. Automate as many tasks as you’re comfortable with
Automation — the process of setting up systems to work whether you’re around or not — can be super useful for managing multiple social profiles.
Tools like Zapier and IFTTT allow you to sync up multiple apps so that when a certain activity happens it kicks off a separate activity in another app.
Zapier published a list of 101 ways to automate social media. Here are a few of their suggestions.
We’ve shared some fun social media IFTTT recipes before, too — things like saving tweeted links to Pocket and welcoming new members to Facebook groups.
The 5 best social media management tools
1. Buffer — social media dashboard & scheduling
My biggest time-saver has been using a social media management dashboard where I can manage all my social media profiles from one central place. At Buffer, we’re aiming to build a simple, clean, and intuitive tool to help with just this.
Tools similar to Buffer: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, HubSpot, Everypost
2. SumAll — social media managment reports
Once you connect your multiple social networks to SumAll, it’ll start pulling data and insights from your accounts. You can then ask for a daily or weekly email with all the info.
Tools like SumAll: Social Express, Socialight
3. Nuzzel— digests of your favorite people’s activity
One helpful way to save time when managing multiple social accounts is to cut down on the number of times you must visit each network individually. One area of assistance here is pulling updates from your most valued accounts out of social media and into your inbox.
Nuzzel connects with Twitter to give you the updates every day from people you choose.
4. SocialCount — tracking social media shares for your content
If you’re managing social media, you’ll want a tool that shows you how your content is spreading. For a quick and simple way to check the share count of your site’s content, plug your main URL into SocialCount and see the results. SocialCount gives you the top shares for each unique article on your site, aggregating data from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Tools like SocialCount: Shares Count, Quick Sprout, BuzzSumo
5. BuzzSumo Alerts — notifications when you & your content go viral
I’ve found great use with BuzzSumo in performing keyword and idea research for blog posts. Their Alerts tools has some great applications for managing multiple social media accounts as well.
Instead of visiting each social network to spot mentions, you can tell BuzzSumo to email you any time your name or company name appears in highly-shared blog posts.
Tools like BuzzSumo Alerts: Mention, Social Mention
Summary
We’re quite fortunate to have so many awesome tools and apps to rely on for managing social media accounts.
When I think of the time I used to spend on social, I see the hours that I’ve saved since just in following a couple small strategies:
- Use a social media dashboard so I can log in at one place
- Schedule posts ahead of time to save time and keep the content coming
- Split up the stream into manageable chunks
- Find simple stats that are meaningful and can be analyzed at-a-glance
Which social media management tips have been most useful for you?
What are some of your most-used tools for managing multiple social media accounts?
The full version of this blog post was written by Kevan Lee and first published on the Buffer Social blog on March 10, 2017.
If you like this post, you might also like the posts on our Social blog on social media marketing:
