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In our modern world, a business can scarcely survive without a robust social media presence to keep it relevant. With 93% of businesses now using social media marketing, many brands now outsource this service to agencies like yours, so they can focus on what they do best.
But when you manage multiple social media accounts, how do you keep track of all of them? How do you keep them distinct and on brand? If you’re asking yourself these questions, we’ve got the answers. Keep reading to find out how to manage multiple social media accounts successfully.
Challenges of Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts for Clients and Your Own Business
Time Management
One of the most obvious challenges when thinking about how to manage multiple social media accounts is time management. You have to figure out how to prioritize client work, and how to recalibrate when unexpected problems arise.
Adobe suggests posting on all channels at least once a day, which is no mean feat. Social media managers need to be serious about organization, scheduling, and content creation deadlines to keep the wheels turning.
Content Creation
According to a study by Semrush, 55% of marketers believe creating more content and posting more often is the key to a successful social media marketing strategy. To be able to do this, you need to have a steady flow of engaging content for each of the brands you manage.
Depending on the number of brands and the variety of industries you manage, this throws up its own unique challenges. You need to keep your brands feeling separate, unique, and fresh. You need to be able to quickly change voice and tone, and you need to have a deep understanding of the varying audiences you are speaking to.
Forbes recommends that businesses allocate 25-30% of their marketing budget to content marketing, so you need to make sure clients feel like they are getting their money’s worth.
Managing the Social Media Approval Process
Managing client approvals can be a real headache when considering how to manage multiple social media accounts. 92% of missed deadlines are attributed to approval delays.
Sometimes the same person is creating and managing the content, which can help streamline the process somewhat. But, as you know, the content needs to be shared with the client and then often returned to the agency for changes. Before you know it, you’re in full swing with amendments.
When you are managing multiple social media accounts, keeping track of this back and forth alongside your various deadlines can be, understandably, confusing. We at Gain recommend that you use a product like ours, which helps you seamlessly pass your content along the approvals chain for a quicker and easier social media approval process.
Steps for Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts
To manage multiple social media accounts for your clients at scale, follow a simple 9-step process:
- Assess clients’ current social media presence and performance
- Establish an effective social media strategy
- Create a social media calendar
- Use social media management tools
- Schedule posts in advance
- Recycle best-performing posts
- Use templates
- Implement a collaborative approval process
- Connect social accounts with other business tools.
Let’s take a look at each step in more detail.
1. Assess Clients’ Current Social Media Presence and Performance
Social media audits should be a regular part of your management process so you can figure out what is working and what is not according to the cold, hard, data. This should be done during the initial onboarding of a new client and at regular intervals afterward. 61% of marketers do a social media audit two or more times a year.
You can start by checking the engagement metrics and KPIs on each platform the client uses, then figure out any correlation between high and low-performing areas. Next, you need to make a plan to give your client a boost in those lower-performing areas and set new targets for each platform.
Finally, you can make an individual assessment of your client’s current and projected performance and decide whether it is worthwhile to expand into other platforms.
2. Establish an Effective Content Strategy
When considering how to manage multiple social media accounts, you need to establish an effective content strategy that is appropriate for each particular business you work with. To achieve this you need to establish clear goals, your target audience, and the most effective platforms for marketing each brand.
The information gathered in your social media performance audit will help you to shape your content strategy.
3. Create a Social Media Calendar
At Gain, timeliness is our business; thus, we highly recommend creating a social media calendar to manage your workload.
Steer clear of the old spreadsheet mishap—you know, the one with a gazillion tabs that are just asking for trouble? Yeah, that’s not a good idea! Plus, sharing it with your client might end up being more of a “facepalm” moment than a high-five.
Spreadsheets are time-sucking and messy because you can’t really track client feedback or collaborate in context. Instead, consider using something more specialized.
Gain can offer a monthly content calendar that is already integrated with the feedback and approval workflows and the scheduling and publishing functions. This makes it super easy for your team and your clients to see all the content that’s been approved, scheduled, and published.
We also have a recycle feature that helps you keep on top of the content that’s so nice, you post it twice.
4. Use Social Media Management Tools
There are a wealth of effective tools you can use to help you with your social media management. There is no need to struggle when help is readily available. All you need to do is find the right one for you.
These tools aid with things like organizing content, measuring engagement, connecting various social media platforms, and scheduling posts. All these tools are designed to keep you in control whilst utilizing AI to take out some of the leg work.
5. Schedule Posts in Advance
Scheduling posts is an essential part of managing social media, particularly when you are in charge of several accounts. Depending on the scope of your client’s business, you may need social media posts going out across multiple time zones, so instead of staying up all night, make use of the power of scheduling.
Even if the posting does occur during your workday, scheduling helps you move on to something else when all your approved content is ready to go.
6. Recycle Best-Performing Content
Recycling best-performing content is the social media manager’s worst-kept secret. Whilst you want to keep content seeming fresh, re-uploading well-loved items in different formats, with updates or slight tweaks can save you lots of time and still keep your engagement numbers high.
You can lift key content from longer-form blog posts or articles and post the quotes as a graphic on Instagram, or tweet excerpts with a link to the full post. The possibilities are endless.
7. Use Templates
Templates are a great way to save time for a social media manager as they mean you are not starting from scratch every time you need to design a new post. They also help to make your branding look cohesive and hopefully instantly recognizable to the viewers. Consistent design gives the impression that your business is professional, organized, and has its own intentional style.
8. Implement a Collaborative Approval Process
Implementing a collaborative approval process is a surefire way to streamline your entire social media management workload. Usually, a whole host of ideas have gone into the creation of social media marketing, and while collaboration is useful for good content, too many cooks can be a killer for your approval timeframe.
One way to improve your social media approval process is to centralize it using one easy tool where all stakeholders can give feedback and approvals when it’s their turn. Gain connects your whole marketing team with your clients so that you can keep content going out the door, fast.
9. Connect Social Accounts with Other Business Tools
You can use a whole host of agency business tools to help you with your social media management. There are tools to help you understand business analytics, tools that help you to respond to social media comments and tools that help you connect all your tools!
The Bottom Line
The importance of social media marketing cannot be underestimated and is always growing. This means that you, as a social media manager, are invaluable to the businesses you collaborate with.
When deciding how to manage multiple social media accounts, you need the best tools for the job. Whilst it is important to find the right combination for you, we believe you will benefit from adding Gain to your toolkit.
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