Manage Multiple Social Profiles: 6 Simple, Powerful 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 tools and strategies I’ve used for handling multiple social media accounts—whether you’re handling several company profiles or juggling your personal brand in multiple places. I’d love to hear from you on what insights you’ve learned as well! 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 nefits:You log in once to manage everythingYou can perform multiple actions in the same spot—sharing, scheduling, and analyzingWhich networks it supports:Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and PinterestTools similar to Buffer:Hootsuite, Sprout Social, HubSpot, Everypost (and 20 more social media management tools)Once you’ve researched all your options, we’d love to help you schedule, publish and analyze your content across multiple accounts through Buffer Publish! Buffer Analyze is our social media analytics and reporting tool for online brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling nefits:Visual modern reports to show the impact of your social media marketingGet Shopify data such as top referral and top products, alongside your social media dataWhich networks it supports:Instagram Business profiles, Facebook Pages, Twitter, and ShopifyTools like Buffer Analyze:quintly, Social Report, and Socialbakers3. Facebook Inbox – social media monitoring and engagementFacebook Inbox, which comes with your Facebook Page, allows you to engage with your customers and audience on Facebook and Instagram from one streamlined nefits:Monitor multiple social media mentions in one locationQuickly engage with the mentions you wantWhich social media networks it supports:Facebook and InstagramTools like Facebook Inbox:TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and Brand244. Nuzzel – digests of posts from people you followOne 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 top social media posts out of social media and into your connects with Twitter and Facebook to give you daily updates of top news from people you follow. (You might be following a lot of people and don’t want to monitor all their posts. A trick is to create a fake Twitter account, follow only the people you want to monitor, and connect that account with Nuzzel. )Benefits:Never miss a top news or popular postMonitor a group of chosen profiles (people, brands, etc. )Which networks it supports:Twitter and FacebookTools like Nuzzel:Flipboard, Refind, and Stack5. Buzzsumo – tracking social media shares for your contentIf you’re managing social media, you’ll want a tool that shows you how your content is a quick and simple way to check the share count of your site’s content, plug your main URL into Buzzsumo and see the results. Buzzsumo gives you the share count for each top article on your site, aggregating data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and nefits:Enter one URL, get many resultsSee which articles do well across multiple channels without having to constantly monitor multiple social channelsWhich networks it supports:Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and PinterestTools like SocialCount:PostReach, Shared Count, and Bitly6. BuzzSumo Monitoring – notifications when you & your content go viralApart from tracking social shares, Buzzsumo’s monitoring tools have some great applications for managing multiple social media accounts as stead 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 can also be alerted when your content exceeds a certain number of nefits:Easily keep up to date on the virality of your brandGauge the quality of your content as it appears on social media (without needing to even be on social media)Which networks it supports:Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and PinterestTools like BuzzSumo Monitoring:Mention and Social MentionThe single biggest help for managing multiple social media accounts is the ability to access everything from one 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 media dashboards (like Buffer and others, mentioned above) are ideal for this. It’s one of the most popular time-saving social media tips out social media platform is audience on each platform expects different types of content from you. You might want to post a video on Facebook, a GIF on Twitter, and an infographic on strategies for crafting the perfect caption are also different across the platforms. For example, hashtags work better on Instagram than Facebook; you can only use 140 characters for a tweet but 700 for a LinkedIn Buffer Publish, you can craft the perfect post for every social platform in one seamless social media posts with different content and captions to each of your social media profiles from one single place. All at once. 3. Schedule posts ahead of timeScheduling 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 helps make sure that you maintain a consistent publishing schedule and always have good content coming up social media management tools listed above (Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, etc. ) each allow for ’s queue system allows you to set up a series of optimal times in advance and publish one piece of content from your queue at each scheduled slot, or to schedule at specific times regardless of the queue. 4. Engage with those who are engaging with your postsReplying to people who engaged with your posts is a great social media strategy, made easier when you can access all these interactions from one are many social media monitoring and engagement tools out there that’ll help you gather all your social media engagement. You can then jump into a conversation and quickly reply your follower. A popular method of displaying stats on social media is to show them as week-over-week growth. This is super 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 eating a benchmark is a bit of an easier way to measure performance week-over-week and ’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) you’re interested in more, SimplyMeasured has a great overview of four different ways to find social media benchmarks:Benchmarks of social leaders and influencers in your nicheBenchmarks from your own history and dataBenchmarks specific to your campaign and promotion goalsBenchmarks based on competitor numbersFor 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 withAutomation—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 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 mmaryWe’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 placeSchedule posts ahead of time to save time and keep the content comingUse a social monitoring tool to keep track of mentions and engage followersFind simple stats that are meaningful and can be analyzed at a glanceThis post was originally written in 2014 and has been updated in October 2017.
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Manage Multiple Social Profiles: 6 Simple, Powerful 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 tools and strategies I’ve used for handling multiple social media accounts—whether you’re handling several company profiles or juggling your personal brand in multiple places. I’d love to hear from you on what insights you’ve learned as well! 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 nefits:You log in once to manage everythingYou can perform multiple actions in the same spot—sharing, scheduling, and analyzingWhich networks it supports:Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and PinterestTools similar to Buffer:Hootsuite, Sprout Social, HubSpot, Everypost (and 20 more social media management tools)Once you’ve researched all your options, we’d love to help you schedule, publish and analyze your content across multiple accounts through Buffer Publish! Buffer Analyze is our social media analytics and reporting tool for online brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling nefits:Visual modern reports to show the impact of your social media marketingGet Shopify data such as top referral and top products, alongside your social media dataWhich networks it supports:Instagram Business profiles, Facebook Pages, Twitter, and ShopifyTools like Buffer Analyze:quintly, Social Report, and Socialbakers3. Facebook Inbox – social media monitoring and engagementFacebook Inbox, which comes with your Facebook Page, allows you to engage with your customers and audience on Facebook and Instagram from one streamlined nefits:Monitor multiple social media mentions in one locationQuickly engage with the mentions you wantWhich social media networks it supports:Facebook and InstagramTools like Facebook Inbox:TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and Brand244. Nuzzel – digests of posts from people you followOne 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 top social media posts out of social media and into your connects with Twitter and Facebook to give you daily updates of top news from people you follow. (You might be following a lot of people and don’t want to monitor all their posts. A trick is to create a fake Twitter account, follow only the people you want to monitor, and connect that account with Nuzzel. )Benefits:Never miss a top news or popular postMonitor a group of chosen profiles (people, brands, etc. )Which networks it supports:Twitter and FacebookTools like Nuzzel:Flipboard, Refind, and Stack5. Buzzsumo – tracking social media shares for your contentIf you’re managing social media, you’ll want a tool that shows you how your content is a quick and simple way to check the share count of your site’s content, plug your main URL into Buzzsumo and see the results. Buzzsumo gives you the share count for each top article on your site, aggregating data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and nefits:Enter one URL, get many resultsSee which articles do well across multiple channels without having to constantly monitor multiple social channelsWhich networks it supports:Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and PinterestTools like SocialCount:PostReach, Shared Count, and Bitly6. BuzzSumo Monitoring – notifications when you & your content go viralApart from tracking social shares, Buzzsumo’s monitoring tools have some great applications for managing multiple social media accounts as stead 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 can also be alerted when your content exceeds a certain number of nefits:Easily keep up to date on the virality of your brandGauge the quality of your content as it appears on social media (without needing to even be on social media)Which networks it supports:Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and PinterestTools like BuzzSumo Monitoring:Mention and Social MentionThe single biggest help for managing multiple social media accounts is the ability to access everything from one 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 media dashboards (like Buffer and others, mentioned above) are ideal for this. It’s one of the most popular time-saving social media tips out social media platform is audience on each platform expects different types of content from you. You might want to post a video on Facebook, a GIF on Twitter, and an infographic on strategies for crafting the perfect caption are also different across the platforms. For example, hashtags work better on Instagram than Facebook; you can only use 140 characters for a tweet but 700 for a LinkedIn Buffer Publish, you can craft the perfect post for every social platform in one seamless social media posts with different content and captions to each of your social media profiles from one single place. All at once. 3. Schedule posts ahead of timeScheduling 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 helps make sure that you maintain a consistent publishing schedule and always have good content coming up social media management tools listed above (Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, etc. ) each allow for ’s queue system allows you to set up a series of optimal times in advance and publish one piece of content from your queue at each scheduled slot, or to schedule at specific times regardless of the queue. 4. Engage with those who are engaging with your postsReplying to people who engaged with your posts is a great social media strategy, made easier when you can access all these interactions from one are many social media monitoring and engagement tools out there that’ll help you gather all your social media engagement. You can then jump into a conversation and quickly reply your follower. A popular method of displaying stats on social media is to show them as week-over-week growth. This is super 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 eating a benchmark is a bit of an easier way to measure performance week-over-week and ’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) you’re interested in more, SimplyMeasured has a great overview of four different ways to find social media benchmarks:Benchmarks of social leaders and influencers in your nicheBenchmarks from your own history and dataBenchmarks specific to your campaign and promotion goalsBenchmarks based on competitor numbersFor 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 withAutomation—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 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 mmaryWe’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 placeSchedule posts ahead of time to save time and keep the content comingUse a social monitoring tool to keep track of mentions and engage followersFind simple stats that are meaningful and can be analyzed at a glanceThis post was originally written in 2014 and has been updated in October 2017.
Did you find this article helpful? You might also like our all-you-need social media toolkit.
Get started for free now
7 Social Media Management Tips to Save Time & Improve Results
Last updated:
August 1, 2020
As a millennial (but not one of the whiny ones that baby boomers complain about), I grew up in the age of online friendships and followers, which has exploded into a world of digital living. If I want to find a restaurant, I hop on Yelp. Recipes or clothes? Pinterest. Trying to be an adult? LinkedIn. The best thing about these options is that they have already been vetted by other people! I’m going to trust a Facebook friend who recommends a product 1000x more than a description on the product website.
According to data from Mainstreethost, social networks are the 2nd most popular way to research brands, just behind search engines. We can google “Faux-suede shirt” and receive an ad from UNTUCKit—but it’s fairly unlikely that I would purchase that shirt before doing my research on the brand.
First, check them out on Facebook, see some reviews; check Twitter and Instagram for discounts. It’s like doing recon for a blind date! I want to know I’m not going to get ripped off; and in the process, the brand should utilize these social channels to develop a relationship with me as a customer.
That being said, I think we agree that social media management can be a stream of irritation. Your brand needs to be engaging, posting and sharing constantly—but who has time for that? I have gathered a list of tips that my colleagues and I use for WordStream’s social management to help save time, save money, and grow and engage your audience.
1. Focus on Quality
It is always good to have a constant flow of content and announcements, but I would much rather have nothing at all than abysmal posts with incorrect information. We want to make sure that we are sharing content that is good enough to be re-shared or retweeted, passed on to colleagues across industries.
We also try to look for content that will last, not just trend for a week and disappear. If you are able to produce content or develop insights that will stay relevant in the industry, these are gold! For us, social media content does really well on—surprise! —social media. This tweet was posted in mid-June and I’m still seeing it being retweeted even now.
It’s a bummer that this doesn’t direct to WordStream, but we have content posted on it, too!
Think about it this way, if someone writes a terrible post without citing sources and shares it on social media—are you going to interact with it? And what does that post say about your credibility as a brand?
2. Analyze Data to Find the Perfect Quantity
…and almost as important, quantity. Because let’s face it, social media is about what is going on NOW, right this second. This is especially true for Twitter; we recently found that engagement rate increased 46% week over week after publishing 30 more tweets than the week prior. In fact, those 30 extra tweets helped push 30% more traffic to the website with 60% more link clicks than the previous week.
During the week with 30 extra posts, there was an average of 5. 9K link clicks daily.
It can be hard to get visibility as organic reach continues to decrease, and the one way we’ve found to combat this is to post more often. My favorite trick is to re-post content multiple times—for blog posts, I’ll share it on Twitter up to 5 times on the day it is published. Just make sure you’re not being spammy on Facebook! People hate that. Truly, I’ve seen the comments…
Another good trick is to stay aware of demand—keep your eye on trending topics in your industry’s sphere. Chime in when you can! This will increase your social media engagement rate and potentially garner more followers.
3. Be Charming (Tools Can Help! )
When my mother complains about social media, she references her friends that only post to brag. “Tommy got into Harvard AND Yale! Such a hard choice! ” *Insert picture of the son as the homecoming king*. But, being the charmer she is, she will congratulate them (with a “xoxo”) and as a result, they will like and share and comment on her posts as well. Be my mother! What goes around, comes back around: engage with others and they will engage with you. Though this sounds silly, Larry swears by it.
Yes, my mother’s last profile picture was a flower pot. For 4 years.
One of my biggest challenges is finding content to tweet and post about! A way to tackle this is through social media management tools like Mention and Buzzsumo, which will send alerts your way when a keyword you select is posted online. I currently use keywords like “WordStream” or “Larry Kim” to see if others are posting about us. Then I can retweet their content!
Another great resource is Feedly, an RSS feed website that helps you read your favorite blogs all in one space, or Klout, which suggests original content that hasn’t been seen by your audience yet.
4. Use Scheduling Tools
Because no one expects you to manage your social media accounts so intensely that you are manually posting 20+ times per day. Actually, who is reading these daytime posts?! Procrastinators, I see you…
I personally use Hootsuite, which had been conveniently set up before I started working in social media. I’ve also tried Buffer, which works similarly. For a complete list, check out our post on Social Media Management Tools.
Hootsuite dashboard for WordStream
I have found that the most important part of these tools (other than the obviously time-saving) is their ability to auto-schedule posts when your account is most likely to see high engagement. It takes a certain amount of brain power to pick times for 10+ posts per day, and this a huge help. If you’d like to simply analyze your twitter sphere timing, Hubspot has a handy tool called TweetWhen which will select your most retweetable time of day, and Tweriod will select the best times to tweet.
5. Automate Repetitive Tasks with IFTTT
IFTTT, short for If This, Then That, is a social media recipe website! In a series of simple steps, this website will help you set up simple commands which link up different applications to automatically perform actions if triggered. For example, IF the weather app tells you there is a high UV index, THEN a reminder to put on sunscreen is triggered. IF you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, THEN save the photos to dropbox.
At WordStream, we have a few blogs that we follow and trust to post quality content consistently that is of interest to our audience. We were able to set up a recipe that automates the sharing process. IF a certain blog posts new content, THEN tweet the post to our followers on twitter.
6. Utilize Social Media Analytics
Does this need an explanation? How do you know how many people are seeing your posts and engaging if you don’t look at the numbers! Make decisions based on data!
I won’t pretend to be an expert in analytics, but I appreciate the vast number of social media metrics available. Luckily, there are experts out there, like the fine people analyzing tweets at Buffer, Twitter themselves, and Kissmetrics, who are kind enough to give us a beginner’s guide to Facebook insights. Personally, I tend to watch post engagement (based on audience size) and URL clicks when managing social media because our goals are to expand and engage our followers while driving them to the site.
7. Be a Real Person
As individuals, we have a higher tendency to follow accounts of “real people” vs. businesses even if we don’t personally know the person. I have tried my hardest to show on social media that WordStream is a real place with a real person with a real personality behind it! To get some ideas, Gizmodo and Contently have companies that manage their social accounts with flair and sass and everything people love…about real people. My personal favorites are Chipotle, Seamless, and Nutella. This says nothing about my real-life favorite things, I swear.
My favorite thing to do on Twitter is to find disgruntled customers and respond, trying to solve their issues. In a survey from InSites Consulting, 83% of companies reported that they deal with questions or complaints sent via social media, so I’m not alone. This is a great way to show that your company cares and a face and personality behind the façade.
This customer had tweeted @WordStream unhappily reporting his dashboard was broken. We were able to respond and get it fixed! Previous tweets have since been deleted.
We already know from Larry that posts with emojis receive more attention. Similarly, when examining our tactics with images, we found that photos will generally receive more attention. This was further affirmed by Convince&Convert, who report that posts with pictures generate 150% more retweets. At WordStream, we analyzed posts on Twitter and Facebook and found that the most retweeted or liked posts featured images of real people–#PPCkid and images of our employees worked fairly well, but even memes featuring a real human work as well.
This is the back of everyone’s head at WordStream. It received 200% more likes than a post directing to an article a few minutes later.
Just like PPC, managing social media accounts is a constant work in progress. I’m keeping an eye out to see how Facebook’s new algorithm will affect our organic visibility while being vigilant about metrics and engagement across all channels. Do you have any great tips that I missed? Let me know!
Frequently Asked Questions about manage multiple social accounts
How do you manage multiple social accounts?
The 6 best social media management strategiesAdd your social media profiles to a dashboard. … Create unique posts for each social media platform. … Schedule posts ahead of time. … Engage with those who are engaging with your posts. … Compare your social media stats to a benchmark. … Automate as many tasks as you’re comfortable with.More items…
How do you manage social accounts?
7 Social Media Management Tips to Save Time & Improve ResultsFocus on Quality. … Analyze Data to Find the Perfect Quantity. … Be Charming (Tools Can Help!) … Use Scheduling Tools. … Automate Repetitive Tasks with IFTTT. … Utilize Social Media Analytics. … Be a Real Person.Aug 1, 2020
How many accounts should a social media manager manage?
We heard from social media managers who managed three to ten social media accounts each. Others reported managing twenty or more Facebook pages, while other managers reported higher numbers, between twenty-five and sixty.Jul 28, 2020