Why Have Multiple Social Media Accounts ?

For lots of people the idea of having multiple social media accounts sounds like a guaranteed route to insanity.  Can you imagine logging on to different Facebook accounts and adopting a completely different personae on each one, doesn’t sound fun does it !  Yet for many businesses, creating and managing multiple media accounts is absolutely essential for success.

It isn’t for every one, and indeed managing multiple accounts does make a lot more work and is often contrary to many social media companies terms of service too, although these can usually be sidestepped easily by using proxies with residential addresses.   However when you start thinking about the possibilities then running a few social media accounts makes a huge amount of sense for the majority of businesses.

Why You Should Have Multiple Social Media Accounts

Here’s a few of the positive benefits –

Segmented Audiences – many companies sell to lots of different demographics.  However that doesn’t mean that they sell in the same way to each market.  For example, you wouldn’t pitch a product to a 20 year old in the same way you’d market to the over 50s.  If you try and balance your posts in a single social media account you risk losing the interest of all sectors.  It doesn’t work.  Using multiple accounts mean you could separate all your customer types and target them specifically.

Location Specific – if you sell to different geographic areas then your message (and pricing) might need to change in each one.  It’s virtually impossible to do on a single ‘worldwide’ social media account.

Product Specific – obviously many companies have different products to sell.  It often makes more sense to split these across multiple accounts so you  don’t dilute your content and lose audience with non-related stuff.

Now obviously this all takes a whole lot more work than simply posting all your stuff onto a single account and there are other issues too.  It might sound obvious that it’s more confusing but this can affect both the company and the fan/follower too.   It might even be the case that you even have some people following your multiple accounts, so you need to be careful how you approach these promotions.  For the bigger companies with many accounts it usually will require a comprehensive strategy for social media promotion to make this manageable.

The drawbacks and the efforts required to manage multiple social media accounts can be significant but rarely will they outweigh the benefits.  Even for smaller businesses and companies running just an extra account or too can bring in significant advantages.   Even if it’s something quite simple like running an account for support/complaints plus one for promotional/branding purposes.

Spread the Social Risk and the Gain

Although it’s pretty much vital for most businesses, marketing anything on the internet can be a huge challenge for a variety of reasons.  One of the most crucial factors is that to leverage the audiences of most social networks is you obviously have to create a presence on each of these networks.  Spending lots of money, time and effort on promoting an account effectively controlled by a third party is not something that most economists or business analysts would advise.   You might have spend years promoting your Instagram account, yet those millions of followers will be worthless if your account gets closed down.

Businesses spend lots of money creating a brand to ensure that their promotion retains value in their own business.   Larger businesses and multinational brands have some built in protection in this extent, but many smaller businesses have been destroyed over night by having their Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest account deleted for some spurious reason.  The simple fact is that using a platform owned by another company is always going to make you vulnerable which is why it’s sensible to spread the risk whenever possible.

Using Multiple Social Media Accounts Effectively

Many of us push the boundaries with many social media platforms in order to build our audiences.  Indeed if you don’t have a million dollar marketing budget it’s difficult not to and achieve any sort of success.  Obviously there are limits, and spamming hundreds of accounts with the same content isn’t going to lead to success in the long term.  However even basic promotional techniques can lead to bans, blocks and even deletions on some social media networks.  It makes sense for lots of us to spread the risk across many accounts and try out riskier techniques on less valuable accounts before trying them on major ones.

Creating, posting and just managing multiple social media accounts can soon become very difficult especially when spread across various platforms.  Fortunately there are lots of social media management programs and tools which can help you ease this workload and lots have free versions or free trials.

Here’s some to check out –

• Hootsuite – probably the most famous social media tool currently.  It allows you to automate and schedule posts across many different platforms from a central interface.  It includes options to integrate your content in all the major networks plus many other high value resources which can often be ignored – places like Reddit, Storify and Tumblr.
• Dlvr.it – never heard of it?  Well try it, you can post to multiple systems and generate RSS feeds from lots of sources.
• Ifttt.com – a strange name and probably one the trendiest tools around at the moment.  Allows you to focus your content on specific sites but then replicate it to other social media sites too.  For many business models with lots of similar content to post, this is the tool they use.
• ManageWP – not so much social media but for managing multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard.   You can automate posts, perform upgrades, backups and even manage comments for multiple sites from a single interface.  The basic functionality is completely free and you just pay for the premium addons if you need them.

These tools take out a lot of the hard work and organization problems of managing multiple social accounts, however there are other things to remember too.  One of the most important is that many of the biggest platforms don’t like you having multiple accounts and will limit your accounts if they detect this.  The standard tactic is to check if the same IP address is managing lots of different accounts so it’s imperative to use proxies like this to create multiple identities.

One Social Media Account to Rule Them

It’s a nuisance, that you can’t simply run dozens of accounts from the same computer and network address.  However it’s a problem that can be easily overcome by creating multiple identities to use online.     These identities are only useful though if they are kept apart by using different IP addresses when using them.

Most marketing and internet based companies are well used to these requirements and invest in hundreds of different IP addresses to use along with automated tools to manage accounts for all sorts of purposes. A few years ago you needed to search around for different proxy companies to source a variety of these IP addresses.

Nowadays though there are a few companies who specialize in providing single proxy gateways sometimes called rotating proxies which can provide hundreds of residential IP addresses.

The extent you use proxies and the number (and type) of IP addresses that you need mainly depend on the platforms and the scope of your activities. There are marketing companies and individuals who operate hundreds of these accounts on places like Instagram and Facebook where you need a lot of addresses. You’ll also find these people rotate their address types to match the platform such as using mobile IPs on Instagram too.

Don’t let these complications put you off though, think of them as barriers of entry.  Any individual with a surprisingly small budget can equip themselves with a few tools and proxies and start operating dozens of social media accounts.   These can be used to promote your own business, sell direct or to market other companies.  Many marketers will establish powerful social media accounts in specific niches and then sell them off for huge amounts of money to a company who can utilize them.   If you want to see how much they’re selling for – go visit https://fameswap.com/ and check out the costs for even a relatively small Instagram account.

So if you’re looking for your next million (or your first) and know your way around a computer and social media, have a look at the power of building lots of powerful social media accounts.   There’s a useful post about using Bots to help build those accounts super quickly here.  For a friendly and helpful company to help you get started with proxies here’s two great little companies who can assist – Storm Proxies and Rotating Proxies.