How many social accounts is too many? No such thing — that is, when you’re managing multiple social media accounts the right way.
Whether you manage multiple social accounts for yourself, your business, or for clients, this article covers everything you need to know to run, optimize, and grow them… without losing your calm.
Bonus: Get a free guide that shows you 8 Ways to Use Hootsuite to Help Your Work-Life Balance. Find out how to spend more time offline by automating many of your daily social media work tasks.
Save time and boost engagement with these pro tips for multi-tasking social media managers.
1. Put together a social media strategy
First things first, you need a plan. Posting whenever you have a good idea and replying to comments once a week doesn’t cut it for growing professional social media channels.
In a nutshell, your social media strategy needs to have:
- Clear goals that go with your business objectives
- A defined target audience
- An analysis of your competitors’ social presence
- A content calendar
- Frameworks for amazing content
- A plan for how you’ll track performance
Check out our complete guide to crafting a social media strategy for more details — and a free template that will help you get started in no time.
2. Create on-brand content templates
Templates let you spend less time creating content and more time engaging with your audience, digging into insights, and coming up with fresh ideas.
Content templates also help you create a consistent look that people will recognize across all your social media accounts.
Need a fresh look? We’ve got 250+ free social media templates for planning your success, as well as these content-focused templates you can use with or without Hootsuite:
3. Automate what you can
The most repetitive part of being a social media manager is actually posting the content, right? Easy solution: use a social media scheduler.
With a social media management tool like Hootsuite, you can even automatically schedule content for the best time to publish based on your unique analytics and audience for each channel — without having to do the math manually.
Other tips for automating your social media workflow:
4. Embrace content curation and (smart) cross-posting
Social platforms are like children’s birthday party decor. No matter how much society tries to convince you, you don’t need to create everything yourself. Lil’ Jimmy will live without your fifteen-hour balloon arch, and your followers won’t care if you don’t write everything you post.
Yes, you absolutely need high-quality, original content to succeed on social media. About half of your content should be fully original and tailored for the platform it’s on.
But save time and mix things up by sharing posts from others, repurposing content across platforms, and *gasp* even sharing the same post again?! (I promise, the world won’t end.)
In fact, it’s how you get ahead. Content curation is a skill and the most successful brands on social media harness its power by mixing their own great content with:
Before sharing any curated content, make sure to get permission from the original creator first and verify you’re compliant with copyright laws.
5. Use a social media tool to access all your accounts in one place
Why do you need a social media tool? Come back and ask me that after you accidentally post last night’s bar selfie on your client’s Instagram.
Why take the chance? Without proper social media management software that keeps all your professional accounts neatly organized in one place, you’re potentially only one happy hour away from many sad hours of professional disaster.
Besides, managing multiple social media accounts manually is a waste of time. Log in to this app, log out of that, log in with the other client’s password, and… what’s the password again?
Obviously, I think Hootsuite is the best social media management platform to handle multiple accounts… but also, so does Kayla:
Source: G2
With Hootsuite, you can do everything you need for all your social profiles in one place—saving tons of time, stress, and browser tabs.
Hootsuite allows you to:
- Plan and schedule content across all your social media profiles (including at your personalized best time to publish!).
- Discover what people are saying about you online with state of the art AI social listening tools.
- Respond to DMs and comments across multiple social accounts right inside your dashboard.
- View performance in context with detailed analytics across all your accounts together.
- Save time with AI content creation boosters like OwlyWriter AI to draft posts from scratch or easily repurpose content.
- Create and manage ad campaigns with social advertising features, including auto-boosting.
Check out Hootsuite’s magic in action in under two minutes:
Personally, my favorite feature of Hootsuite is being able to see my cross-platform analytics in one unified report.
No other social media tool I’ve tried lets me see all my performance together in a way that makes sense, so I can tell which accounts are growing and which ones need a lil’ more love. Plus I love that I can schedule custom reports via email so I never forget to check in and optimize my strategy each month. Sounds nerdy, but insights like these are priceless for growth.
6. Put aside time for listening and engagement
If a social media post gets less than 1% engagement, did it even happen? A good engagement rate to aim for is between 1-5%, depending on your industry.
How do you get that level of engagement? Some unfortunate news: you have to work for it. Daily.
Seriously, there should be dedicated time in your calendar every day to reply to messages and comments and seek out posts from others to comment on. Engaging with others builds relationships, attracts new followers, and can even result in new corporate or influencer partnerships.
One way to massively speed this up, and as a result boost your engagement, is to use social listening to identify posts you should comment on, discover what people are saying about you, and find these new opportunities to grow.
Enter Hootsuite Listening and Hootsuite Inbox.
Hootsuite Listening helps you:
- Find out what people are saying about your company or products (and your competitors) across social media, websites, blog posts, forums, and more.
- Analyze and track brand sentiment over time.
- Identify when you’ve gone viral or have a potential PR crisis on the horizon.
- Discover new partnership opportunities.
Hootsuite Inbox helps you:
- Reply to private messages and comments across multiple social media platforms in one place.
- Handle messages as a team, with queues, message assignments, statuses, notes, and history tracking.
- Track response times and CSAT scores.
- Map customer journeys, with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics integrations.
Ready to become a social listening and engagement pro in a few minutes? Watch below:
7. Make collaboration and approvals easy
Leave the chasing around for approvals to your personal life by implementing a collaboration and posting workflow. Part of that includes knowing who needs to sign off on each piece of content before it goes live. But the far more critical part is keeping an organized content calendar and tracking where your content is in the workflow.
Approval workflows are a given for social media managers at larger firms. Even for small business owners or freelance social media managers, a dedicated process ensures each post is on-brand and optimized for each social network.
With Hootsuite Team and Business accounts, everyone can contribute to content, view the content calendar, and roles and responsibilities can be assigned in a simple dashboard where everyone can see what they need to do. That means nothing gets posted by accident.
Wanna see how we do it at Hootsuite? Check this out:
8. Connect social to your other business tools
Odds are you use project management tools, image and video editing apps, automation tools, and of course, AI marketing tools.
Hootsuite has over 250 apps in the Hootsuite App Directory to help integrate your social media marketing with your other business processes. The more of your apps that talk to each other, the merrier your workday can be.
Chances are the tools you use are in our App Directory, including popular partners like Dropbox, Mailchimp, Monday, Shopify (via Shopview), and many more.
Check out how simple it is to add apps to connect Hootsuite to your other tools:
9. Unify your reporting
As I mentioned before, Hootsuite Analytics is my favorite feature in Hootsuite. Hootsuite makes analytics just so cool.
Okay, maybe I’m over-selling it a bit, but being able to finally see how all your social accounts are performing without having to download and open seven different analytics tools and try to piece the bigger picture together by yourself? Sign me up. (Or sign you up with a free trial, friend.)
Hootsuite Analytics simplifies your (work) life with:
- Unified reports: View all your social media performance in one place. (Or, dive deep into specific accounts or metrics to your heart’s desire.)
- Paid and organic campaign performance together: Get the full picture of your ROI (and prove it) with lead tracking and key metrics.
- Competitive analytics and benchmarks: Keep an eye on your competitors, compare performance, and find inspiration to level up.
- Easy content repurposing: Hootsuite Analytics identifies your best performing content and lets you repurpose it in a few clicks with the power of OwlyWriter AI.
Okay, but how do you actually use analytics reports to improve your social media strategy?
This is our exact social media analytics process all spelled out for you to copy and’ paste. Enjoy.
Skip the overwhelm when managing multiple social media accounts with these expert tips.
Batch your content
In my experience, the best tip for managing multiple social media accounts is to batch your time. I manage 13 social media accounts across my three businesses by grouping tasks together, sorted by business.
One morning, I’ll create all my content for one business. Film Reels, create graphics, write captions, etc. The next morning, I’ll create content for the second business, and so on. Another day, I’ll schedule all my posts (with Hootsuite, ofc). And a few times a day, I’ll open Hootsuite Inbox to reply to messages and comments.
This way I only have to focus on doing one thing at a time which is infinitely more productive than having to switch mental gears all the time by making one piece of content, then scheduling it, posting it, promoting it, then starting all over again for another piece.
Use an auto-responder to set expectations
Whether you manage three accounts or thirty, you can’t respond to every message across all of them as soon as they come in. Instead of leaving customers wondering when they’ll hear back from you, set up an automatic reply.
Social media manager Gillian Ní Leathloir finds this especially helpful during busy periods:
I have my own personal and then a festival’s social media also. I have them muted on Instagram and have an auto-response thing if they message the festival page. Then I’ll go in and check them in the morning or evening when festival prep is really busy.
By saying you typically reply to messages within 24 hours in an auto-response, your customer knows what to expect and won’t be worried if they haven’t heard from you in what they deem to be an acceptable amount of time.
And while a faster response time is always better, don’t panic and think you need to reply within minutes. Sure, some people may expect that, but almost half (46%) of customers are willing to wait up to three days (!) for a reply.
Wondering how to set up an auto-response? Many social media apps have this feature built-in, such as Instagram, but of course you can make your life even easier by setting this up for multiple platforms at once with Hootsuite Inbox, as well as batch reply to all those messages in one place.
Have social media brand guidelines
One of the main challenges of running multiple social accounts is staying true to your brand while still being able to change up language and stylistic elements to better match each platform.
Reddit user @Forward-Goose1672 recommends creating a social media style guide to keep your team aligned:
“One strategy is to develop a brand style guide that outlines your core messaging, tone, and visual elements. This ensures consistency across all platforms while allowing room for platform-specific adaptations. For instance, Twitter’s character limit necessitates concise, impactful messaging, while Instagram’s visual nature calls for compelling imagery and storytelling.”
Source: r/DigitalMarketing on Reddit
Do it better with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.
