How to manage multiple social media brands with ease

Social media is a massive landscape with different terrains that each comes with its unique challenges. While it used to be the domain of large agencies to manage multiple brands and networks across different social networks—these days we find even a single brand manager or a lone brand juggling multiple channels. With this, also comes a diverse audience with multiple requirements, to keep engaged.

Brands are communicating and marketing across demographics, and with this in mind, your approach has to be more than just a conveyor belt of content pushed out routinely to multiple networks. While it may not be easy to manage this, you can always follow some best practices to ensure that your business:

• Spends its time on each network wisely.
• Only creates and posts content that’s relevant.
• Keep no channels inactive for want of time or ideas.
• Improves on existing content based on feedback and data.

While all this paints a reasonable picture, what’s lost in translation is this: a poor marketer or brand owner juggling multiple tasks usually all by themselves, or with small teams. Achieving high social media marketing goals needs to be an attainable pursuit for everyone, not just savvy digital agencies.

That’s why we’ve put together some tips that we believe can help anyone who manages multiple social channels on a regular basis.

Organize all your channels in one place

Imagine the horror of having to manually check ten different social media pages every single day, keep track of everything happening across all of them, and push out content on each one—on top of staying up to date on the trends for every network you’re active on.

We know that sounds terrifyingly time-consuming—all your business hours would go to engaging with your audience and you’d never have enough time to build new content and ship it out—but you can breathe. We’re going to tell you exactly how to handle it.

One of the best ways to organize your social media channels also happens to be one of the biggest social ROI you’ll experience. It’s simply this—investing in a social media management tool, like Zoho Social (Hello!). SMM tools help you cut down on hours of work, and that’s an important asset for someone who may be handling social media, in addition to other responsibilities.

Schedule posts ahead of time

Once you figure out a schedule for each social platform you handle, batch the content and schedule it in advance, so it doesn’t get overwhelming. One way to effectively do this is to have a content timetable. Social networks can have different best times to post, so this can also factor into your posting schedules.

For instance, Facebook content is generally most viewed in the afternoon, whereas Instagram is highest at around 5pm. However, that’s only a general global average—you might have a different timetable for each channel, based on your specific audience and their social media habits.

So, if your Facebook posts are meant for weekday afternoons and your Twitter posts for weekend mornings, create a content queue for each day and time slot, and push the content into their respective queues.

While scheduling content directly isn’t a possibility for all networks, third-party social media tools can handle that for you. They don’t just fill the role of a scheduler—most social media management tools also come with a content calendar that can give you a snapshot of all the content you’ve planned and scheduled in advance.

Quality vs quantity

When posting on multiple networks, one can be tempted to turn to many sources for generating content. This is where we recommend that you exercise discernment, and only pick the best content that will add value for your followers. Even if you’re not posting ten times a day, make sure what you post is optimized for generating high engagement. Make sure you have all these bases covered:

• Content follows a marketing purpose
• It’s based on research from authentic sources
• It is well edited and error-free
• It is optimized and formatted for each network
• It is checked for plagiarism
• It is relevant to your target audience.

While sticking to a schedule is crucial, it shouldn’t come at the cost of compromising content quality. Remember there are tons of resources people can use on the internet to read on the same subject, so if you want yours to stand out—brush up on the quality aspect from all fronts.

Re-purpose content

We know it’s hard to create a massive library of social media content by yourself, or even as a small team. If you’re the sole social media manager, then you’ll have to prioritize between networks and try to create content for the ones that are most important to you. Sometimes, though, the same piece of content can work well for more than one platform. Here, you can do two things:

Cross-posting: Brands can share the same content across multiple networks, assuming the content is suited for it. For example, if you’re writing educational blogs that are relevant for all your followers—irrespective of network—you can post it on LinkedIn but also crosspost to Twitter or Facebook, where article readership is high. The golden rule of crossposting is simple: make sure the content is relevant for each of the networks and their respective audience.

Recycle content: By recycling content, we mean taking your existing content and presenting it in a new format. For instance, making a short video out of your blog and posting it to your Facebook page, or making Pinterest infographics from it. This way, you can present the same content in multiple formats to different audiences across networks. This works especially well for popular content, that generates more engagement.

Monitor your engagements

Like we said in the beginning, it’s no easy feat to keep all your social channels organized manually. This applies to monitoring them as well. Why monitor, you ask? Because social media is a fast-moving landscape and every second there are thousands of brand mentions, complaints, branded hashtags, and feedback being left for different businesses.

How do you identify and locate relevant conversations? Only a small percentage of your audience will post on your timeline—many keep the conversations on groups, pages, profiles, and places that you may not think to monitor at all!

To keep track of all the replies, feedback, opinions, and brand @mentions that happen on a daily basis, your business needs effective social media monitoring. Be it a keyword or a hashtag search, it’s good to know what your audience is saying about you. This helps inform what you post, and what people think about your business as a whole.

Look at social metrics

As someone managing social media for a business, you need to get into the habit of looking at the analytics for all your channels. While covering the basics like follower details and growth trends is important, you should also keep an eye out for how each post is performing.

Data is very essential for multi-taskers as it helps isolate and prioritize the exact metrics that matter to your specific brand and audience. This helps tailor your content to those needs, and for this—your analytics will give you a snapshot of what kind of content is working for you and what isn’t. This also gives you room to build on your successes, and not waste time on content that’s failing to attract engagement. So make it a point to always look at social media analytics and insights regularly, to optimize your content.

Be culturally-aware

If you’re handling social channels for a brand across multiple locations, you must run your content through an extra cultural filter. If you’re tweeting from a profile that’s not meant for an American audience, alter your content accordingly instead of hitting a copy-paste. Be aware and use terminology and context that will make sense to that specific audience. While this may not seem like much, it’s easy to push out content that misses the mark in certain markets or even offends.

For instance, Yellow Pages made this blunder that blew up on social media. Its ad copy as seen in the image, was about the Korean rice dish Bibim Bap, but its graphic showed a bowl of noodles. These inconsistencies can happen anywhere, especially on a social media ad copy. A case of a culturally-ignorant ad

Being culturally-aware and sensitive is especially important if your larger audience is bilingual or multilingual. Take time to respond in their language—use a real translator—and try to understand the specific concerns they may have.

And on the other side of this idea, for channels that have a diverse audience, frame your marketing content to appeal to a larger demographic.

Always keep the tone human

It can be hard to draft multiple response messages to each tweet or post your brand receives every day, especially if you have built up decent social media engagement. Whether you’re thanking a customer for a review or directing them to your contact email, at some point you’re going to have repeated, template responses for some of your social media engagement.

For a social media manager busy juggling multiple social channels, it’s understandable to use them, even if it’s not the ideal option—which is why it helps to keep your response templates more human and personal. Keep a friendly, open tone, throw in an emoji if you’re thanking someone, and sign off with your name. Try to incorporate human-friendly language that makes your brand approachable to anyone engaging with you.

We can’t stress this enough since this is one area that comes out lacking in social media accounts being managed by an overloaded marketer. They end up sounding terribly formal and the conversations flow terribly forced.

Take a look at Virgin America, an airline company that uses Twitter to be approachable and engage with its followers and customers.

Or, even this regular response from Taco Bell. Even though its a routine tweet, it’s still more conversational and engaging with it’s audience—thereby being more approachable on social media.

This also teaches us something crucial – you don’t always have to spend a substantial amount of time constructing a polite response to all social media engagement that comes your way. Making easy conversation can save your “drafting a response” effort a whole lot easier and quicker, keeping things fresh on your social channels.

The important thing to remember is, you’re not merely “managing” a bunch of different social channels—you’re getting the chance to interact and talk to many different types of people. So go ahead and keep your social media activity like it’s supposed to be: approachable, informative, and active—regardless of the amount of time you spend managing it.

Try out new tools

Not only social media managers, but all multitaskers can benefit from useful tools and services that make their job easier. This is why it’s important to keep track of new mobile apps, tools and even browser plugins that can help you do more. Time is of the essence to a multitasker like you, so it helps to learn what tools you have at your disposal to make life easier. When it comes to social media, it’s not just merely managing content, but also staying on top of trends that are crucial to constantly evolving your content strategy.

To that end, you can browse social media trends, or use tools like even a simple RSS feed widget to send you curated updates on what’s happening and what’s trending in your industry.

As for managing a bulk of tasks, you can always enlist the help of a little automation. For instance, you can use a tool like IFTTT (If This Then That) that helps you set automated tasks by connecting your tools and devices. Simply put—you can map it in such a way that if activity A happens, it automatically triggers an activity B—saving you time and effort that can be utilized in your social media hours. Take a look at some of the tasks that IFTTT helps you automate.

This is just one example, there are loads of tools, apps, and services that can help you optimize your market, learn better and do better. Do some research by subscribing to tech articles or trying on new products on platforms like Product Hunt regularly, to get acquainted with what’s out there.

Got any multitasker tips that should belong to this list? Hit us up in the comments section—we’re all ears!