When developing an online presence, it’s very easy to get excited by all the different ideas and possibilities that exist for your company. Target’s Twitter accounts are a very goodexample of this. Target has a multitude of accounts including @Target, @AskTarget, @TargetDeals, @TargetStyle, and @ABullseyeView in addition to local Target twitter accounts like @TargetSEA (Target Seattle). But is having this many Twitter accounts really useful and helpful in reaching their audience?
Well, there isn’t a one size fits all answer to this question. It really depends on how you’re trying to connect with your consumer. If you’re a large corporation, generally speaking, having a local Twitter account for each franchise or store isn’t recommended. You have to be able to monitor each store’s Twitter feeds to ensure that they’re not only giving out accurate information, but that they’re tweeting brand appropriate content. Every company should have a set of brand guidelines that dictate what can and cannot be put on social media. Period.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have Haverty’s Furniture (@Havertys), which only has one twitter account. They use their single account to interact with their audience, showcase certain pieces, share style guides, and more. This approach seems to work well for them. They have almost 3,000 followers, and their audience really does want to interact with them. Many of @Havertys tweets are responses or retweets of what their followers have already sent them. And by not creating multiple accounts, they don’t have to worry about which account to send a tweet from, or monitor so many accounts.
There are pros and cons to having multiple Twitter accounts. If you have several accounts, each with a well-defined and obvious purpose, then maybe it makes sense to have multiple accounts. However, if you have seven or eight Twitter accounts, or if the accounts you do have don’t have a clearly defined purpose and audience they’re trying to reach and connect with you might want to think about consolidating. On the other hand, having one twitter account can make your channel filled with such a variety of posts that you really fail to connect with as many people as you could by creating a Twitter account for several well-defined target groups. People you could have connected with may be uninterested in certain post types, and unsubscribe from your account to get away from the posts they’re not interested in.
Social media presents an array of possibilities, and it’s easy to get caught up in so many “great” ideas. But when you try to implement all of them at once, none of them work to their full potential. The best thing you can do is make sure you have a clearly defined objective to your social media marketing campaign, and that you can justify all of your online accounts by indicating their individual purposes, goals, and measurements.
Is your company using multiple social media accounts-or just one?
For free consultation or to give your social media strategy a makeover, call us at 855.673.3000.
