You’d think from those brands you follow that most companies only have one or a few social media accounts by network or platform, and you’d be wrong.
In fact, according to The Altimeter Group, the average company that’s active on Twitter manages an average 39 separate accounts. The average company active in blogging manages nearly 32 distinct blogs. Almost 30 Facebook pages on average and 29 LinkedIn groups and company pages.
The question you’re probably asking yourself is « why? » would my company have this many different accounts. An average 39 Twitter accounts given that we might thing we only see brands with a few means there are a few brands that have way more than 40. Let’s look at Dell and Twitter as example of how you can end up with so many different accounts on one particular social network. Dell manages over 90 distinct Twitter accounts.
There are a number of strategies employed in deciding how many accounts to create and manage, once you know you’ll have conversations and followers to manage.
Geography
The first and most obvious is geography. Dell has a “Home Sales” account for personal use and home office needs for each country in which they are present: US, Canada, Australia, New-Zealand, Japan, China… This can go a lot further as with Whole Foods Markets who have a Twitter account for each of their store locations.
Language
The next most important type of account would be by language. For example Dell might have both a French and en English version of each account in Canada. It could further have an English and a Spanish version of the same account in the US.
Services
You could further, like Dell distinct accounts for different services. As I mentioned before they have a bunch of accounts for “home sales”, but they also have accounts for SMBs, enterprise clients, outlet sales, partners, social outreach, tech support, digital life, education, health care… You could choose to have a different account for each type of client your organisation supports. You could create accounts to service your suppliers and partners, vendors and end-users. This becomes clearer within each organisation as you evaluate the different accounts you could create when considering how your own organisation is set up.
