How to Manage Social Media Accounts for Clients

Social media can be a lot of work to manage, and that’s especially true when it comes to managing multiple accounts for one client! Social Media Management Tools can help automate some of the work. The aim of this article is to inform you of free social media management tools and tell you how you can use them for your business.

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If you are like most small business owners, you probably do not like the idea of spending hours on social media. Yet, it is just as important as any other marketing strategy and is also an easy way to engage with your customers. Instead of manning social media accounts for all your clients one-by-one, try managing all their accounts in one location. Hootsuite is one of many free social media management tools and they offer enough benefits to make managing multiple accounts at once a breeze.

Managing social media for 9 clients simultaneously? That can be smooth and easy, or confusing and chaotic depending on how you manage your two most important resources – talent and time.

Some social media management tools allow you to create groups of social media accounts for easy scheduling. Imagine being able to post content across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram pages for one client in one click. That would not only save you time and effort but also save you some pain and frustration.

2. Curate content via RSS feeds and keyword based content streams

Creating content for the same clients every single day? Agency marketers are celebrated for their creativity, but no amount of creativity can make repetitive work easy or interesting. With content curation, agency marketers can collect new ideas or curate entire pieces for clients.

Many social media management tools enable users to curate content via RSS feeds and keyword-based content streams. Agency marketers can use these features to create a content idea resource to fuel daily brainstorming sessions.

3. Organize ideas, complete posts and reusable posts in easy-access folders

Working with dozens of social media posts daily? That amounts to hundreds of posts a week and thousands of posts a month. If you have invested deeply in creating that much content, you probably won’t have the heart to use it once and throw it all away. Here’s a neat idea – don’t. Save your posts in organized folders in an accessible place.

Some social media management tools have created libraries, queues, or folders within them that store content long-term. Save your best posts in separate folders for different clients and reuse them occasionally. Or save drafts and ideas to work with when needed.

4. Consider automated publishing queues for best performing posts

Some social media management tools have folders that also function as automatically publishing content queues. This is a great idea for clients that have diverse target groups that are active at different times of the day. Instead of scheduling content to go out multiple times a day, you could create a folder of posts and have the tool evenly spread them out automatically.

Social media management tools refer to such folders as content libraries, repeat queues, or smart queues. Some tools allow you the extra functionality of picking publishing frequencies.

Reporting to multiple clients? The end of the month is always hard on agency marketers because it’s when clients want to see results. It’s when dreaded words like engagement metrics, conversions, leads, and ROI are traded between account managers and marketing managers who represent clients.

Many social media management tools have inbuilt social media analytics modules that track and report engagement metrics. Some tools even have fully-finished, downloadable reports that you can rely on for reporting.

We’ve already talked a little bit about why it’s risky and time-consuming to manage multiple social media accounts through individual apps. Combining everything into one social dashboard is just a huge time-saver.

Using a social media management tool also allows you to work on all your social profiles from your laptop or desktop computer, rather than from your phone, making it physically easier to work using a keyboard and monitor rather than hunched over a tiny screen typing with your thumbs. (After all, no one wants to get text neck or texting thumb.)

In Hootsuite, you can manage accounts from:

Twitter
Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups)
LinkedIn (profiles and pages)
Instagram (business or personal accounts)
YouTube
Pinterest

2. Automate your busywork

The act of actually posting content to each social network can become quite disruptive if you do it multiple times throughout the day. It’s much easier to create content in batches and schedule it to post automatically at the right times (see the next tip for more on that front).

It’s also a huge time suck to pull analytics individually from each social platform. Instead, set up Hootsuite Analytics to automatically send you cross-platform analytics reports each month.

3. Post at the right times and frequency for each network

We talked earlier about the different demographics of different social platforms. And the different ways people like to use those platforms. That means each network has its own ideal posting times and frequency.

The last thing you want to do is spend time creating too much content for any given platform. Give people what they want, not so much as to scare them away.

To start figuring out which times to post it, check out our blog post on the best times to post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But remember that these are just averages. The exact best times and frequency to post on each of your social accounts will be unique to you.

A/B testing can help you figure this out, as can various analytics tools. Or, you could let Hootsuite figure this out for you with its customized Best time to publish feature.

If you happen to discover your ideal posting time is 3 a.m. on Sundays, you’ll be extra-glad you already implemented tip 2 to automate your posting so that you can get some much-needed sleep.

4. Engage in some tasteful cross-posting

We’ve tried to hammer home that audiences and their preferences vary across social platforms. This, of course, means that cross-posting the exact same content to each platform is not a great idea. Never mind that varying word counts and image specifications can make your post look wonky if you use an everything-everywhere approach.

That said, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel for every platform. As long as you adjust a post appropriately, content based on the same assets can be shared across multiple social networks.

The Hootsuite Composer allows you to customize one post for each social network, all from one interface, so it speaks to the correct audience and hits the right image and word properties. You can also add or remove hashtags, change your tags and mentions, and switch out the links.

5. Curate and repost ⅓ of your content

Odds are, people in your industry — may be even your customers — are creating content that would look great on your social feeds. We are absolutely not saying you should simply take it and use it. (Please don’t do that.)

But it is a great idea to reach out and connect with these creators to ask if you can share and amplify their content. You can even use strategies like contests and branded hashtags to collect user-generated content to fill out your feed.

Or, on the thought leadership front, share a link to an insightful piece relevant to your industry, along with a quick summary of your thoughts. Content curation is a useful way to bring valuable information to your audience while building connections with leaders in your industry (and, of course, saving time).

6. Use templates for content creation

A recognizable brand look and voice are important for building your following on social media. Templates reduce the amount of effort needed to create a new social post while ensuring your content is always on-brand.

The Hootsuite Content Library allows you to save pre-approved templates and other brand assets so you can create new content in just a couple of clicks.

We’ve also created lots of templates you can use with or without Hootsuite. This post of 20 social media templates includes a lot of strategies, planning, and reporting templates, but there are also content templates anyone can use for:

Instagram carousels
Instagram Stories
Instagram highlights covers and icons
Facebook Page cover photos

7. Put aside time for engagement

Engagement is a critical part of building — and keeping — a social media following. Don’t forget to build time into your daily schedule to respond to comments, mentions, tags, and DMs. Seriously, put this in your calendar every day and block off the time to put the “social” in your social media accounts.

Of course, it’s a lot faster when you can do all your audience engagement from one central dashboard rather than platform-hopping. Plus, using software to manage multiple social media accounts ensures you never miss out on key opportunities to engage with your audience.

You don’t want to spend your lunch break (always take a lunch break) worrying about whether you forgot to check DMs on one of your accounts or missed an important comment.

Even better, use social listening to spot opportunities to engage when you’re not specifically tagged, without having to dig through each social network’s search tools.

8. Make collaboration easy

Realistically, there is only so much any one person can do. As your workload grows, collaboration becomes increasingly important.

A social media dashboard makes collaboration easy by allowing team members exactly the access appropriate to their role, with built-in approval workflows and password management.

You can also use Hootsuite to assign public and private social messages to other team members, so nothing slips through the cracks. And you’ll always be able to see if someone is trying to contact you through multiple social channels, so you can make sure to provide a consistent response.

Even better, set yourself up to collaborate with bots designed to answer basic customer queries.

9. Unify your analytics

Each of the social media platforms has its own built-in analytics tools. But an analytics program is your best bet when planning how to manage multiple social media accounts for business goals and reporting. For a full understanding of multiple social media accounts, you need a unified report.

Hootsuite Analytics uses templates that allow you to create multi-platform reports quickly, or you can use the custom reporting tools to build reports with the specific metrics that matter most to your organization.

You can also get a picture of your paid and organic social media reporting all in one place.

And, as we mentioned above, you can set Hootsuite Analytics to send you a report automatically every month, so there’s one less thing on your to-do list.

Social media tools are not the only business tools in the social media manager’s toolbox. Odds are you use third-party tools for tasks like project management, image editing, customer support, and more.

The Hootsuite App Directory includes more than 250 apps and integrations that can help simplify your workday and consolidate everything you need in one place.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that it’s impossible to have one system to manage all of your social media accounts and your clients’. Thankfully, there are tools that can make this easier for you. By incorporating these tools into your daily workflow, you can spend more time on tasks that are important to growing your business and less time on ones that will get done with or without your efforts.