There are not enough hours in the day to successfully manage a plethora of social media profiles. The bottom line is that you need to make money. Social networking sites will help you build a strong network of contacts, but you still must devote a large portion of your business day to selling and perfecting the actual services you provide in order to generate some sort of income. Personally, I have taken a liking to Facebook and Twitter. I never managed to build up a strong enough Digg reputation and StumbleUpon is not a site I travel to very often.
Let’s say you are like me, and use your Facebook profile primarily to connect with friends and share photos. I also have a Facebook Fan Page for my company, where I provide updates and links to stories written about my clients. Okay, that’s an easy split. But what about Twitter? Should you be Tweeting about your business from your personal account, or should you have a separate business account to manage all business-related tweets?
Until recently, I devoted a large chunk of my personal Twitter profile tweets to updates about my company and clients. But I have rarely tweeted about my business from that account since creating a separate account for my company. I use CoTweet to allow other employees access to the business Twitter profile, so that I am not the only one who can update our followers about Dynasty news.
The consequence of this action is that I am submitting less Tweets from my personal account, but at least my followers are getting updates about me, which after all, is the person they chose to follow. If you really want to know about Pete Parise getting a save for the AAA Memphis Redbirds, or Rulon Davis’s chances of making the Denver Broncos active roster, you can do that too…but you are going to have to follow my company’s profile.
Is it a good idea to create this split? My company profile has much less followers, but it was also not created nearly as long ago as my personal account. Is a company profile even interesting enough to be its own entity?
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Hi Darren,
To answer your question, I do think creating a split is the best solution. Otherwise, you would just be spamming a lot of people interesting in finding out what you are doing with a lot of useless information about what a company they don’t care much for is doing.
Although the company account might not have the same number of followers, at least you know you are tweeting to the right crowd. But there is something you can do: retweet on your personal account some of the most interesting messages from your company account.
This way you don’t annoy your followers because you don’t do it frequently, and you might direct new followers to your company account.
I have been RTing a select few important business tweets on my personal account. No complaints yet! 🙂
I think it depends on how closely related your personal brand/audience is related to your company’s audience.
If they’re completely different, then you should split them. If they’re very similar, it’s up to you…but realize that you’re then committing your personal brand to your company’s brand. It’s not the best mentality to think about the fact that you’re probably not always going to be working there, but it is still an important factor.
Personally, I split them, and try to integrate both together where it’s relevant.
@DavidSpinks