How to manage multiple social media accounts

Enterprise social teams operate across multiple brands, geographies and audience segments. Deciding how many social media accounts to manage isn’t just a logistical question—it’s a fundamental strategy that can impact engagement, customer service efficiency and brand perception.

Managing social media at an enterprise level means you likely have a diverse audience with many segments. Your customers are likely spread across multiple social media networks, from LinkedIn to Instagram to TikTok and beyond. Different segments of your audience have unique interests, better served from individual brand accounts. But overseeing multiple accounts is no walk in the park. Each account requires its own strategy, complete with unique content, posting schedules and goals.

We’ll help you figure out how to manage multiple social media accounts effectively so you can carry out your social media strategy and drive more impact with social.

4 signs your business needs multiple social media accounts

As an enterprise business, you’re dealing with several audience segments across networks. To maximize reach and engagement, leading brands structure their social media presence strategically. Here are four indicators that a multi-account approach will improve your social impact.

Customer support dominates your feed

Customers increasingly turn to social media for customer service. They don’t want to wait for someone to email them back or navigate a maze of phone prompts to get to an agent. They want to make a quick post and have someone get back to them right away. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 73% of social users agree that if a brand doesn’t respond on social, they’ll buy from a competitor.

When your business grows to the point that most of your posts are responding to support issues or complaints, it might be time to dedicate an account to those issues. This way, you can align your marketing efforts with customer service goals by maintaining a dedicated support account. Xbox Support’s X (formerly known as Twitter) account is an example of a support account. Their posts are tailored to informing users about issues they’re resolving and they reply to user problems with solutions or directions. They also post helpful answers to questions their users have.

You manage multiple audiences

Take a look at your ideal customer profiles (ICP). How much do they have in common? If your brand serves multiple personas with vastly different needs, separate accounts help ensure each audience receives relevant content.

For example, Nike serves a range of customers who are interested in different types of sports. Appealing to all of their distinct audiences through only one account would be nearly impossible—because the majority of content would not appeal to each segment individually. By having multiple social media accounts, Nike gives each of their audience segments relevant insights that appeal to their specific needs and pain points. For example, they have separate Instagram accounts for basketball, running and women’s sports.

If you’re a large corporation, you might have audiences looking for information beyond marketing, sales and customer care. At Sprout, we have an investor relations account to showcase relevant highlights for that audience. Enterprise companies with a high volume of job openings have a careers account dedicated to job seekers.

Another good example of how to manage multiple social media accounts for business success is New Jersey Transit. They run 14 separate X accounts for each transit line they operate. If a user was looking for information about a bus service, but NJ Transit’s feed was cluttered with information about hiring, train service interruptions and police activity, they’d become frustrated. NJ Transit manages that complexity with multiple accounts.

Your brand serves multiple regions

If your business has multiple locations, managing multiple social accounts might be in your best interest. A snowstorm in New York might close your locations there, but that wouldn’t be relevant to your customers in sunny Florida. Having multiple social accounts can help you navigate regional complexities.

Take Starbucks, for example. As a multinational company, they have locations in markets that are vastly different from one another. As a result, having social media accounts to serve each market means they can offer relevant product information—in the market’s main language—while also highlighting information that’s unique to each market.

Your product suite offers a diverse range of solutions

If you’re an enterprise-level business, chances are you have multiple products. While those products might be relevant to a business at large, they probably won’t resonate with every user.

As your product suite grows, it might be advantageous to create accounts for specific products, so you can keep audiences updated with the details they care about most. For example, Microsoft has social media accounts specifically dedicated to some of its leading products.

5 steps to manage multiple social media accounts

Having a solid social media marketing strategy is imperative for any brand, but it’s especially important when you’re managing the complexity of multiple accounts. To get started, follow these five steps.

1. Have a strategy in place

First, establish what accounts you need to create. Document your requirements. Are you going to segment accounts by purpose, like support vs. marketing? Or does it make more sense to segment by attributes like audience, location or product? Once you have those answers, decide how many accounts you need and how your team should manage them. You should also think about how your teams will interact.

“We combat decentralization by creating relationships and being a resource for other departments or teams in the Texas A&M system that are working in social. Recently, for example, we got a message in Sprout about our recreational sports center. Even though the message wasn’t directed to the Texas A&M rec sports social channels, we were able to pass it along to the right people because we’ve built the relationship.”

–Krista Berend, Director of Social Media at Texas A&M

After you decide what accounts to create, make tangible goals for each. You’ll need key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and track results for your business. Monitor your performance against those KPIs consistently and adapt or iterate as you identify your wins and improvement areas.

If you’re looking for a place to start, this 30-day social media plan template is a great way to set your foundation.

2. Document your brand guidelines

When you have one social media manager and one account per platform, it’s pretty easy to stay within brand guidelines. But if you need more formal governance when managing multiple accounts, a brand guide will set the direction for your voice, tone and creative elements for each account. This is particularly important when considering tools that post to all social media at once, as ensuring consistent brand representation across all platforms is paramount.

When you’re dealing with different audiences, there might be slight shifts you want to make across accounts. Keeping a voice that resonates with your audience is the priority—which means making room for a little nuance. Document those differences in your guidelines as well, so there’s never any confusion about how to apply your overall brand voice in specific contexts.

3. Reuse content

Having multiple social media accounts means having to create more content. But time, resources and bandwidth can become limited, which is why it’s even more important to repurpose content across your social media accounts. What works well as a Reel could work well as a TikTok or YouTube Short. Crossposting relevant content across multiple accounts gets more eyes on the same post. You can turn video content into GIFs to share on other platforms. The world of content reuse is endless if you get creative.

Another way to repurpose your content is by developing a library of reusable assets. Sprout Social’s Asset Library enables you to organize and categorize creative assets, helping your team make sure they’re using approved media.

4. Invest in a social media management tool

It’s hard enough to manage one social media account natively. It’s nearly impossible to manage multiple social media accounts without a helping hand.

Social media management tools keep your DMs, content calendar, replies, mentions and metrics under one roof. Even if you have multiple accounts, they’ll be centralized in one place so you can see everything in the same platform instead of navigating across multiple tools. Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that helps teams tackle the day-to-day aspects of social—from publishing and engagement to reporting and analytics. No matter how many social media accounts you have to oversee, Sprout enables you manage all social networks in one place so you can have a single source of truth for your social teams.

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5. Automate your tasks

When you’re managing multiple accounts, scaling can be difficult. Social media automation tools will take care of the little tasks, so you can focus on strategy.

Managing multiple social media accounts means multiple sources of messages and notifications. Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox aggregates all of your messages across accounts and platforms into one view. You can reply directly from the platform, so you don’t miss a message.

Sprout users on the Advanced plan have access to Custom Post Variables, which gives teams the ability to dynamically change specific parts of a social post depending on predefined custom variables. One post can quickly be tailored to each of your location or product-specific accounts, taking one more thing off your social media to-do list.

Top tools to manage all social networks in one place

The right social media management tools can help you manage your social accounts across multiple networks, saving you time on tasks such as scheduling posts, providing customer service and analyzing performance, so you can focus on the strategy. The market is filled with social media management tools, making it hard to know which one to use.

We’ve rounded up five leading recommendations to help you manage all your social accounts and networks in one place.

1. Sprout Social

We’re going to start with Sprout Social, an all-in-one social media management tool enterprise organizations and other businesses use to oversee their entire social media strategy. Sprout’s accolades speak for themselves:

• Sprout Social has been named a G2 Enterprise Leader every quarter since 2018.
• Sprout was named #1 Best Software Product in G2’s 2024 Software Awards.
• Sprout secured 173 leader badges in G2’s 2024 Fall Reports, in every region including EMEA, APAC and the Middle East, for organizations spanning from small business to enterprise.
• Sprout ranked #1 in 94 reports, and maintained the #1 position in the Grid® Report for Social Customer Service, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Suites and Social Media Listening Tools.

Here are the social media management capabilities that make Sprout Social stand out as a social media management tool of choice:

• Integrations: Sprout integrates with all major social networks, including X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and more. See what’s happening across accounts, all through a single dashboard.
• Optimal scheduling: When should you schedule each post? Sprout shows you the perfect time to post across each network with Optimal Send Times™ so your content gets maximum engagement and visibility.
• AI-assisted captions: Coming up with net-new content for each post, for each account, can be time and resource intensive. Sprout’s AI Assist functionality creates captions for you, so you can get back to strategy development.
• Unified messaging: The Smart Inbox aggregates all of your social accounts into a single channel, so you can find priority conversations to engage with. Respond to DMs and tags right away, showing your audience you don’t want them to wait for a response.
• Personalized customer care: Have a dedicated support account? Sprout’s customer care tools align your marketing and customer service efforts. Measure the impact of your care team, tailor responses, maintain brand consistency and more.
• Social listening: Know what your target audience is talking about by tracking social conversations around your brand topics and keywords with Sprout Social Listening. Get access to unfiltered conversational data to make strategic business decisions.
• Reviews: Your audience reads reviews from Google My Business, Trustpilot, Facebook and other sources. Sprout enables you to manage these reviews and respond to them all from one place.
• Employee advocacy: Your employees can expand your social reach and garner more trust from your audience. With Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution, you can create a curated content feed for your employees to share branded content through their personal social accounts, amplifying your brand reach. Users can also create approved brand messages, ensuring brand safety and compliance with brand guidelines.

That’s only a small sample of the ways Sprout helps enterprise organizations run their multiple social media accounts with ease. Learn more about Sprout’s other tools, like our Influencer Marketing platform, custom URL tracking and advanced analytics if you want to see other ways Sprout supports organizations.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer relationship platform that offers social media management software. Schedule posts in advance and monitor keywords to track conversations. With its centralized inbox, you can manage and respond to social conversations. Plus, you can run social campaigns on multiple networks from one location. HubSpot also offers analytics so you can attribute business value to social media accounts.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers tools for publishing to multiple social accounts. From its dashboard, you can design social posts using Canva templates, write captions with AI and get approval with automated workflows. It has functionality to schedule posts and respond to DMs. Hootsuite also has social listening tools to monitor keywords, mentions and hashtags.

Check out our article on Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite to understand how the two platforms compare, based on real user reviews from G2.

4. Zoho Social

Zoho Social offers time predictors for scheduling your social posts, a visual calendar so you can see your posting cadence for each network at a glance and an aggregated inbox so you can keep conversations in one place. Zoho Social has a monitoring dashboard with columns for each account to see all social activity in real time.

5. Later

Later has content creation and editing tools, hashtag recommendations, user-generated content search, scheduling suggestions and more. Later also has a caption generator tool that can write captions specifically for Instagram based on prompts.

Manage multiple social media accounts with minimal stress

Creating and managing multiple social media accounts can be done successfully with the right set of tools and a clear goal. Having multiple accounts will improve your audience relationships and simplify your processes.

Interested in trying out a tool that’ll make managing multiple accounts easier? Try Sprout Social free for 30 days.