Should I have one or two Twitter accounts as an entrepreneur?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the show for you if you've got value locked up in your organization and you're just trying to find some cost-effective and some practical and time-efficient ways of communicating that. My name is Jim James and I've been running a public relations company for over 25 years. I've also set up 8 companies on 3 continents around the world, so I'm here to share what I know works. And as I currently manage a number of clients, I know what's working for companies big and small. And today I wanted to answer a question from a good friend, Carol Robinson, who asked whether she should have more than one Twitter account, one for herself and one for her company. So that's a question facing many entrepreneurs, including myself. And I'm going to dive into that and look at some questions that you might want to think about and some practical issues as well to take into consideration. So the first question I think that we need to ask is, what are you going to be branding yourself as? Are you building a brand which is a standalone third-party brand, or are you the name, the brand of the company? So if you're running a personality-based business, then the website domain name, your LinkedIn, your Facebook, and so on may all have your name. They may all be eponymous. In which case, whatever you're saying on Twitter will be both your personality and your company offering. So the first way of looking at this question of should you have more than one Twitter account is what kind of business are you building? Is there a brand that's third-party that you might one day, for example, want to build and sell, or is your name the brand? The second question to ask yourself is, who are you looking to communicate with, with the social media, with the Twitter? This also applies, by the way, to your Facebook social and to your Facebook business account, and even to your personal LinkedIn and personal and your company LinkedIn accounts. So who are you looking to talk to? So if you have one audience that's going to receive all information without any filtering, then you could have one account. But if you're looking to have your own personal lifestyle commentary, for example, you're sharing things that are intimate and things, for example, maybe political or religious or preference-based, then the question would be, would you want your customers to also be looking at that? Now, if the answer is yes, then that's fine. If we look at, for example, the Kardashians, there is no line between who they are in social media and who they are in their business lives. They are selling who they are and how they live. On the other end, of course, you get an airline, for example, where we don't know who really is behind the company or the Twitter. So the Twitter account is really managing for those consumers of the airline services. So who are you looking to connect with on your social media platform? The next I would say is going to be using the content. So if we've got content that is essentially personal, is it going to be of a quality that would ensure that someone would want to buy from your company? So if you have an issue where you want to send out pictures, for example, that are maybe hastily taken, or memes, or humor, or repost articles or commentary from people that you think, for example, maybe is about football, or is about gaming, or about travel, which isn't strictly speaking related to what you're selling, then think about the quality of the content. Is it content that you find amusing and fun but is not of interest to the people that you want to be a customer, or is of the caliber that your company would like to deliver that product or service to that audience? So let's look then at the quality of the content that you can send. Personal Twitter accounts can be one-liners, they can be inaccurate, they can be something humorous that you liked but isn't verified. But a company account needs to have credibility. So let's think about the quality of the content that you can share. A next element would be under the amplification. Now, in our Speak PR methodology of Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and To Know, under the amplification, we're talking about how many other people or how many other followers and re-followers and reposters are we looking to have to amplify our content? If a key part of the amplification of our content is going to be other people, then our content could be quite social, and we're hoping that other people like it and share it. But if we're hoping that other companies will follow and share our content, then if the content is not of a caliber and a consistency to make another company want to share it, then you've got to ask yourself whether you want to have one personal and one professional account. So for example, I have an account for East West PR and I have an account for Jim A. James. I have companies like Lately, Try Lately, which follow my account. I have companies like Tech Data that we work with, for example, or we work with publishers in America, for example, the Assembly magazine. On my company account, I will share content from a company account like the Assembly magazine recently published an article. I put that through my company account, and then the Assembly magazine will repost that as a company-to-company share. An Assembly magazine is probably not going to reshare a Jim A. James story, which has also got my other personal information and other shares. So let's think about if you want to amplify the content, who do you want to amplify it? If it's other people, a personal account. If it's other companies, a professional account. Let's also look at the workload. Now, if the content is going to be different across the 2 platforms, then the amplification tools, the the automated amplification tools like Buffer, like Zoho, like HubSpot, like Hootsuite actually aren't really helping you because you still need to generate 2 different kinds of content— one which is B2B and one which is essentially personal. So we want to be thinking about the amount of content that we can create. Now there are great tools like trylately.ai where you can put in, for example, a podcast, you can put in a, an article, you can put in another social media post, and it'll automatically generate a number of iterations of that piece of content. So you can use that for personal tweets or posts to your other social media channels, and you can use it for professional ones. What I think you can't do is blur the two. So you're gonna have to have 2 content generation strategies. One for your personal and one for your professional, because they're going to be looking at different audiences. The content is going to be different. You're hoping different companies are going to— or different entities are going to be amplifying your content. So on the grounds that the average tweet lasts about 18 minutes, or certainly less than 30 minutes, if you want to get any number of followers, you're going to need to be tweeting at least 5 times a day. 5 times a day for companies under 100 followers apparently is, is the way to build your followership. So you're going to need to create either 5 unique tweets per day or 10 if you're having 2 accounts. If you use trilately.ai, you can easily create that many tweets using the technology for $200 a month. But you have to ask yourself the question whether it's worth the cost for the amount of content, for the amount of followers. So the next thing to look at here is, are you going to be creating more work for yourself than you're going to get the ROI? So thinking about if you've got 2 channels, you've got 2 amounts of content, but it's not just the content. You've got to get followers because content without followers, frankly, is like speaking into an empty room. So you've got to actively engage by following and following back, reposting the content from other accounts that you want to have a relationship with. So if you think of it that way, you've got to be thinking about the amount of content, but also the amount of follow-up work that you're doing in order to get that content engaged with the various audiences. So you have to think through about the responsibilities and the activities that you've got when you do that. Now let's just look at a second account that you might want to have. So some people set up a second account for a brand account, and they might then have multiple brands within a portfolio. So maybe you have a restaurant, for example, and then you have different restaurant franchises in different locations. You could have, for example, local events and local promotions for that brand, where you could then be sharing common content, for example, for the main brand, for the house brand. But the sub-Twitter accounts, or the Twitter accounts, are then, if you like, local, and they're posting local information. So some of our clients have then a global account, and then they have regional and in-country accounts. Some 50% of the content comes from the global account, and then 50% comes from the local accounts. But it does take management. Another aspect to having a second account could be the Twitter customer service accounts. Now you'll see more and more companies now have a customer service account based on Twitter. In fact, now Yahoo Messenger and WhatsApp. And Apple, of course, have got their own customer service account on Messenger. And this is becoming a really big way of handling customer inquiries, that it's not just now about making a phone call or filling out a form. You could be using Twitter to manage your customer service. And if you do that, Then you can end up with a consolidation of all the service tickets that are sent to your company with direct messages where people have got questions about a product or service. So then you have a personal account, for example, for yourself. You could then have a brand account with promotions, for example, taking place. And then you have a third account, which is the customer service Twitter, which is looking after those people who have already bought from you. So in that sense, you could have 3 Twitter accounts. There we go. So just making more work for you. But what you can do is to have a bot-managed account, and they are now fairly common, especially where people are just using those to repurpose content. But those can be actually a little bit annoying sometimes when you get them on at the bank, for example, where you are putting in a question and it's giving you a response, an automated response. The airlines have been experimenting with those. For example, when they have a live feed of travel information and plane arrivals, that then they can stream that content to Twitter. And then if people have got questions, they can do a quick search or reply to that Twitter. So it's really like a glorified RSS or Real Simple Syndication feed but going out to Twitter. Now, another way of using Twitter is to have an industry-curated account. In other words, rather than trying to generate all your own dedicated content, you could be an editor. And what you can have is a, a Twitter account where you're going in and finding content. You can use an application like scoop.it that finds headlines according to keywords, and then you can just repost those. There's one called like The Daily SEO, for example, and those just monitor SEO blogs and then it reposts content. Now, you may ask, why do that? I think the answer is that if you had that, for example, as part of your suite of accounts along with your website and your blog, this could position you as an authority, as a source of information, and And may help you then with your SEO, especially if that content and other people start to retweet your content from your own curator account. So should you have more than one account on Twitter? I think the answer, Carol, is that you can, but just think through the workload implications. It can be safest to start with one account. Personally, I find that Twitter is increasingly for me just used for work, and that I use other ways of sharing information for my, you know, personal account. I think if I'm using social media for business, then the information that I share, the places that I share, the other people's information that I share, needs to all reflect the brand positioning that I've got for my own organization. If it's, uh, if you like, gilded with me going on a run or who I met for a cup of coffee, I think that's not really relevant. That's not really what people have signed up for that account for. There are other sites like Facebook, for example, or WhatsApp that we can share our personal journey with people. But if how I live my life is my brand, if how I do my fitness or how I meditate is what I sell, and my coaching is my brand, is my name, and it's all bundled into one, then there may not be any point in separating those 2 things out because it just creates 2 lots of work. So Twitter, as we know, is quite a hungry engine. Every 18 to 20 minutes, what you posted will have disappeared. As we talk about in the Speak PR program, it's not just about how many accounts and how much content, but also when you schedule it. Because if you have a personal account, you're sending content that's personal, it'll be read by people in their personal time. If you're sending business content, people are going to be reading that during their business time. Although that's blurred a little bit with lockdown and with travel schedules changing. But in principle, people are going to be looking for answers to work-related questions on a work-related Twitter and probably for personal-related issues on a person-to-person Twitter. So depending on the answers to those questions, there is not a right or wrong, there's just a preference. My personal view is that it's better to do one account well than two poorly, because they take so much time and the ROI in terms of revenue is not direct. I personally am working on building out the business part of my Twitter presence rather than trying to keep two, or rather than using my social one to build my business. But the choice. Is yours. And if you want to tell us what you do, of course you can just tweet about it. So thanks for listening to this episode of Speak PR. I hope you find that of some use to you. You've been listening to the Speak PR program. We have a website at speakpr.co where you can even sign up for our 6-week mastermind on how to get noticed with using the tools and the tips that we work with big agencies but that you can use for free. And if you would like to sign up to our weekly newsletter, just come to eastwestpr.com, and this and other articles are all shared weekly for free because we'd like to share with you what we know to help you to get noticed. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much. Until we meet again, wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on sharing what you're doing so that you get the value that you deserve out of your business.