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 organisation, and you 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 eight companies on three 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 your self as, are you building a brand, which is a standalone third party brand, or 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 may all have your name, there may be all 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 the 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, under, 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, or even to your personal LinkedIn and personal and your company LinkedIn accounts. So who you're 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? 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 humour 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 that the calibre that your company would like to deliver that product or service to their audience. So let's look 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 storage personalise, 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 repost as 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 calibre 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 Jimmy 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 Jimmy James story, which is 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 two 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 two 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 try lately.ai, where you can put in, for example, a podcast, you can put in a an article, you can put in another social media posts, and an 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 two content generation strategies, one for your personal and one for your professional, because they're going to be looking at different audiences, the contents 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 five times a day five 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 five unique tweets per day, or 10. If you're having two accounts, if you use try lately.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, then you're going to get the ROI. So thinking about if you've got two channels, you've got two 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 Ferris 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 accounts. 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 three Twitter accounts, there we go. So just make 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 the bank, for example, where you are putting in a question, and it's giving you a response and 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 Twitter account where you're going in and finding content, you can use a application like scoop di t 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 is 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 a as an authority as a source of information 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 organisation. If it's if you're like gilded with me going on a run or who I met for a cup of coffee, I think that's not really relevant. It'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 two things out, it just creates to 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 talked about in the speak PR programme. 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 should 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 to 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 Speaker I hope you find that of some use to you. You've been listening to this feed PR programme, we have a website at speed pr.co where you can even sign up for our six week mastermind on how to get noticed with using the tools and the tips that we work with big agencies that you can use for free. And if you would like to sign up to our weekly newsletter just come to espn.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 t ank you so much until we meet a ain wish you the best of heal h a profitable business and that you keep on sharing what yo 're doing so that you get the v lue that you deserve out of our busin