Managing multiple Twitter accounts effectively

Managing multiple Twitter accounts has become essential for schools using Twitter. Schools are adopting the approach of offering their community many types of accounts to follow, based on particular aspects of the school.

This can include a dedicated account for sports, drama, music, library, science, computing and many more.

Appearance

First things first… make sure your brand appearance is consistent. Would you allow your prospectus to be designed by Teacher A, and your website designed by Teacher B? No, you would require there to be a high level of brand consistency. You would also want to have control over how the school’s brand appears.

Ensure that your Twitter appearance is consistent and instantly recognisable. This includes the naming (@SHSsports, @SHSlibrary, @SHSenglish etc.) and profile appearance through the profile image, header image, colours, description, location, website, etc.

Publishing

Publishing to multiple Twitter accounts only using the Twitter web app would be a big pain. You would have to log in and out of each of the accounts - not so good for your productivity!

This is why using a service dedicated to managing multiple social accounts is essential - HootSuite or TweetDeck would be your best options.

Monitoring

Do you know what is being tweeted from all of your accounts?

Three things you can do:

• Create a list on Twitter
• Only follow your school’s sub-accounts
• Monitor on HootSuite/TweetDeck

Creating a list will enable you to follow all of your school accounts, whilst also allowing you to link to the feed on other channels. BBC use this approach well: https://twitter.com/BBC/lists

On HootSuite and TweetDeck you can create columns to follow along with your account’s feeds. An easy way for you to quickly visualise what is being tweeted.

How effective are the accounts?

You could look at the basic metrics - tweets, followers, retweets etc. - but this gives minimal indication to how your tweets are being received.

A more insightful metric to use is #SocialScore. This will show you how influential your accounts are.

You can use Social Candy to keep track of your multiple account’s #SocialScore.