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I currently own a resume writing business, but am also starting up a separate B2B copywriting business as well as another online marketing site. All of these ventures have very different customers, personas, and styles associated with them, yet all in some way will be linked to my name. I am trying to come up with strategies for managing my social media marketing efforts. I of course can get multiple Twitter, Digg, this site, etc, accounts, but obviously that is a force multiplier of annoyance. Has anyone faced this problem (I'd be surprised if nobody has) and what have you done, or are you doing to address it?

To clarify, I'm not only talking about managing posting to multiple places at once (I'm currently using Ping.fm for this), but also managing multiple "brands" with multiple social media accounts.

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I've been struggling with this. I own a web design company (www.guidinglightproductions.com) a short sale software company (www.shortsaleartisan.com) a skiing forum (www.alpinezone.com) and I'm about to launch a new mobile application company (www.totaltab.com), and maintaining the social network for all of them is quite a challenge.

I'm going to check out HootSuite. Right now I have Google Apps accounts for each to manage the email side of it. For Twitter and FB, I've been using tweetdeck but to be honest I'm not a huge fan of it, but it works on my Android and I need to be mobile so I can respond to questions on the fly.

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I believe there are a lot of us that management of multiple "identities" would be helpful. I don't see any that allow for multiple identities he same platform. – Joseph Barisonzi Apr 6 '11 at 2:13
+1 Hootsuite rocks. – Anonymous Apr 2 at 10:02
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While many people in this thread are talking about the different tools that you can use to monitor multiple different accounts through social media, (HootSuite, TweetDeck), etc.. I think the real question is whether you should create multiple different accounts or rather "personalities" or just support one.

In my opinion it is always better to focus on one account and its growth and outreach rate. The number of people that you target will be larger and there is always a possibility that a customer from one of your offerings could always become interested in another one of your services based on seeing updates in their timeline/feed.

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I use Hootsuite for managing multiple social accounts, haven't find any better solution yet! http://www.hootsuite.com

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Help me Roland. This allows managing multiple social accounts -- but does it allow for managing multiple identities on the same platform? Can I load two different facebook fan pages I am responsible for on hootsuite? – Joseph Barisonzi Apr 6 '11 at 2:14
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I've been struggling with this. I have three different real estate businesses which I've are all seperate, and am in the middle of startup and potentially another one. I also use tweet deck, but I don't think that's what you're asking.

If I understand you correctly, its more like "how the hell do i keep up with five different personalities because social media takes up soooo much time".

The answer is unfortunately, I have no idea.

I've actually recently been thinking of consolidating. When my startups launch, they will have to have their own, but I'm thinking that maybe for now I should just have one twitter, one blog (maybe a couple facebook pages still) and do everything from there. If the people interested in real estate have to read a couple of tweets about a startup, maybe they can deal with it. I just saw an add in a magazine today for Jillian Michaels, and underneath it said celebrity trainer/cruise director/show host/ another five other things... so maybe its okay these days to be doing many different things without being considered a "master of none".

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Yes! Your "how the hell" is correct. Social media takes up enough time for one personality... managing multiple I think will kill this single person entrepreneur. The master of none issue you describe is part of what I worry about, especially as a start-up. I think Jillian Michaels can pull it off, because she is largely selling herself first and people follow her to whatever she is selling/endorsing. I am trying to build a brand first (of course I'm part of that brand, but right now, people don't give a rip who I am, they want to know what I can do for them). So, its a dilemma. – Mary Aho Apr 6 '11 at 16:10
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If the only thing you will be talking about is marketing and related topics, you can use 1 social media account for all of it.

Nobody reads ALL of your updates on social media sites, they only read the ones they like and since the topics are not a world apart i don't think you'd need to give yourself the headache of managing 3 different personas over a ton of different social media sites.

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The main reason I want to have separate personas is that my customer bases will be very different groups with different expectations of tone. – Mary Aho Apr 6 '11 at 16:04
Expectations are not hard and fast rules. How much scope for variety is there? How many groups might forgive a little more formality and/or informality as a refreshing change? – Matthew Brown Mar 30 at 11:37
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We use TweetDeck and it's been great for managing personal Twitter accounts along with multiple business accounts.

Just make SURE you check which account is live immediately before you hit enter.

The columns make it incredibly easy to keep track of tweets by your followers, mentions of your account, Direct Messages, new followers, etc. In addition, it's really easy to use a column for a "hash tag search" of various topics that are relevant. Makes it easy to listen to your market.

Works well on Macs, with Windows, and on iPhone.

Big fan of TweetDeck.

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Hi Warren, I like TweetDeck in some ways, but its that whole having to keep track of which account is live that is driving me insane. Ideally there would be a master tab for each persona with each linked account below it, so you could switch easily back and forth between personal, business 1, 2, etc. Any programmers out there who want to build this, I will be at least one new customer. – Mary Aho Apr 6 '11 at 16:08
Totally agree - this is the one thing that makes me nuts with TweetDeck. When you're in a Twitter chat with your business ID and you find you've responded with your personal ID..... it "lacks humor". – Warren E. Hart Apr 7 '11 at 18:23
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I'm not going to repeat my full answer here as I have just addressed this very same topic moments ago. However let me give you the short version.

Think of each project, each self, each topic as a brand. The you-as-brand is multifaceted just as you are in real life. There is no harm in being a brand that does more than one thing. The Tea and Soap company in the UK was a market stall and became TESCO and dominated the supermarket industry. Just because tea and Soap were different items for different rooms the market for each was fairly similar.

So do likewise set up the one home for everything. When a brand has enough momentum to move out and for a hub (it's own home) with it's own blog or forum that you can justify investing time or money into then it is also ready to start creating multiple points of contact (Facebook, Twitter etc).

Have a look at this question (and my answer) for more thoughts on multiple brands and promoting them: Should company A have different social network identities for each service/website?

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