Multiple Twitter Accounts: Do You Need Them in Your Social Media Strategy?

The following article is a guest post by Daniel Sharkov, an 18 year old student, marketer, blogger and a social media enthusiast. More about him at the bottom of the post.

So, you are a business blogger or a marketer, who’d like to make more sales? Or maybe you simply want more people to read what you have to say?

If the answer to those questions is yes, then there’s a good chance that you already have a Twitter account, where you share your content and get to know other folks in your niche. And that’s great! That plus the right set of tools and the right strategy and you might be in for lots of traffic and sales!

But if Twitter is working that well, why not create a second account? Haven’t you ever thought about that as a way to boost your presence?

Whether you believe operating with multiple Twitter accounts is a good idea or not, you might just want to keep reading!

With the below paragraphs, I will try to give a definitive answer to four questions related to this multiple account issue. Keep reading to find out why it might be worth signing up for an additional account or why doing so might not be the best way to market your products and content! You might be surprised.

How Many of Them Should You Have In the First Place?

Okay, let’s assume you’ve decided to go on and try to make the most out of Twitter by setting up additional accounts… But wait a minute! What is the golden number? How much accounts it is really worth creating? Is it two, three, four or more?

Well before we move on to answering those questions, we first need to see what Twitter has to say about the issue. If you take some time to research, you will actually see that the Twitter guys have dedicated a whole page to this and here is the most important part:

• Yes! You can have more than one account on Twitter. You can sign up for an additional account here.
• Please note, each account must have a unique email address associated with it. An email address can only be associated with one Twitter account at a time.

The quotation comes namely from Twitter and as you can see, the guidelines don’t mention a specific maximum number of allowed accounts. So this basically means that as long as you use unique emails, you can assign as many as you want to the same IP address. Having that permission is pretty good, but is it actually worth it?
Here are some hints to help you make the decision:

• If you are into blogging for instance then it would be absolutely fine to sign up for an additional Twitter account – one will be for personal use so to say and the second one will have your blog’s logo as an avatar and will be more content-oriented.

• If you participate in more than one niche, tweeting on all the topics you cover from one account, simply isn’t ideal. That way it would be very hard to build a solid following of people who take the time to share your content, since what you will end up would be a mix of folks with all kinds of interests and that is far from ideal. In that case you’d better create a Twitter handle for your different interests. Each of the accounts will serve as a lens that will focus the signals to the right poeple.

• What I wouldn’t advise you to do however is pretending to be different individuals. In order to make something out of any social network out there, you have to be honest. And you can’t be honest if you build up different personas that aren’t really you. At one time people will probably realize that one person is running all those accounts and that will hardly lead to a happy ending.

You think that is all there can be said? Nope, not at all. From that perspective, a multiple account might already seem like a not-that-bad idea, but there are other factors that need to be considered! Moving on to the next question…

Are Multiple Twitter Accounts Worth the Time and Effort?

That is THE most important element to every successful campaign out there. If you are spending hours and hours of your time and after weeks have passed, the results are still not satisfactory, then the whole undertaking is worthless…

So first let’s see how traffic works!

There are basically two kinds of traffic in terms of efficiency:

• One that doesn’t require us to do anything after a certain point i.e. passive.
• One that requires us to perform a specific task in order to keep the flow going e.g. tweeting, engaging, etc.

Social media generally falls into the second category. However when we talk about Twitter, things aren’t as straightforward. The thing about the micro-blogging platform is that unlike some of the other networks, here we have the tools to automate some of the more daunting tasks. Using Buffer for instance, we can schedule updates, so that we don’t have to log-in every time we have something to share. If This Then That is another awesome tool that combined with Twitter can help us discover new content to share with ease. We can use a tool like ManageFlitter to unfollow the inactive Twitter accounts and the spammers. What we are left with is the simplest – we just have to engage!

But wait, there’s another way to answer the question – by giving you some simple facts about Twitter!

• Twitter is THE place for online businesses – if you are into internet marketing, if you are trying to sell a product or promote your blog, you already know that by yourself. Just take a look at your stream! You will clearly notice the direction of the shared content – tweets are far more business-related than personal. And although not all businesses are on Google Plus or Facebook, almost all of them are using Twitter.

• Your target audience is in it – that’s right. Since pretty much every business tweets, consumers are also there to follow their favorite brands and the latest events in their favorite niches. That means one thing – you can be certain that you will find supporters.

• More accounts equals higher exposure – since your target audience is most probably already engaging on Twitter, it is obvious that the more accounts you have, the more exposure you will get. That is firstly because different people will follow the different accounts, which basically means that your message will reach more people and secondly because with more accounts your accounts will appear more frequently in your target audience’s streams.

That’s how simple the calculation is!

And then again, as I mentioned engagement is all, which leads us to the third question that needs answering!

Do You Have to Engage on All of Your Accounts?

My personal approach on Twitter comes down to using two accounts. The first account is my personal account and the second one is my blog’s account.
What happens in reality is that I am spending 99% of my time on my personal account. As I talked about it in my post: “Building Relationships on Twitter: 3 Tips to Help you Make a Head Start” what I do is to log in to my personal account three-four times a day (depending on how busy I am). Then I get in touch with my followers, ask questions, thank for retweets and all those kinds of things that help marketers build trust around their brand and that define the word “engagement” in the marketing world.

So, since I don’t really log in to my second account I’ve done a little trick to save me some time. Instead of taking the time to reply to people there, in the bio of that second account I have mentioned my main account and made it clear that this is the place where I can answer their questions.

The idea is once again to be honest – if you aren’t going to reply back on your second account, tell people where they can reach you!

And now the main question…

Can You Get All Your Accounts Banned from Twitter?

Based on Twitter’s guidelines, which I cited in the first paragraph, you are allowed to have more than one account. However keeping those accounts sage is all up to how you manage them. It is up to you to make sure that you don’t “cross the line”.

Although there are lots of rules, I’d say the most important consideration is the quality and usefulness of what you share. If you send fishy offers, direct people to spammy sites and share repetitively bad content, people will start reporting and blocking you. And that is when things get serious…

Keep in mind that doing any fishy activities on one of your accounts, will most probably result in your second one being suspended as well.

Aside from that here are three important things that might get you into trouble:

• Retweeting what you’ve shared on the one account from the other
• Constantly tweeting identical times all at the same time
• Making mentions from one to the other account too often

As long as you make sure to abide to those simple rules, you will be able to benefit from having another account. Use the system, don’t abuse it – that’s the main thing to remember!

In Conclusion

So, all in all, having more than one Twitter account won’t lead to a huge increase in traffic. However as little additional visitors as this approach might bring you, it is still worth giving a shot. And as long as you don’t take the spammy approach and you play it safe, you will be safe. That’s how it works. Now on to you! Do you use multiple Twitter accounts? If so, what are your thoughts – are they worth it? Do they require lots of additional time?

About the author: Daniel Sharkov is an 18 year old student, marketer, blogger and a social media enthusiast.

Be sure to check out Reviewz N Tips – the place, where he shares his insights and experience!