Managing 3 Twitter Accounts

I thought that managing 2 Twitter accounts was a lot. I talked about that in an early post called “Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts.” I have recently been put in charge of my company’s corporate account (@AnswerDotCom.) This is a short term project for me. I just need to set things up and then I will pass it off to someone else to take care of. I have 1 month to get things ship shape.

The more that I do, the more I learn. This account is more corporate than @ThePetWiki or my personal, @RenaR account. I haven’t really engaged any of the followers. There is a ton of content that the site has. I have mostly been tweeting about things that have occurred on a specific date-stuff like birthdays and history items. It’s all information that we have on the main site, and I can add a link to each item.

I have been using HootSuite to post interesting and informative tweets throughout the day. I have them set up to go out every hour or so. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a ton at one time. I know when I see tweets like that, I am less likely to read or spend any time on them. They seem like another form of twitter spam. By sending them out the way I am, I am also able to cover a larger range of time zones.

The more that I use HootSuite, the more I like it. If you use HootSuite to shorten urls that you put in your tweets, they will track how many clicks those urls get. I know that other people use bit.ly, but ow.ly is so well integrated with HootSuite, I can’t imagine using anything else.

HootSuite also allows you to add multiple users to a twitter account. I have added editors to check the pending tweets before they go out. They can also add their own tweets. I tried using CoTweet, pre-posting tweets and sharing the account, but for some reason, my tweets never got out. It was annoying to put all that work into creating and scheduling the tweets and not seeing the fruits of my labor. HootSuite has been very dependable.

Since I am managing multiple accounts, I still run a client application to keep track of them all. Seesmic Desktop works well for me. That and the Flock browser have been life savers. While I’m writing this post in Flock, I see live updates of tweets that are coming from people that I follow. The stream of tweets is a bit distracting, but it helps me keep on top of information that is important to me.

It’s been a lot more work than I expected, but I think that it’s going well. When I took over the account, there were about 30 followers. It’s been about a week, and there are now more than 1,300. Not to shabby. I am also very happy with the number of click throughs to the site. As the number of followers grows, it will be nice to see that number go up as well.

I find the whole thing fascinating. It will be cool to see how far I can get it in that month. I’m hoping for 5,000 good followers. Wish me luck.