It is not unusual for people involved in social media to manage more than one Twitter account, typically a business account and a personal one. With the proliferation of tools out there that allow us to manage multiple accounts, comes some issues. An occupational hazard for community managers is posting to the wrong account. The most recent case was Kitchen Aid during the presidential debate. Irene Koehler has a great review of what happened and the company’s response on her blog.
If you are managing multiple accounts in one tool, like TweetDeck in my case, posting to the wrong account is bound to happen even to the most diligent. I have been prone to do it during TweetChats. Thankfully I am pretty boring online and don’t voice polarizing opinions, but it can still be embarrassing and frustrating. Not to mention confusing to your followers.
After the KitchenAid case, I started to wonder is it best to use separate tools to manage your different accounts? Basically only manage one account per tool. I went to Twitter to ask some Community Managers and see how they manage keeping their personal and business accounts. From the people that responded, people used separate tools mostly on mobile devices. The consensus was it is easier to make posting mistakes using mobile tools than desktop. From the conversations I had, it appears that this is on the radar for community managers and using different tools is more of the rule than exception.
Thanks to April Finnen, Liz Glomb, Lauren Gray, Amanda Changuris, Hanna Benedict, Victoria Beppler, and Elliot Volkman for your feedback.
I would love to hear from other Community Managers out there. Any tools or tactics you would like to share for avoiding the dreaded errant tweet?