SHOULD I HAVE A PERSONAL AND A BUSINESS ACCOUNT?
Many of us first dip our toes into the social media waters with a personal experience. We share the summer’s photo dump or a girls’ weekend, but mostly we watch reels and Tiktoks for longer than we’d like to admit.
For some of us, we start sharing our business journey on our personal accounts because that’s what we’ve been using for years and because the thought of starting from scratch is just too daunting.
If you think there’s even a small chance you would like to make money or connect with potential customers, take the leap and start a creator account for your business. (“Creator” accounts on IG have many more features and “Business” accounts are limited due to copyright laws but allow you to use a third-party scheduler.)
What happens when we suddenly find ourselves responsible for managing our office’s social media accounts?
The reason you want to create a professional account is that eventually, you are going to want to have insights and analytics. It would be a shame to build momentum, to post consistently and build a following, and then when you’re really getting serious, have to start from scratch at *that* point.
You can turn a Creator account into a Business account (and vice versa) but you can not turn a personal account into a professional account.
THE PERSONABLE/PROFESSIONAL BALANCE
When you're posting for a business, one of the most important topics to cover is you, or the people involved in the business. It is imperative on social media to be authentic and genuine and focus on the human experience; emotions, storytelling, all that mushy stuff. You can do it in a polished and professional way, but without it you'll never truly connect with potential clients. They won’t trust your account if they can’t see the person/people behind it. For this reason, overly-produced content often doesn’t perform as well.
I always suggest posting something semi-personal or at least human related every five posts or so. Your post-rotation could look like this:
Client experience,
Answer questions about your product or service,
Show behind the scenes,
Personal share.
Here are some ways you can add the human element to your office’s social media:
-do an employee spotlight post or employee of the month,
-have an employee talk about how they got started,
-profile employees during holidays.
Do you have a veteran on staff? Maybe they can record a 30-second video of what Veteran’s Day means to them. Or they can share their favorite Thanksgiving dish/recipe.
-take a video of the team during a meeting, company parties, and training.
The people watching your posts will naturally look for things you have in common. That’s another reason the personal share is so valuable. Someone will see that employee spotlight and think, “hey, I have kids, too,” or “I like fishing, too.” That goes a long way if your goal is to be trustworthy and connect with your viewers.
If you have had your personal account for a long time, it can be helpful to share once in a while what's going on in your business. However, if you are already overwhelmed with managing social media I would just go the professional route and pop in a few photos/videos of your personal life.
A word of encouragement:
If you’re debating the fine line between being too personal and too rigid, remember that when you first start posting, your posts likely won’t be up to your standards. Like any skill, it’s going to take consistent practice and learning to get to a point where you feel proud of what you’re putting out there. If you’re willing to learn on the job, each post you publish is building your skills as well as serving as promotional material for your business.
If you don’t want to learn on the job and just have your social media start out with the ideal balance of personal and professional, hire a social media professional to get your business on the map. If you’d like to develop a corporate social media strategy and have me train your team, fill out the application form below.
