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Email marketing is one of the oldest and best tricks in the communication playbook, and newsletters are an excellent tool for brand awareness, audience engagement, and lead nurturing. But newsletter planning is challenging. Coming up with and delivering fresh ideas...
Jul 24, 2024
Need to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts? I know the struggle – constantly jumping between separate docs to note down ideas, draft new content, and schedule LinkedIn posts. Then, once they’re live, you’re spending what feels like the entire day toggling between different profiles to check for new comments and messages.
It’s a common challenge for anyone running more than their own personal LinkedIn account.
Let’s take a look at who needs to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts, why it’s a fruitful tactic, and what you can do to keep things organized and on track.
Most people use their LinkedIn accounts for networking and job seeking. And for that, there’s no need to manage more than a single profile. But in the mad world of marketing, we are an entirely different breed.
Here are a few reasons we do this to ourselves.
As a demand generation specialist, you may need to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts from your sales team, using each one to send engaging LinkedIn posts, comments, and messages for prospects that align with the company’s different target personas.
Similarly, a marketer using LinkedIn for prospecting will benefit from splitting the activity between multiple LinkedIn accounts, with each account being used for a different target audience.
This will help you scale your outreach efforts and minimize the impact of the ‘100 connections per week’ rule.
As an in-house social media manager or content marketer, you’ll often be responsible for keeping the social content calendar ticking over with new ideas for each platform.
But for LinkedIn, that’s not always as simple as handling one single company page.
Many large companies have several brands, products, or business lines – each with its own distinct social media presence. That means you could be responsible for handling multiple LinkedIn company pages.
Beyond this, you could also find yourself helping colleagues with content for their personal brand.
For example, the CEO or subject matter experts from within your company may need you to help them create and manage a content calendar for their personal accounts. This can lead to you managing multiple LinkedIn profiles.
This can help them successfully build a personal brand on the platform with regular posts and comments on relevant topics, which in turn leads to interactions with other thought leaders and more awareness from target personas.
Agency life is all about managing multiple accounts and campaigns across different clients. And just like social media managers, this can see you helping to build a personal brand for CEOs or other in-house experts that the client wants to push publicly.
That means different content and campaign requirements need to be managed and organized effectively. As your agency scales, this can get more and more difficult.
Once you’re dealing with more than a few clients, a single platform with a workspace dedicated to each client can help you streamline the necessary collaboration and approvals for the different LinkedIn accounts you manage.
One person, one LinkedIn account, and don’t share it with others – that’s what the LinkedIn user agreement states. Creating multiple LinkedIn accounts is not allowed.
When you create multiple LinkedIn accounts or use the same IP address to access more than one account, it can trigger LinkedIn’s security protocols.
Breaking these rules can result in account restrictions, possibly forever. This, in turn, puts both your online presence and your professional reputation at risk.
However, if you need to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts, there are a couple of ways to play it safe.
If you have access to multiple devices (e.g., smartphone, tablet, and laptop), use each one to log into a separate LinkedIn account. Just log into your personal account on your mobile app and your client’s LinkedIn profile using the web app on your laptop.
Or you can use separate internet browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) for different LinkedIn profiles. For example, log into your own LinkedIn profile using Chrome and your client’s account using Safari.
This is an easy solution to manage multiple accounts without raising any red flags with LinkedIn’s algorithm. But it’s only useful when you’re managing just a couple of LinkedIn profiles because juggling between more accounts can become a hassle, lowering your efficiency.
If you only use a single computer and have one additional LinkedIn account to check every once in a while, use the incognito browsing feature.
Private or incognito mode doesn’t store cookies, cache, or browsing history. So you can log into someone else’s LinkedIn account without the platform associating it with your main account. This reduces the flags for suspicious activity and the risk of account restrictions.
Simply open an incognito or private window on the same computer. If you are using Google Chrome, you can find it in the upper right corner of the browser window. Log into the other account, and you’re set.
Note that this is a temporary solution if you don’t have to switch between accounts frequently. So, if you have to switch between several LinkedIn accounts throughout the day, this way might not be convenient for you.
Looking to use different LinkedIn accounts for prospecting and lead generation? Well, you won’t get too far with a single profile. That’s because LinkedIn limits what you can do with just one account.
For example, the number of connection requests you can send per week tends to fall within the 100-250 range. The exact number you’re allowed to send depends on how the algorithm calculates your social selling index.
Other daily limits apply to the number of messages you can send and the number of profiles you can visit.
One way to overcome these limits is by using multiple LinkedIn accounts. After all, using five accounts instead of one means you can 5X your output on connection requests, messages, and so on.
This also allows you to fine-tune each account towards a particular buyer persona.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind.
Generally speaking, it’s best to get a few of your colleagues on board with the idea of letting you use their LinkedIn account for prospecting – especially if you all live in the same city and work from the same office.
Accounts that are accessed from different countries on the same day, especially without the use of password managers, can raise suspicion with LinkedIn’s security protocols. Equally, you’ll want to avoid simultaneous usage of the same LinkedIn account, so communication is key.
Fellow marketers, sales reps, and account executives are a great place to start. It should be easier for them to understand the value of using their account for prospecting and outreach purposes.
Just be fully open and transparent with how you plan to use each profile and agree on the boundaries of what each person is comfortable with.
The first thing you’ll want to do is optimize each LinkedIn profile you plan to use.
Since you’ll be using the profiles for prospecting, you’ll want to set things up for maximum impact. That way, any new connections or visitors to the profile will see your key messaging and visuals immediately.
This is particularly effective if you’re using each profile to target a particular buyer persona.
You’ll be able to curate all the content and interactions on each profile according to the target persona it has been optimized for.
Once you’ve got your profiles optimized, it’s important to set up a shared calendar for the activity that you have planned for each account. Streamline this process using a LinkedIn post generator to create engaging posts in seconds.
The owner of the account should have access to the calendar so that they can see what you’ll be posting in their name.
While this will primarily be used to plan and create the content that each profile will post, this will also help you plan out messaging campaigns across the multiple accounts you’re using.
You can even use the calendar to mark time slots for when you plan to use the account, so the account owner has full visibility.
Now it’s time to fill those content calendars with ideas that will capture the attention of your target personas. There are various LinkedIn tools to make your work easier.
You don’t need to go overboard and try to reinvent the wheel here. Talk with your team to identify what you already have. Take the core messaging and content pieces you’re already using for each target persona and group them into buckets.
Then, assign each bucket to the corresponding profile that will be used for prospecting to that buyer persona.
This will provide you with a great starting point and allow you to repurpose a lot of what’s already available to you.
Now, you’ve filled your calendar with ideas for posts. Before you start sending out connection requests and personalized messages, it’s a good idea to get some recent activity built up on each account.
That means posting valuable content, liking and commenting on posts from relevant thought leaders, and engaging in any conversations taking place on suitable topics.
When people receive a connection request or an outreach message from you, one of the first things they are likely to do is click on the profile to get a better idea of who is reaching out to them.
You’ll leave a far better first impression with an optimized and active profile than if the account hasn’t engaged with anyone for months.
All of this can feel overwhelming. Particularly if you’re trying to do everything manually.
I know from experience that the idea of building five different content calendars from scratch is a daunting task, and that’s before you even get to manually posting the content you create.
Thankfully, social media management tools exist to make life much easier with built-in calendars, post scheduling, and much more.
You just need to find the one that works best for you.
Once you’ve got multiple LinkedIn accounts under control, try learning how to post multiple photos on LinkedIn to enhance your posts with more visual storytelling.
Working within a social media agency, as soon as you have more than one B2B client, you’re going to be managing more than one LinkedIn account – even if it’s just each client’s company page.
That’s just what you do.
But as you add more client accounts into the mix, it’s important to keep a clearly defined and streamlined workflow in mind for each one.
Stick to these five key tenets and you won’t go wrong.
Each account that you manage will need a LinkedIn strategy that caters to the client’s needs.
Get clarity and buy-in on the strategy before you start producing any content. This is especially true when handling multiple accounts for different brands or multiple profiles for the same brand.
If the client ever questions why you’re doing X (or not doing Y) on an account, you’ll always have the agreed strategy to turn to.
When working on the strategy, try to consider:
As an agency, chances are that the LinkedIn content you produce for a client will be part of a larger social media program across multiple platforms. So you may need a master calendar for each client that shows all upcoming activity across all platforms, as well as platform-specific ones.
Many agencies use a social media management tool to help them with this since building and maintaining these documents is quite a task.
For example, Planable’s calendar view lets you see everything you have planned for all platforms you may be managing for a client. You can also apply color-coded tags and filters so that the calendar only shows what’s planned for a single platform.
Once your strategy is approved and your calendars are ready to go, it’s time to start creating content.
Each of your client’s accounts will have its own identity. As a result, your content creation efforts are also likely to differ for each client.
As you’re brainstorming ideas and creating new content for each client, you’ll need to keep in mind:
When you’re working in a growing agency, managing the workload is all about strategic decision-making and being efficient with your time.
The last thing you need is to be chasing clients and sending reminders for approval on your latest proposals.
Plus, dealing with multiple accounts across multiple clients means you can lose hours on basic tasks like keeping track of the latest changes and double-checking which posts have already been approved.
Here’s what Planable offers agencies who need to handle multiple LinkedIn accounts:
When you’re managing multiple accounts for clients across several platforms, a social media scheduling tool is a lifesaver.
It allows you to tackle a whole bunch of approved posts in a single sitting, rather than constantly jumping between accounts to post manually.
Using a social media management tool to schedule your LinkedIn content in advance will help you keep a consistent publishing schedule.
And yes, that applies to both the company pages and personal profiles you manage.
Managing multiple LinkedIn accounts can be a time-consuming challenge, whether you’re a marketer using LinkedIn accounts for prospecting or an agency handling several clients’ accounts.
I hope you feel ready to tackle that challenge with the help of the tips I shared with you!
Tom is a content marketing expert who knows how to tell a compelling tech tale. With over a decade of experience under his belt, he helps companies create content that grabs eyeballs. In his spare time, you’ll either find him writing a branching narrative, learning a new tool, or enjoying a live music show.
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