Consolidation isn’t a dirty word, at least for corporate social media
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Have you ever searched for a company’s social media channel only to find that there are 29 different accounts for the same brand? Unfortunately, that’s common, and it’s a fundamental mistake that even some of the world’s largest brands make.
Companies find themselves in this situation because of two fundamental breakdowns:
They allow anyone and everyone who wants a social media channel to start one – most often without any strategy, oversight or overarching anything. This is a state that I affectionately call “the Wild West.” No one is in control. No one is responsible. And no one cares enough to reign it in.
They allow internal politics to spill out externally. This is a big one. It’s very common, especially at larger companies, for each business division to want their own set of channels for their own stuff. Or, for each communications team in each country to want their own “Company X Greenland” page for their country or geography. Very often, these folks get their way by playing the internal politics game. But these choices are made to make someone happy internally – not because they make strategic sense externally.
Now here’s the truth: Customers and consumers do not care at all about your internal chaos. They give absolutely zero fill in the blanks about your internal structure. Allowing the two scenarios above to dictate your externally facing presence on social media is a huge mistake for about 9,000 reasons.
Remember, to the outside world and your customers, your company is one entity. If you were Coca-Cola, you are Coke to everyone. People seeking you out on social would most likely simply search for “Coke” or “Coca-Cola.” They’re not going to search for “Coca-Cola Internal Division X” or “Coca-Cola Lithuania.”
So why exactly is this such a bad idea? Here are my top reasons:
It’s confusing! I can’t think of a single company that would put “confuse customers” in its annual planning goals or KPIs. And yet on social media, this lack of caring about how the company is being presented results in exactly that. Don’t make it hard for your customers to find you. Don’t make it hard for them to determine if they’re in the right place. Don’t make them do work.
Branding goes sideways. With so many people controlling so many accounts (authorized or otherwise), the company’s branding standards always go awry. People use unapproved logos, colors or images. They misrepresent the brand. And they cause more confusion. This scenario also leads to situations where the usernames/handles are not consistent across the company either.
Cannibalizing your own audience: Instead of one powerhouse account with millions of followers, your company winds up with dozens of accounts with a subset of followers. You are stealing audience from yourself, or duplicating audiences across channels. For some platforms, namely Facebook/Meta and LinkedIn, this lack of brand coherence can have further impacts on your company’s relationship with the platform. In other words, the more you seem like a big deal, the more the platforms will treat you like a big deal. Companies that allow this kind of external splintering of their brand appear to be 200 medium to small deals instead of one coherent powerhouse of a brand, and they are treated accordingly. Additionally, unaware employees will choose to list their employer as one of the sub-pages versus the main corporate one, which impacts the number of employees LinkedIn shows on your main company page.
It creates delays for customers and extra work for your teams. Let’s say you work for the home décor division of a major retailer. And there are separate Facebook channels for Retailer Inc. (the parent company), Retailer Home Décor, Retailer Wedding, Retailer Baby, etc. With so many different niche channels, someone who requests assistance via the main Retailer Inc. page might get routed to the team managing the Wedding page. Or they might get routed elsewhere. You are adding revolutions of internal communications to get that person assistance, and you are creating a delay in providing that assistance. You are also creating unnecessary work. No one wins.
It creates security and governance issues. The more channels you have, the more people are involved, the more access is needed, passwords are required, and the more risk of security becoming a problem there is. The more channels you have, the more the risk of crisis situations being handled poorly, someone posting something they shouldn’t or a myriad of other regulatory or compliance missteps. See my four pillars of social media governance here.
If we look at history, there are examples of companies and other entities realizing they’ve fallen into this trap and correcting course.
I remember a time when Target had a ton of social channels – Target Baby, Target Wedding, etc. If you search now, Target has walked that back, sticking mostly to the main Target channel and then adding a couple of key additional channels that truly have a separate audience like Target News and Target Careers.
More recently, NASA announced it would be shutting down some of its social media accounts for the Voyager mission and the Mars Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Their statement on the move really nailed the reason for doing so (albeit in wonderful corporate speak):
"With more than 300 agency accounts across 15 platforms, we have an opportunity to better focus our messaging and connect more clearly with the public.
"This initiative will help us fulfill our responsibility to share NASA's story widely and effectively – by reducing the number of accounts, improving the signal-to-noise ratio of content, and making our messaging more unified and accessible."
So, they are reducing the number of accounts to:
Focus their messaging
Connect more clearly with the public
Share their stories more effectively
Make their messaging more unified
Should your company follow suit?
It’s worth a discussion, I think.
PS- So, when should you allow separate channels that are different from the corporate channel? When there is
(1) a completely different audience, such as a Careers channel for job seekers or a News channel for journalists
(2) 100 percent separate branding such as a Lays branded page that is separate from its parent company PepsiCo’s page, or
(3) another specific need that merits a distinction, such as needing a separate page for Brazil that stands apart from your overall LATAM page because residents of Brazil speak Portuguese and not Spanish