The number isn’t really the issue. Are they all effective?
To start answering that question means knowing all the social media accounts used to reach audiences, because you can’t make more effective what you don’t know about.
Our research suggests that many major corporations don’t know how many social media accounts they actually use to address audiences. Many have also lost track of the number of websites they operate.
A first step to making social media more effective is to run an automated social media account inventory. An audit can uncover all social accounts across all websites (relatively easy) and the results become even more valuable when each account is linked to its content owner (really hard).
Here’s what we found for the five global corporations that we estimated had the largest digital estates as measured by websites they own:
A simple list augmented with account activity data — audience sizes, engagement levels, content update frequency, etc. — becomes even more powerful.
And that data can inform social media account update, delete or modify decisions, with the objective of making social media content more effective.
Because, you can’t make more effective what you don’t measure.
