Social: How Many Instagram Accounts Should You Have?

In the digital world where should the boundary be drawn between personal and professional lives? Sometimes it seems like everyone you meet now is a Social Media Manager, “SEO Executive” or blogger and besides dropping out of social occasions to fire off a quick post they also regularly fill our social media feeds with self-promotion.

Whether they have a separate account for their services or work for a small company, there is always another page that gets re-tweeted and shared to their personal profiles so their friends can feign interest and bump up their stats.

Instagram in particular is an ever-growing platform that allows users to create multiple profiles and is becoming a top marketing tool estimated to have 15x the reach of Facebook and Twitter in terms of how many people see a single post.

Secretly we all want to be able to make a living from our everyday living but where should we be posting those cocktails, dinners and fashion brands in order to gain the right following where it matters and keep it?

Selling Yourself

Besides just bloggers and marketing professionals anyone with their own product or service like models, writers, artists and designers can vastly improve their advertising to targeted interests for free with Instagram.

Many advertised jobs for marketing and media roles require evidence of applicants running a successful social media platform. Often this involves gaining access not only to the person’s skills but also their loyal following.

For this reason it makes sense for anyone in these and related fields to build up a following just from their life and their assorted interests and activites.

Moving job means business accounts are handed over so reposting evidence of work for these to a user’s own profile shows an active involvement with their clients.

Being a freelancer is the ultimate issue here because these workers sell their skills and their brand. Bloggers in particular have to sell their lifestyle which itself must be inspiring and aspirational in order to be a hit.

On the other hand they need to maintain the interest of their followers by posting relevant content. Posting from client’s pages or on behalf of clients will quickly turn the most loyal followers away.

Multiple Instagram Accounts?

Everyone has varied interests so what if someone combines posts of sports blogs as well as wardrobe styling or personal training with healthy eating? These subjects are similar and complement one another but followers of fashion are not likely to be interested in sports which could lead to the account losing followers.

Instagrammer @RougeYourKnees is a vintage fashion enthusiast with an incredible 12,100 followers purely from social posts about what she collects. She views her feed “completely as a social account. The number of followers I have is a complete surprise to me.”

Should these people have a separate account for each interest as if just a personal and professional were already not enough? That would result in endless “reposts” as different aspects of someone’s life cross into different themes. With vintage clothing simple photos of recent purchases looks tedious while a more relaxed feed of what they get up to engages people.

“I like the idea of different accounts for different aspects of our lives. For example, if I follow an account because I like the vintage clothes they are posting, I find it annoying if they stay discussing their emotional life or find they eat too much, as it dilutes the content I followed them for.”

Nevertheless with each of her posts receiving over 300 “likes” there comes the question of the potential to make money through reviews and product placements, although she refuses to take this approach. “I’m not really into promoting things for money but happy to post about things I really like and use in real life. I would feel awful promoting something I did not actually genuinely use or like.”

While this may not be the biggest problem in the digital age it remains that what we post and where matters, whether that’s new blog posts and marketing strategies or memes and kittens.

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