why create a new account

Posted on by Sarah Cooley

So yesterday when I decided to start selling Avon as a part of a Social Media experiment my first thought was to create new accounts. I made a new twitter account, and I started this blog to document my online social life as an Avon representative.

But today I was thinking about creating new accounts, are you alienating your community who might want to know what you are doing, but might not know to follow that new account, or might not want to?

I have a personal twitter account @sarahcooley, and I use it for everything. My show has a separate twitter account, @whatsitallabout, but I think that makes sense. Should I just use @sarahcooley to talk about selling Avon, since I already have a community there? or would that upset my followers? After all, it is something that I am doing, and by following me, they are saying that they want to know about that.

Just some thoughts…I would love to hear yours.

  • http://www.jonberry.net Jon Berry

    I struggled for a short while with the same situation after putting in a lot of time branding myself online. Every time I launched a new site, venture, or got involved in a seperate community online I was creating a different persona or “corporate” account for those activities.

    My interests vary greatly, so the reasoning made sense. For my music ventures, I had an account. For social media, another. Aviation, another. MySpace profiles, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, etc.

    ALL GONE NOW! I use my single account for everything, except video show channels, because that is who I am. I, Jon Berry, am all over the place. That is my personality, those are my interests, and in the immortal words of @GaryVee, that is my DNA.

    It is also much less trouble logging in and updating various accounts all day long. So, while the video shows that I produce may have different audiences and they may subscribe seperately, my comments and participation in them all come from one source.

    I would suggest that you work those Avon leads through your @SarahCooley account, because that is who you are right now. If your social media friends are not interested in those posts, I hope they will simply skip over them rather than lose interest in all of your activities. At least, that's the wager I have made for myself. I hope that helps.

  • http://cynthiabidar.wordpress.com Cindy

    I agree with Jon. I blog about many things, and I used to have different logons for different sites depending on who I was at the moment. That very quickly became overwhelming to manage.

    As for Twitter, your followers will simply ignore that which does not interest them, but might get confused if they suddenly see you with multiple accounts, as I did the other day when I started following @sarahsellsavon and didn't make the connection to @sarahcooley.

  • http://randomsarah.com sarahcooley

    One of the reasons I wanted to start a new account for @sarahsellsavon was because I wanted to use this Avon experiment as a case study of sorts. To see how I could build a following, a community, essentially a customer base, with social media.

    If I was using the @sarahcooley account, which already has over 1,600 followers, there would be no real way to measure it.

    But I can see the benefit of using the @sarahcooley account

  • http://cynthiabidar.wordpress.com Cindy

    I agree with Jon. I blog about many things, and I used to have different logons for different sites depending on who I was at the moment. That very quickly became overwhelming to manage.

    As for Twitter, your followers will simply ignore that which does not interest them, but might get confused if they suddenly see you with multiple accounts, as I did the other day when I started following @sarahsellsavon and didn't make the connection to @sarahcooley.

  • http://randomsarah.com sarahcooley

    One of the reasons I wanted to start a new account for @sarahsellsavon was because I wanted to use this Avon experiment as a case study of sorts. To see how I could build a following, a community, essentially a customer base, with social media.

    If I was using the @sarahcooley account, which already has over 1,600 followers, there would be no real way to measure it.

    But I can see the benefit of using the @sarahcooley account