Debating the Mechanics of Handling Social Media

She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

Photo
Jennifer Blumin is still looking for a 22-year-old intern to handle social media.Credit Earl Wilson for The New York Times

At the most recent meeting of the She Owns It business group, the owners discussed their approaches to social media. This post continues the conversation.

Julia Beardwood, who owns branding firm Beardwood & Company, said she regrets getting a late start with Twitter and wishes she could tweet more consistently.

“In my ideal world, I would tweet three to four times a day,” she said.

“A day?” asked Jennifer Blumin, who owns Skylight Group, a company that creates event spaces for corporate clients in large, distinctive locations.

“I would,” Ms. Beardwood said.

“Wow,” Ms. Blumin said.

Ms. Beardwood added that she’s heard “the best practice is to repeat your tweets.” Typically, she tweets a few times in the morning, an hour or so apart. But she said it’s considered a good practice to use a social media management system like Hootsuite “so that your four tweets turn into 16, to be released at different times during the day.”

“Aren’t you also not supposed to tweet necessarily about your business?” asked group member Susan Parker, who owns Bari Jay.

Yes, replied Ms. Beardwood. “Usually it’s commentary,” she said. But if her business has a new project, she will tweet about that and include an image.

Ms. Beardwood also has strong opinions on weekend tweeting. “I think it’s impolite to send email on the weekends, and I think it’s impolite to tweet on the weekends,” she said.

“Well, anyone who’s checking Twitter on the weekends would be checking Twitter on the weekends,” Ms. Blumin said, adding that she’s been “terrible” with Twitter. At Skylight, she said, she is one of three people, along with a director and the president, who tweet on the company’s behalf, and she also has a personal account that she tries to use for business purposes. She said both accounts are “underutilized.” But so far, she said, she hasn’t found that “22-year-old intern” who could make tweeting for the company a full-time job. “It hasn’t been a huge priority even though it’s important,” she said.

In addition to the Twitter accounts, Ms. Blumin said she has personal and company accounts for both Instagram and Facebook. “I wonder if it was a mistake to separate myself,” she said.

“I separated myself,” said a group member, Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour. “It’s a lot to manage.”

“It’s too much to manage,” Ms. Blumin said.

“But my personal is really my personal,” Ms. Parker said.

“I don’t need a personal Twitter,” Ms. Blumin said.

Ms. Parker, who doesn’t tweet, said she was referring to Facebook.

“Oh yeah,” Ms. Blumin said. “Facebook is like your high school friends.”

Ms. Blumin then explained how she tries to separate the personal and the professional on Instagram. “I am aware of the fact that I’m trying to develop myself as like a thing for Instagram,” she said. As that “thing,” on her personal Instagram account, she posts photos of “cool architecture” during the week and more personal photos — her babies, for example, — on the weekend. She doesn’t have much involvement with Skylight’s Instagram account, which is relatively new. “This conversation is making me realize how much more we should be doing,” she said.

“Can I ask you all something?” Ms. Parker said. Noting that Bari Jay hired an outside firm to handle social media, she wondered why the other group members hadn’t done the same. “I’m not sitting here saying I’m doing it right, you’re doing it wrong,” she added. Still, she was curious.

“Our industry is so specialized that I feel as if we’d be doing all the work anyway,” said Ms. Lord, whose company is in the energy industry.

“That’s how I feel, but that’s probably less true for me,” Ms. Blumin said.

Ms. Lord mentioned that she would also be reluctant to hire an outside agency because there would be no clear return on the investment. “It’s hard for me to say, ‘Oh, I should be paying someone to do that when I’ve got a million other priorities.”

Another reason Ms. Blumin has been reluctant to hire a social media firm? “By the time I get the info together to feed to this person, I could have just tweeted it myself,” she said.

Ms. Parker said it’s part of the social media firm’s job to know what to tweet.

“But you have to send them a photo,” Ms. Blumin said.

Sometimes the social media firm takes the pictures, Ms. Parker said. At any rate, she continued, she and her sister Erica Rosenfeld, Bari Jay’s co-owner, initially handled social media on their own. Once they switched to an agency, she said, their biggest competitor, a much larger company, saw how much better Bari Jay looked on social media and switched as well.

Ms. Beardwood pointed out that using an outside firm makes sense for Bari Jay because its product, dresses, is much easier to convey than those of some of the other owners. “With our businesses, it is more complicated as to what people are buying — it’s not instantly visible,” she said. “In general, our advice to clients is that it’s better to do it in-house.”

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.