I was surprised to read that the average number of social media accounts for businesses doing marketing online is somewhere around 178.

Really? Do you need that many?

Personally, I think one account at the popular social media websites is enough. If your employees want a personal account at LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, then allow them the privilege of their own personal accounts. You might even give them some leeway in promoting corporate events and products – with some guidelines, of course. But you don’t need multiple social media accounts.

In a word, it’s overkill.

I would add that it is time consuming and costly to manage more than one account at any social media website. If you have 30 Twitter accounts, you’ll need that many employees to monitor and manage them. Maybe – MAYBE – one employee can manage 3-5 of those accounts, but that would be a full-time job. You still have to pay their salary.

A better use of time and resources is to have one account at each social media website. You have your marketing team manage those accounts – one manager per account. And make sure they talk to each other. You want your social media accounts to work in tandem, not against each other. Make it easy on yourself, not more difficult.