Developing a Digital Strategy 018 – how to manage personal and professional accounts and stay sane

You may have different personal and professional social media accounts within one application (like a private facebook page and a professional one, or two YouTube accounts) – as someone emailed me recently,

…there are many interfaces and how to manage them all? This can be a very resource hungry experience without a good process

It get’s difficult if you have to keep logging out of one account and going into into another. Here is a time saver that I am using based on Bookmark folders and Browsers.

Managing personal and professional accounts

1. List all of the sites you have and divide them into personal or professional
2. Open your browser (a browser is what you use to browse the web with, for example: internet explorer, or firefox, safari, chrome)
3. Open all your personal  accounts and bookmark them.  Save them onto your bookmarks toolbar.
   (Note, if your toolbar is already  full put the bookmarks into folders – I’ve done a screen shot below)
4. Open a different browser and go through the same exercise with your professional accounts

You now have your accounts separated, and can switch easily between the two without having to log out of accounts. If there are some accounts that you use regularly you can set them to open automatically.

How does this work in practice?

I have two identities – Heidi Allen and associated social media accounts, and Body In Mind (health and research) and associated social media accounts.  How to manage them day to day at the same time?

Heidi Allen

All accounts here are in my firefox browser. Here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders

And here is what is in one of my folders (Heidi Allen Profile) if I need it

Body In Mind

All accounts here are in my Google Chrome browser – again, here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders (this time Body in Mind Profile folder)

I have the same bookmark folders in both browsers but you could have one set on each browser – and if your life is blissully simple and you only have a few accounts – stick to one browser!

Vegard – I hope this develops our discussion further from the previous Digital Strat post.

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