Building a Social Empire

July 6, 2012February 17, 2023 Koka Sexton 23 Comments Entrepreneur, koka sexton, marketing, marketing_tips, Social Media Tips, Twitter

I manage a lot (IMO) of social profiles. When I started getting involved in social media it was for fun and I was doing a ton of testing to see what social media could be leveraged for.

My initial plan on Twitter was to create an identity on there for myself and create a couple of profiles that I could use as aggregators of sorts.

I started with @kokasexton for myself, @salestools for sales related content and @socialhelp for social media related content. That’s when things got really nerdy.

@socialhelp was a shell profile. No branding, no background image, and a basic bio. I figured the best thing to do on Twitter was to create an environment where I wouldn’t have to leave the platform or click from one profile to the next to discover news I would be interested in. So I set up RSS feeds from my favorite tech and social media blogs to flow right into the profile as new updates. When I wanted to see what was going on in the world of social media I would just look at that profile and see a collection of updates from all over the web that I could read or use to share from my personal profile.

Over time I wasn’t focused on doing any actual engagement from the profile (that’s not what it was intended for) but it started gaining its own organic following and I was surprised to see that other people had found it through search or other means and they were retiring the updates too.

The story is the same for @salestools. I first created it do be a stream of news and articles around the sales industry, not as sexy as social media so the organic following didn’t happen at the same scale but it was getting noticed.

About 3 years ago I started changing my thoughts about how these profiles could be used. I was becoming more active overall and realizing where I could add value. I realized that if I got more focused on them as individual profiles and putting some actual work into them it might have a bigger impact. It did.

I decided to actually take ownership in a more public way of the profiles by adding my name to them and getting custom images created all of them also have links to my LinkedIn profile (It’s all about the page views). I also got even more geeky.

Over the years I have created other Twitter profiles that I manage.

@b2bsales became a spillover for content not on @salestools. They seem a little redundant but they do serve unique purposes in many cases.

@socialsensi is my first attempt at almost a standalone profile with the plan to build into something else.

@socialselling was a no brainer when I realized it wasn’t taken. Who else should own the one Twitter profile for a movement I helped pioneer?

There was a brief moment when an unnamed entity was trying to take these from me. I was a bit scared but I held my ground and eventually was left alone on the matter. The great thing about working at LinkedIn is that if it’s not a branded account they said they didn’t care how many profiles I ran on my own. Which was great for me and for them.

Im not a PR or marketing agency but I can see where this could go. Without a ton of thought outside of wanting to build interesting and educational social profiles, I have built a personal network that I like to call my social empire.