What questions should I be asking a Social Media Agency?

15 Common questions & their answers

How do you know what to post?

We’ve been doing this a long time, so we’re pretty skilled at knowing what to post! However, each business is different, which means we need to learn as we go to make sure the right content is posted.

What that means is that the initial content posted, in the first couple of weeks, is exploratory, a little bit of trial and error if you will. Thanks to our content approval process, we get great feedback from you on our content before it gets published. This gives us an excellent guide to what’s on-brand and what’s not.

When it comes to researching content, we’ve got three ways we do it. To begin with, we’ll talk to you! It’s common that a lot of the information that we need at least as a basis, can come from the brands we’re working with. Next, we’ll research things that have been published on the brands website or social media profiles in the past. We’ll also take a sneak peak at what competitors are doing too to get a sense of where the value lies.

Lastly, we’ll do our own industry research to determine what to post. Based on our experience combined with what’s clearly available in the particular industry, we’ll be able to create a content schedule that’s both on-point and appropriate for your brand.

How do you know our tone of voice?

Trial and error is the very short version here, but it’s much more involved than that.

To begin with in our kick-off meeting we ask you questions about your brands tone of voice. We uncover the kind of words you’d use to describe your brand.

Thereafter, we examine prior pieces of content or communication your brand has published to get a sense of the kind of words you use.

Then, we develop the content schedules. In these schedules we use all of the knowledge we’ve acquired from your prior communications and conversations to work decide what words to use.

It’s over to you to approve or make edits to our content. If you find wording that doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, just let us know and we’ll change it, for this time and every other in the future!

Do I get to approve content before it’s published?

YES! It’s been a formal part of our process for years, we develop the content to be posted a week or two in advance, it’s sent to you for approval. Once we get your approval or edits, we make the changes then post!

What about negative comments?

Contrary to public thinking, you actually don’t get that many negative comments on Social Media. Occasionally you get ‘trolls’, people who say stupid things for the sake of it, whilst they can be annoying they’re generally harmless.

If you’ve got us looking after the community management for you, we use our standardised negativity management process which basically involves calming the person down first then seeking to get further information from them ‘offline’ rather than in the public eye.

Should we not be managing the community management for you, you’ll be able to follow the same general rules that we do. When a negative comment comes along, you’ll simply be able to acknowledge it and respond as politely and quickly as possible.

Remember, you don’t actually get as many negative comments as you think!

Where does the content come from?

There’s a variety of sources. We try to get as much from ‘you’ as possible, because there’s usually a number of different content sources that you’ll have within your business that you don’t even realise you have!

In order of preference, here’s how we source content

1 – Within your business

We’ll use content (photos, videos, articles, etc…) that you already have and adapt it to suit social media. This means that we’ll be editing photos, creating illustrations, writing text and editing videos all based on content from your brand, but curated to suit Social Media.

2 – Created or adapted from existing

It’s often the case that new content isn’t created that easily, so what we’ll do is use any existing photography, videography or content that has been published and modify it to suit what we want to publish.

This may mean that we also use some stock photography or videos to supplement what we have from you, but the end result will look like it’s yours. It’s a nice ‘cheat’ if you will.

3 – Externally Sourced

Sometimes the creation of new content is impossible and there isn’t any other content that’s in already in existence. What this means is that we need to create content from scratch.

Sometimes this means that we’re organising photo and video shoots to create new and exciting content, other times we’ll be creating new content from scratch based on stock imagery that we can get our hands on.

Other times we have the opportunity to gather content from suppliers or customers, it’s a nice little union that not only provides us with content, but also strengthens your brands relationship with suppliers and customers because you’re sharing their message too.

What platforms should we be on?

How long is a piece of string? Unfortunately that’s the simple answer.

The longer answer is, it all depends on where your audience is, who they are and what they’re interested in. It’s pretty common for people to think that ‘oh, I’m in business so I have to be only on LinkedIn’ or the contrast ‘we sell consumer goods, so it’s only Facebook for us’ but the reality is much different.

There’s consumers on LinkedIn and there’s business people in Facebook, so you can’t use that rule to determine which platform to be on.

There’s technical benefits on Instagram that don’t exist on Facebook, but there’s things you can do on Facebook that you cannot on Instagram, so that rules out only being on Instagram.

As you can see there’s no hard and fast rule. At the time of writing though, there is pretty much three main platforms.

Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

The lesser used platforms such as Twitter and Pinterest still exist but their usefulness in Australia is decreasing.

The general rule is, if you’re on Social Media, then you’re on Facebook and Instagram. If you have a business ‘angle’, then perhaps LinkedIn too – but the nature of the platform is proving increasingly difficult to be effective. Plus the advertising costs dramatically more than most.

How many posts should we have?

Many years ago the answer was a thing we called the “Coca-cola rule”. Coke was using 1 post per day and proving effective with it, so everyone else copied, assuming it was the best.

These days, the game has changed substantially.

Our recommendation is still a minimum of 1 post per day, but sometimes that’s unachievable, so less is permissible.

The catch is, not every audience member sees every post for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the sheer flood of content on Social Media these days.

So, sometimes daily posting is not enough, you need to raise the bar to twice daily or even more. At that level you’ll certainly be seen by everyone!

The reality of getting that much content out can be a huge challenge though so we still come back to one post per day being the standard we’d suggest.

What do I have to do?

As little as possible. Your involvement in the first couple of weeks will be supporting us with as much of the existing content as you possible can.

Thereafter your involvement will be limited to three key areas.

1 – Providing any follow-on content you may get your hands on

2 – Approving our content schedules

3 – Helping us answer any questions regarding your brand that come from Social

Our goal is to minimise the effort requirement from you and to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible for you.

How many followers do we need?

There’s two ways to answer this question.

Credibility and Usefulness.

Firstly with credibility the answer is, as many followers as you possibly can get. The more followers or fans that you have the better you ‘look’.

Secondly, usefulness means quite simply, how many audience members do you need to be useful. Audience members can be useful in two ways. 1) to sell to, 2) to share your content. If you need to sell to a particularly niche audience then perhaps you don’t need that many followers.

There is one overriding factor. The larger your audience size, the more people that will see your content. The more people that see your content, the more people that can potentially see your content. It’s the second ring effect.

By growing your ‘inner circle’, your first ring if you will, then you’ll have a higher pool of ‘potential’ audience, these are the people in the second ring.

Ideally, you want as big an audience as possible, but don’t get hung up on it. We focus on growing your audience naturally and progressively which means you get good quality audience members who actually care about what you have to say!

How many leads will I get?

We get this question all the time. The answer is, we have no idea. We can try all sorts of things and eventually figure out what works and what doesn’t, but nothing is a hard and fast rule from the get-go.

Generating leads is seldom just the sole responsibility of the social media content, it’s more to do with entire digital ecosystem which includes social media but primarily the website.

The better the website, the better conversion rate. What we can impact is how many people get to your website, from the content we publish on Social Media for you.

Ideally, we want to generate as many leads as possible, our focus is on impressions and audience size, once we get that up we then focus on engagement to ensure that the people who are seeing the content actually engage with it. That’s where the leads come from.

Any Social Media agency that guarantees the number of leads they can generate for you is lieing, be very careful.

How much should I spend on Advertising?

It’s an element that’s often left out, but Social Media advertising budgets are pretty important.

Applying advertising to social media content helps get it infront of more people more quickly, which helps grow your audience, impressions and engagement from the start.

Commencing a social media presence without some advertising budget can be fraught with danger as you won’t get much traction and it will appear ‘ineffective’ when in actual fact it’s the platform being used incorrectly that’s causing the problem.

We like to recommend starting with at least $500 per month in your back pocket, though it is flexible and can be raised or lowered at any time. Many of our clients will spend around $1,000 per month on advertising.

Do I need to do competitions?

No. Not necessarily. Social Media is flooded with competitions and they have to be used carefully to be effective.

It is a case of trial and error. We’ve seen a competition go absolutely wild off a seemingly low value prize, when in contrast we’ve seen a high value prize competition do absolutely nothing.

It’s trial and error.

How do I work with influencers?

Influencers can be very difficult to deal with. Some can be great, others can be downright unethical.

It’s important to have processes and documentation in place to get the best out of engaging with influencers.

We will help identify and find influencers for you, then create the framework (& documentation) to engage them to the best possible effect.

When it comes to social media influencers, sometimes it can be better to put the money straight towards social media advertising rather than going to influencers.

What should I expect to get out of this?

Another difficult question because the objectives vary from business to business, brand to brand. In most cases, brand exposure is the first metric for any Social Media content. The assumption (and generally the rule) is that the more people that see your content and brand, the more people who will enquire, ultimately to buy.

It’s useful to think of Social Media as an advertising platform. Like your own TV channel or billboard. The goal of those platforms is to get as many people seeing your content as you possibly can. As many people seeing your brand name as possible is the objective.

The difference between Social Media and the other platforms is that it’s a two way street and you can control your message almost entirely. As such it provides a dramatically higher level of precision and impact compared to what another platform might.

So, what should you expect? More people to know who you are, more people to ask about what you do, and more people to be better educated about your brand when they do enquire, through whatever platform they eventually choose.

How do you measure success?

We use two key metrics. Impressions and Engagements.

Impressions is the number of people who have seen your stuff.

Engagements is the number of people who have engaged with your content in some way.

In the first month, we generally set the metric targets based on our experience from the first month. After which we then monitor the numbers each month, presenting them in our reports as a six month rolling window – so you can clearly see everything improving month on month.

How you measure success might be different in your own mind, but when it comes to the actual success of what’s being published, impressions and engagements are the two true and measurable metrics that come out of your investment in advertising on Social Media.