The Process I Follow to Get Results for Social Media Management Clients
Summary
TLDRIn this episode of the Freelance Friday podcast, the host discusses strategies for social media managers to deliver tangible results for clients. They cover the importance of social media audits, competitor analysis, and crafting a comprehensive social media strategy. The host also emphasizes the role of customer service in social media management and the value of clear communication with clients through templates and tools like Metricool. The episode concludes with tips on creating effective social media plans and reports to build client trust and ensure success.
Takeaways
- π The importance of a social media audit to establish a baseline for performance metrics and to compare with industry benchmarks.
- π€ The necessity of onboarding clients to set proper expectations and boundaries for the social media management process.
- π Conducting a competitor analysis to identify gaps and opportunities within the client's industry and social media presence.
- π Utilizing a social media strategy as a roadmap for client engagements, including where, what, and how often to post.
- π The value of a buyer persona in crafting marketing messages that resonate with the target audience of the client's business.
- π± The significance of a hashtag library for enhancing social media posts with relevant and high-quality hashtags.
- ποΈ The use of a social media plan to outline and get approval for initial content ideas and campaign strategies from clients.
- π The role of reporting tools like Metricool for automating and simplifying the process of performance reporting.
- π¬ The crucial aspect of customer service in social media management, including the development of response templates for common inquiries.
- π‘οΈ The need for an escalation plan to handle sensitive or threatening customer interactions on social media platforms.
- π― The emphasis on clear communication with clients about the social media strategy, campaign approvals, and performance insights.
Q & A
What is the main topic of the 'Freelance Friday podcast' episode discussed in the transcript?
-The main topic of the episode is about how to get results for clients in social media management, including strategies and tools to ensure clients see the value of the work done.
What is the 'social media management toolbox for Notion' mentioned in the transcript?
-The 'social media management toolbox for Notion' is a set of 17 editable templates designed to help manage social media tasks and client relationships within the Notion platform.
What is the significance of a social media audit according to the podcast?
-A social media audit is important for analyzing historical data, identifying what has been done well and what hasn't, and establishing a baseline for performance metrics such as posting frequency and engagement.
Why is it necessary to look at industry benchmarks and the client's own account during an audit?
-It helps to compare the client's social media performance with industry standards and their own past performance to set realistic goals and identify areas for improvement.
What is the role of competitor analysis in social media strategy?
-Competitor analysis helps to identify what works well for similar businesses, understand the types of content that engage audiences, and find gaps in the market where the client can stand out.
How does the podcast suggest using Metricool to aid in competitor analysis?
-Metricool has a feature that allows users to input the names of competitors' social media accounts to automatically analyze their performance, saving time and effort in manual analysis.
What does the podcast recommend for creating a social media strategy?
-The podcast recommends considering the platforms to focus on, the types of content to post, the frequency of posting, and the overall goals and measurement methods for the strategy.
What is a buyer persona and why is it useful in social media management?
-A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the ideal customer, which helps in crafting marketing messages that resonate with the target audience and understanding their preferences and behaviors.
Why is it important to build a hashtag library as part of the social media strategy?
-A hashtag library helps in finding quality hashtags relevant to the client's content pillars, ensuring that posts reach the right audience and increase engagement.
How does the podcast suggest using a social media plan for initial client communication?
-The social media plan is used to showcase the initial ideas for content, captions, media, and hashtags to the client for approval, ensuring that the brand voice and strategy align with the client's expectations.
What is the significance of customer service in social media management as discussed in the podcast?
-Customer service on social media is crucial for building brand loyalty, addressing customer concerns, and managing crises. It also plays a role in the public perception of the brand.
How can saved responses in tools like Metricool improve customer service?
-Saved responses allow social media managers to quickly and consistently reply to common inquiries, improving efficiency and ensuring a high level of customer care.
Why is it important to include commentary in social media reports presented to clients?
-Commentary in social media reports helps clients understand the significance of the data, providing insights and recommendations for action, which is essential since clients are not experts in social media analytics.
Outlines
π Maximizing Client Results with Social Media Management
The speaker introduces the topic of getting tangible results for clients through social media management, emphasizing the importance of a structured approach. They reference a previous episode about client onboarding and mention a social media management toolbox for Notion, which includes 17 templates for various tasks. The speaker also highlights a limited-time 50% off launch sale for the toolbox. The discussion then shifts to the necessity of a social media audit, which involves analyzing historical data to establish a performance benchmark for the client's social media profiles. The process of competitor analysis is also covered, where the speaker advises identifying top competitors and examining their posting frequency, follower count, and engagement rates to identify gaps and opportunities.
π― Crafting a Social Media Strategy with Competitor Insights
This paragraph delves into the development of a social media strategy post-audit and competitor analysis. The strategy serves as a roadmap, helping to avoid bad habits and communicate intentions to the client. It includes deciding on which platforms to focus, what type of content to post, and how often. The speaker introduces the concept of content pillars or categories and the importance of assigning priority levels to tasks. They also touch on the creation of buyer personas to better understand the target audience and the process of building a hashtag library for effective content tagging across social media platforms.
π Organizing Social Media Content and Customer Service
The speaker discusses the organization of social media content through planning documents, emphasizing the importance of client approval, especially for sensitive campaigns. They mention the use of templates for social media plans and story planners, allowing for easy client sign-off and collaboration. The paragraph also addresses the critical role of customer service in social media management, including the handling of common inquiries and the establishment of an escalation plan for negative interactions. The speaker suggests using pre-canned responses and saved texts in tools like Metricool to streamline the customer service process.
π Reporting and Analyzing Social Media Performance
In the final paragraph, the focus is on reporting social media performance to clients. The speaker highlights the use of automated reporting tools in Metricool and the importance of simplifying data for clients who may not be experts in social media analytics. They advocate for adding personal commentary to reports to provide context and insights, helping clients understand the significance of the metrics and the actions to be taken based on the performance data. The speaker concludes by reiterating the value of the social media management toolbox and Metricool's impact on their business, encouraging listeners to take advantage of the current promotional offer.
Mindmap
Keywords
π‘Social Media Audit
π‘Engagement Rate
π‘Competitor Analysis
π‘Social Media Strategy
π‘Content Pillars
π‘Buyer Persona
π‘Hashtag Library
π‘Social Media Plan
π‘Customer Service Responses
π‘Social Media Report
π‘Metricool
Highlights
The importance of setting proper boundaries and onboarding clients for successful social media management.
Introduction of the social media management toolbox for Notion, featuring 17 templates for various client needs.
A 50 percent off launch sale for the Notion toolbox, available for a limited time.
The significance of conducting a social media audit to establish a baseline for client performance.
The role of industry benchmarks in comparing and setting goals for client social media engagement.
The process of identifying and analyzing top competitors to inform social media strategy.
The value of discovering gaps in the market through competitor analysis to find unique opportunities.
Sponsorship mention of Metricool, a tool for streamlining competitor analysis and social media management.
Features of Metricool that can automate and enhance social media strategy and reporting.
The necessity of developing a comprehensive social media strategy as a roadmap for client success.
Incorporating content pillars and categories into the social media strategy for focused messaging.
The process of determining posting frequency and platform prioritization in the social media plan.
The use of buyer personas to better understand and target the ideal customer for social media campaigns.
Building a hashtag library for effective and targeted social media post reach.
The initial social media plan presentation to clients for approval and collaboration.
The distinction between using a social media planner for approval processes versus direct scheduling in tools like Metricool.
The importance of customer service in social media management and developing a response plan.
Creating and utilizing saved responses for efficient customer service on social media platforms.
The role of social media reporting in demonstrating success and adjusting strategies based on data insights.
Providing clients with simplified reports and actionable insights to build trust and understanding.
Transcripts
Welcome back to the Freelance Friday podcast.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how to successfully book clients, get
them onboarded so that you can hit the ground running and start working together
with proper boundaries and all of that.
If you haven't checked out that episode, I'll be sure to link it for you.
Well, today I want to talk about part two.
Two of that, which is how to actually get results for your clients.
I hear this question all the time.
Hey, I've booked a client where I'm employed at a job.
How do I actually make sure that, you know, they see results from social media
and they see the value of what I do.
And that's what we're going to get into now.
Now, all of these.
Documents that I'm going to be talking about today are in the
social media management toolbox for notion, which is all new.
And at the time of recording this, we've got a few days left for
the 50 percent off launch sale.
So I'll leave that in the show notes, that link for you.
And it's a fully editable back office system for notion.
It has 17 templates.
That you can copy into your own notion account and start using with your clients,
everything from a prospecting sheet to a portfolio template, a case study
template, and a bunch of the templates that we're going to talk about today.
So be sure to check it out.
And, um, it's 50 percent off for a few more days at the time of recording.
So once you start working with a client, the first document that I recommend
pulling out and working with is.
Is the social media audit template now doing an audit of a social media
profile is really just taking a look at some historical data, if you have
it and seeing what they've done well, what they haven't done so well, posting
frequency, just all of that baseline kind of benchmarking data and a benchmark is
kind of just a way of comparing data.
So you might have an industry benchmark, meaning that you look at all the All of
the different social media accounts in the, let's say beauty space or in the
retail space or whatever, and establish kind of an average number of engagement or
followers or whatever that they may have.
But I think it's also important to look at your client's own account and say,
well, what is, what has been your norm?
What has been your average so that we can make sure that we're always
striving to at least be hitting those.
Previous, you know, previous highs, I suppose, of course, this is something
that you're going to do if your client already has social media accounts set up.
But if they're brand new, which sometimes happens, I get reached out to
by people who just need a social media presence in general, then of course
you'd be skipping this step and just moving on to a competitor analysis.
So I always like to talk to my clients and this is a part of
that onboarding process as well.
That, um, Google form that I send them or honey book form that I send them.
I asked them who their top competitors are, who in their industry, in their
space, would they consider to, you know, be going after the same customer as them?
Or selling the same type of product or service.
And I think three is usually a good number to start with.
And I just use this template and go through and do some manual digging.
Hey, here's how often brand a posts, here's the follower
account that they have.
Here's their engagement rate.
And you do that for as many competitors as you need to or want to.
And then you can also just kind of go through and figure out, all
right, well, what's working for them.
What types of.
Content are they posting?
What is their audience seem to be engaging with the most?
And here's the thing doing a competitor analysis.
Yes, of course, we're going to be taking some inspiration.
Perhaps if we see like, I don't know why every time I always say
Coca Cola, but it's just easy to compare Coca Cola and Pepsi, right?
If Pepsi sees Coca Cola is posting Instagram reels and having just.
You know, such a great impact from it.
That's where all their engagement is coming from.
Well, of course I would imagine Pepsi social media manager is going to say
we should try some reels as well, but a competitor analysis is also helpful
because the magic is often in the gaps.
I've had clients that are in the B2B space and they.
Only go to LinkedIn, right?
LinkedIn is like their go to, which is a great place if you're in B2B.
But I've suggested Twitter or X, and we've had great, great results from
that because they were one of few companies in their industry that were
having a really active, well thought out Twitter strategy, for instance.
So you may be able to not just learn from your competitors about what to
do, but also what they're not doing.
And of course, what not to do.
As well, I got to take a second to mention today's sponsor Metricool.
We love Metricool.
They're a longtime sponsor of the freelance Friday podcast.
And this one actually like, listen, competitor analysis manually.
Sure.
It's fine.
I've got a template for you in the toolbox, but Metricool actually
has a feature within their tool that allows you to just sort of.
Type in the names of the Instagram accounts or Facebook pages or
whatever of your competitors.
And it does a lot of this work for you.
So if you want to speed up that process, among so many other features,
definitely give Metricool a try.
You can use the code LaTosha.
I'll leave a link down below in the show notes.
You can use that code to get.
30 days free on any of their pro plans.
And let's talk about what all comes in that pro plan.
Some of the amazing premium features that are available across plans
are management of multiple brands analysis of up to 100 competitors.
That's huge.
Customizable links for any of your social media bios.
Downloadable reports, and you can even automate those monthly.
So cool.
A hashtag search engine for TOK.
You can assign team member roles and client access.
You can integrate with data studio and so much more.
So again, be sure to create your free account today and use
code Latasha to get 30 days free on any of those premium plans.
Okay.
So once you've got your audit, you've done some competitor analysis.
That should be.
Yeah.
Enough information for you to start thinking about the social media strategy.
And, you know, a social media strategy is really, it's your roadmap.
It's your blueprint to what you're going to do for your clients.
And it's there for a couple of reasons.
It's there one as an exercise for you.
Sometimes I hear from people who are like, Oh yeah, I just like start posting.
And of course you can do that.
But when I just kind of start posting, I notice I start to sort of develop some
bad habits, maybe some lazy habits, you know, I'm like, Oh yeah, well, it's fine.
It's just easier if I just do this, or if I just, you know, syndicate my
Instagram posts to Facebook and just don't really put too much thought in it.
You know what I mean?
So I can kind of get a little bit lazy, but it's also a communication
tool between you and your client.
So it's always a good idea to let your client know why you're posting
reels or why you're posting content under this particular topic, or, you
know, what the, what the end goal of this stuff is and how you're going
to measure everything, all of that.
So a social media strategy is going to include basically the
answer to all of these questions.
Where you're posting.
So which platforms are you going to focus on based on your audit,
based on your competitor analysis?
Are there, um, platforms that they should be on that they're not on?
Are there platforms that in your professional opinion, they're spending
a lot of time on and they really are not seeing much results from, are
there, you know, new things that you want to try new things on the horizon
that you just want to test, like figure that out where you're posting.
Also figuring out what you're posting, which could include both content
formats, So are you posting reels?
Are you posting, you know, long form videos?
Are you posting audio?
Are you posting links?
Are you posting text posts and so on, but also what the content pillars or
content categories or buckets, everybody calls them something different.
What those are going to be.
So what are you going to be talking about in these social media posts?
And then lastly, you also want to include when or how often
you're going to be posting.
Are you recommending that they post once a week on LinkedIn?
Are you recommending that they post three times a day on Twitter?
Right.
Or some combination of those, of course, in my social media strategies,
I also like to kind of assign priority levels because it can be a lot.
If I'm like client, listen, you need to be on Pinterest.
You need to start a podcast.
You need to start a YouTube channel.
Like.
That's a lot.
And that's just not realistic unless it's maybe a huge business with a huge
budget and a huge team that can help me.
So I'm going to prioritize and just really lay out, like, here are the
things that I'm going to work on in the first three months, and here's
how we're going to measure progress.
And if that goes well, we'll, we'll kind of move on to step
two, step three, et cetera.
Oh, another thing that maybe can be done before the social media strategy
or as a part of the social media strategy, it's really up to you.
Is a buyer persona, a buyer persona is it's building an archetype
essentially of your customer, of your clients, customer rather.
So this is an exercise that's been used for years and years in the
marketing world is really just truly like naming your customer.
Maybe it is Lisa, the librarian.
Or, um, Franny, the fashionista, I don't know, whatever, you know, however
cheesy or corny you want to make it be.
It is really helpful.
I like to ask my clients, you know, can you tell me about your dream customer?
Can you tell me about a client that you've had that you wish you
could like duplicate 10 times over?
When I say that to myself, I think of like a couple of specific faces of
people that I've actually worked with.
And so I just think about all of the.
Things that they have in common, or, you know, I write down as much as I know
about how they found me and what they care about in life and business and how
they like to take in information, some of that demographic data, like their
age group, or, you know, what country in the world they live in, what language
they speak, like all of that stuff is super helpful when you're crafting
your marketing messaging, because.
You know, there's local specific trends, there's age specific trends.
There's if my, my ideal client is a mom or if it's a dad versus a
young single professional, right.
I'm going to be making different jokes and different cultural references.
So building that out is really important.
And like I said, can be done either before the strategy or kind of as part of it.
If they don't already have one, a lot of times clients will already
have done this work, which is great.
And you can kind of just import that in.
And then something else I like to do kind of as part of the social
media strategy process is I like to build out a hashtag library.
I take some time.
I take a lot of time, honestly, and go through whichever the platforms are that
I'm focusing on for the client, because social media is not just Instagram.
I feel like it's really easy to just talk about Instagram for some reason.
Um, but yeah, I, you could do this for your LinkedIn.
You can do it for Twitter.
Uh, threads doesn't have hashtags, but they have like topic tags now.
So I take a good amount of time to really dig through those topics
that we've assigned as our content pillars or key areas of focus.
And I find quality hashtags and I put them into a document so that I
can really easily just save them.
Metricool actually has a really awesome feature where you can save texts.
So what I do is I use the hashtag library template in the social
media management toolbox for notion.
I find the high quality hashtags and then I save them in metrical.
So when I'm scheduling my content, I can just like pop those different.
Text buckets in, um, and adjust them if needed.
But yeah, really, I think hashtags require a bit of a manual dive because
it can have a really high volume of posts in the hashtag, but they cannot
be all junk and all spam or vice versa.
It can be a really small.
Small niche hashtag that is like perfect for your clients.
And I think that's the direction that hashtags are going now anyway, is
more small and niche versus like using hashtag love or hashtag shopping or
whatever, or too many hashtags too.
Okay.
So once you have all of that information, it's time to start
putting together a social media plan.
I generally like to let my clients see what I have in mind for the first
like week or a couple of weeks, or even up to a month after that, I'm
usually given the, you know, sort of.
stamp of approval to just go ahead and do my own thing.
So I really only use the social media plan.
That's in the toolbox for that, like initial period of time while
we're getting to know each other.
And I show this to my client and I get their approval on it because
I want to make sure that I'm getting their brand voice, right.
That, you know, they like it, that they're happy with my work, that.
You know, they're, they're confident.
They're building up that confidence in me to be able to
represent their, their brand.
So there's a template in here where I just write out the caption, write out the post,
upload the media, showcase the hashtags.
And then there's like a little checkbox that you can send this
document to them in notion, add them as a contributor and editor to the
doc, and then they can just click.
And sign off, if they're approving something, they can edit it themselves.
They can leave a comment and say, Hey, maybe can we like brighten up this photo?
Or can we change the caption or whatever that might be?
Another reason that I use this, um, social media planner, as opposed to just
scheduling directly into Metricool is.
Is for campaign approvals.
So for example, maybe we are getting ready for black Friday, cyber Monday,
and that's when they make like, you know, 70 percent of their revenue.
So it's really high stakes.
It's really important.
A lot is riding on it.
Well, I like to make sure that they, you know, get approval for my campaign.
Or even if there's maybe like a more sensitive topic that can veer
into like a controversial category.
So I want to make sure I'm.
So you can use something like that.
Metrical also does have an approval feature on the pro plans.
So that can be a nice way to do this too.
If you don't want to like send them a notion doc.
Um, I have a whole video about that as well, which I will link.
And then similarly a stories planner that's in the toolbox as well, so
that you can upload your vertical stories and stories are just kind
of unique in terms of their format.
So I like to send them a story.
separate social media plan for that, just because they're vertical.
There's like stickers you can put on question boxes.
It's just a little bit of a different way to process information.
So I send that to them separately.
And then we've got to talk about this customer service.
Customer service responses are such a huge part of a social media manager's job.
And I feel like we just don't talk about it enough.
I feel like we always think about social media.
As being a marketing role and it is, but there's also an element of customer
service, customer care, um, you know, brand loyalty, all of that involved
in a social media manager's job.
And when customer care goes wrong, that's when we hear about social
media managers behaving badly, right?
It's not because they didn't make the most influential social media
marketing campaign in the world.
It's because they Left their customers on red or they responded
really inappropriately or, you know, they just didn't do their job.
So getting together with your client and pulling up this template, there's
some canned responses already written out for you to start with of just
the basics of like, if somebody comes in and just says, Hey, or if they're
like, Hey, what are your hours?
You know, there's pre canned stuff that you just need to fill in
their specific, you know, hours of operation address, whatever.
But I also.
Encourage you to talk to your client about what common questions they
get specifically in their business.
And also figuring out what the escalation plan is for this customer service stuff.
Every client and every job I've worked with is different.
When I worked in, you know, fortune 500 companies, everything was like very.
Serious.
I mean, if somebody came in and said something really inappropriate or
threatening, for example, even like mildly threatening, like I could see in
an alternate universe, how that would be threatening, there was a whole escalation
plan of, I had to copy my manager.
I had to copy her manager.
I had to copy legal.
I had to copy the PR department.
Like.
All of these different people on an email with a copy, just so there
was a record of it and that they could investigate it if needed.
Obviously, I think a lot of smaller businesses probably don't deal with, you
know, life changing threats or, or wild things like that, but you never know.
So it's always good to talk to your client and just say, Hey, if somebody
doesn't like my response and they start yelling or swearing at me,
or if they start threatening, like what should I do in that scenario?
Um, And also with these customer service responses, I mentioned in metrical, you
can create saved text, which is cool.
So you could pop these into there, even just natively in the Instagram app,
for example, meta, you know, Facebook, you can create saved responses as well.
So you can, um, you know, write out these customer service responses
and then add them into one of your tools so that you can save them.
So you're not having to like type them out every single time.
And then lastly, a report, I put our social media report template in here.
You can also use Metricool for reporting.
And like I said, I love Metricool's reporting because you can automate it.
So you don't have to go do any manual digging at all.
You will just say, Hey, I want a report of my Instagram performance on the
first of every month emailed to me, and it will show up in your inbox.
You just got to do the initial setup.
It takes just a few minutes.
It's amazing.
But you can also use this social media report.
In combination with your metrical reporting, because I, again, if there's
like a specific campaign or maybe just a specific month, again, maybe it's
like cyber Monday, black Friday time or course launch time or new product launch
or whatever, I like to just pull that stuff out and show them, show some like
highlights, show some of my commentary alongside the data, because the thing is.
Your client is not being paid to understand social media.
Just like I'm not being paid to understand dermatology, hairstyling,
um, you know, I don't know, plumbing, any of the services that I pay for, it
is not my job to really understand them outside of just an elementary level.
That's why I pay people to help me with those things.
So you need to really be able to break it down, simplify it for your client
and explain to them why the numbers that they're looking at are Why they matter.
What is the insight?
What action are we going to take if it's bad?
Um, or even if it's good, how can we amplify that success or
maintain that success at minimum?
So adding your commentary in here is really important.
And this template, uh, helps you do so.
So that's how you get success for your clients.
In my opinion, it's by building out really solid social media strategy and just doing
good work and reporting on that good work.
And all those tools are available for you in the toolbox.
I'll leave that link in the show notes.
Let me know if you have questions about any of this stuff.
It's just high level.
Of course we can go in depth, a lot more.
In future episodes or videos, but, um, yeah, I really hope this was
helpful and huge things to Metro cool as always for sponsoring the podcast.
You can use the code Latasha for 30 days free on any of their pro plans.
It's changed my business.
I'm not even joking.
I know so many of you guys love them too.
So thanks for supporting the sponsor of the show and the show in general.
And I'll talk to you in my next one.
Bye.
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