If you manage social media accounts for different companies, managing multiple accounts at once can be a bit difficult. These tips help you learn the basics of how to manage social media accounts for clients.
This article is all about how to manage social media accounts for clients, from setting up the accounts to producing daily updates. Some part of your job may be done on behalf of a client, for example if you belong to a company that provides marketing and promotions services to their customers. In fact you can manage social media accounts for one or more of them!
Create social media account groups for scheduling
Managing social media for 9 clients simultaneously? That can be smooth and easy, or confusing and chaotic depending on how you manage your two most important resources – talent and time.
Some social media management tools allow you to create groups of social media accounts for easy scheduling. Imagine being able to post content across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram pages for one client in one click. That would not only save you time and effort, but also save you some pain and frustration.
Curate content via RSS feeds and keyword based content streams
Creating content for the same clients every single day? Agency marketers are celebrated for their creativity, but no amount of creativity can make repetitive work easy or interesting. With content curation, agency marketers can collect new ideas or curate entire pieces for clients.
Many social media management tools enable users to curate content via RSS feeds and keyword based content streams. Agency marketers can use these features to create a content idea resource to fuel daily brainstorming sessions.
Organize ideas, complete posts and reusable posts in easy-access folders
Working with dozens of social media posts daily? That amounts to hundreds of posts a week and thousands of posts a month. If you have invested deeply in creating that much content, you probably won’t have the heart to use it once and throw it all away. Here’s a neat idea – don’t. Save your posts in organized folders in an accessible place.
Some social media management tools have created libraries, queues or folders within them that store content long-term. Save your best posts in separate folders for different clients and reuse them occasionally. Or save drafts and ideas to work with when needed.
Create goal-oriented social media strategies
What are your endgames and deliverables for each client? If you don’t have these documented clearly, you can’t align client expectations to your team’s approach. That’s a surefire way to client dissatisfaction.
In order to get those endgames and deliverables nailed down, set SMART goals that are specific, quantifiable, and in line with why your client hired you. Many small agencies do this but face setbacks during execution because of hurdles and circumstances that are unforeseen. Here are two major red flags to watch out for:
- Sometimes, clients aren’t great at articulating what they expect of you. That’s why you should spend a sufficient amount of time understanding their requirements. It’s best if you have a set of go-to questions to assess what clients actually need from you.
- It’s easy to stray away from end goals in day-to-day execution. Ensure that you and your team review all social media content keeping goals in mind. It’s also a good idea to have daily or weekly exams to check if you’re on track.
Build a network of active freelancers
Your first concern after accepting a client project should be capacity. You need to make sure you have the resources to produce quality work within the agreed upon deadlines. Most small agencies have one account manager handling way too many client accounts, which can lead to problems with delivery. If that manager is tied up, then there’s no one to follow up and ensure delivery.
The situation could also become dicey if you have already accepted to work with too many clients and there isn’t enough capacity to handle daily assignments for clients. Here’s how you can avoid these crises:
- Ensure that your point-person, whether an account manager or strategist, has every client’s information and strategy documented in a meticulous manner. This is essential when getting work executed through multiple resources.
- Build a network of active freelancers on whom you can depend for extra work from time to time. This is more cost-effective than keeping full-time in-house employees who may not have enough work to justify a yearly cost to company.
- Test freelancers’ capabilities and worth ethics beforehand by giving them small parts of projects to handle. That way you can find out if they’re reliable under pressure without too much risk.
Employ low-cost project management software
Keeping your clients’ account details, documents, and content in one place for all project contributors to access is a key part of managing client social media accounts efficiently. Another important part of managing multiple projects without hangups is investing in good project management software. The good news is that there are several free and affordable software options that you can use to automate or streamline most repeat tasks. That leaves you with more time to focus on strategy and improve performance.
There are so many different types of project management software that you can use, but these are particularly helpful for managing client social media accounts:
- DrumUp: Instead of keeping client logins and content in confusing sheets, you could connect client social accounts to DrumUp and group each client’s accounts for easy scheduling. Instead of keeping created social media content in different places, you can store it all in customizable content libraries on this tool. You can then schedule that content right in DrumUp.
- Trello: You can delegate work, set deadlines, and track progress of projects using a Trello board. Every employee or freelancer involved in a project can be invited to this board for easy and effective communication.
- Canva: If you need a quick way to create Facebook, Twitter or Instagram visuals or infographics, you can work with templates on Canva, thereby saving time and effort spent on graphic design. Many of Canva’s templates are free for use.
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Steps for creating a winning client social media strategy
Here are the key components of any social media strategy:
- Client interview and goal defining
- Research and analysis
- Choose the client’s social media channels
- Create KPIs and set goals
- Define the client’s content pillars
- Create a posting schedule
- Workflows, collaboration, and sign-off process
- Customer service and crisis management
Client interview and goal defining
This is the most important step in the creation of your client’s social media strategy.
If you don’t have the best possible grasp of your clients’ actual needs, your best work is as likely to miss as it is to hit.
Even if your results are amazing.
To find your client’s goals, here’s a few questions you can kick off with:
- What are your monthly, quarterly, and annual marketing goals?
- Where do you see social media helping you reach marketing goals?
- What do you feel is the biggest weakness in your current social strategy?
- What do you feel is the biggest strength in your current social strategy?
- Who is a competitor you would like to beat?
- What other brands do you like? Which ones would you want to be like?
- Do you currently have super followers? Are we able to get in touch with them?
- What are your monthly, quarterly and annual sales goals?
- Where do you see social helping you achieve sales goals?
You’ll also want to interview a few people in the business:
- CMO or head of marketing
- Content marketer/manager/specialist
- Social media manager
- Product marketer
- Sales
- Support
You’re not always going to get all these people on a call or in a meeting.
What’s important is that you get the best possible understanding of what needs to happen from a range of viewpoints.
Best yet, by being the focal point of these different groups, you’ll be able to reveal to them things they never knew.
And that kind of insight makes you invaluable.
Research and analysis
Research is the foundation of any great social media strategy. Having data to back up your recommendations adds a layer of legitimacy to your plan and makes it more certain that the client will reach their goals.
It’s also a good idea to perform a social media audit on the client’s existing accounts before developing your strategy. This will give you an idea of their strengths and weaknesses. You can apply the findings from your audit to pinpoint the best ways to improve the client’s results.
Your research and analysis should cover three areas: Audience discovery, Competitor analysis and Industry standards.
Audience discovery
First and foremost, you need to know who your client’s customers are. What are their interests and behaviors? When are they most active on social media? The client can’t reach their audience if they don’t know where they are.
It’s important to regularly check the client’s social media analytics to see which channels most of their engagement is happening and when. Sked Social uses data-driven and statistics-backed analytics for Instagram. Find the best time to post, analyze your post and story performance, compare your activity against your competitors, and more with our free 7 day trial.
You can also use built-in platform insights to learn more about your client’s audience. On Instagram for example, if your client has a business account, you can go into “insights” at the top of the page and see a breakdown of their audience’s age ranges, locations, and the days of the week and times of day that they are most active. This will affect the types of content and the posting schedule you set out for the client.
Conclusion
Managing social media accounts for clients takes time, but there are ways to make the process easier. This article addresses using bulk uploads to manage multiple social media accounts at once.