Do you represent an agency with a lot of clients, or an individual who wants to free up time to be creative and let automation do the post scheduling, niche research, conversation finding and account handling for you?
If so you’ve probably considered using social media management software or online services for the task.
In my “other life” as a marketing director at Gambit-Nash, I’ve recently had to spec and cost up a solution for this, and was more than a little surprised to see that the headline figures for paid social media management tools bore little to no relation to the actual cost of using these tools commercially. Read on to see what the problem is, and a proposed solution.
Agency Level Social Media Management
At some point, either as an agency, or an individual with multiple clients (or multiple sites with different persona’s) to manage, you might grow out of the free version of Hootsuite, Sproutsocial or whatever tool you use. First what should a good tool do as a minimum?
Handle Multiple Accounts And Account Switching On The Fly
Switching between accounts is a bug for most. Logging out, logging back in, often re-entering all the user data, getting warnings from the site that your IP address or the PC you are using already has 3 twitter accounts associated with it or whatever (effectively meaning the software won’t let you add any more). As an agency this quickly becomes a pain. Every time you log out and log back in your work flow is interrupted and you risk coming across one of these blocks that just stops you dead.
Find Conversations Based In Niches, Websites Or Based On Keywords
A good social media tool also goes to the trouble of finding you conversations. Looking across whatever platforms you operate in searching for communities and conversations that you can join, watch (community lurking, come on, we’ve all done it at some point) or that don’t currently exist, offering you the opportunity to create them.
“Wow there is no community on Google+ for this new product yet, let’s get in first, form a circle”
Looking for something that isn’t there? Yeah it’s not so easy, but the rewards can be huge.
Anyway, back to the point. Finding these conversations. Places to get involved. Spots for link building, advertising, brand building, conversation joining, list building. You know the kind of thing.
Good tools go out and search for these things. Free versions of Hootsuite and the others pretty much suck at this. They either don’t do them at all, or have some very tight restrictions on the number it will find or the time it will spend looking. A sample of a service that is just enough to whet your appetite and see the value. This feature is a must.
Post Scheduling
My main use of Tweetdeck, Sproutsocial and others is to schedule posts and updates to go out regularly.
To be efficient at my job I prepare a block of content at once to work with over a given time period. A tool should then allow me to add the Tweets, Facebook et al updates to a schedule. While as a responsible agency or social media user, you are always on the lookout for breaking news and conversations, your run-of-the-mill posting is most time economically done in batches,
For example queuing up 14 Facebook updates to go out two a day for a week, then move on to the next client. Constantly being at my desk to personally post every update for every account night and day is not possible when you have 25 clients each with say 6 social media accounts across a range of platforms and an expectation that each one gets content 5x a week. That would involve all day doing nothing but logging in and out of accounts. I need a tool to schedule posts and updates en-bloc.
Allow Multi User Or Hot-Desk Working
If you work alone this is not so much of an issue. Ideally though you want to scale up with multiple users if you are an agency. Having each social media manager with their own account on whatever application you use to manage with. How does this impact on price? Is it possible to “hot desk” one user account that is shared by several social media managers. You’ll need to answer these questions, because as you will see later, the number of users scales the price on these well known applications dramaticallyExpensive subscriptions
It Would Be Nice If They Also Provided Client Ready Reports
Agencies need to provide reports. How many followers has a client added in the month? How many click through s did that Facebook post get? Has the Circle on Google+ you set up for a client grown at all. How did the advertising spend go.
While no solution I saw here answers all the questions a comprehensive client support monthly report should really have, some do it better than others. One needs you to stump up about $8 for every report you run, but disguises this daylight robbery as “credits” The killer being – it’s not even very good after all that.
Remember this is not cost per client. It is cost per profile.
Most clients in my experience have between 5 and 10 profiles, so multiply the cost in the right hand column by the number of profiles you are managing for a true price.
An average cost seemed to add up to several hundred dollars per client per month.
If you have multiple per month reporting requirements It is quite possible to have clients who insist on reports clients weekly or twice monthly. You probably need to pass this full cost on, but justifying it can be hard, especially as the reports produced are not actually any better than the ones you can pull yourself.
It might come as no surprise that we strongly recommend Buzzbundle on a cost per client basis, though there are some considerations you need to take into account. Below is an affiliate link. Just so we are clear on this Smile A full review of Buzzbundle is coming in the next couple of weeks.
Get Noticed!
Typical Client Monthly Workload
How to manage client workload in a cost effective and time efficient manner
A Few Questions You Will Want To Consider
Were you responsible for the previous work? If not, say this is a new client for you and another SEO company has worked for them with a period of time before, start with a detailed search through everything you can find. The links from GWMT, the links again from a tool like Majestic, the profiles on any social media. Is it good? Can it be improved? Might it even be dangerous?
Dangerous?
It’s not just negative SEO that is a danger. I’ve dealt with companies where previous SEO work has resulted in what might be considered libellous posts on social media criticising the competition without a firm foundation in fact.
I’ve seen Adwords accounts hammered with poor target scores to the point that, should PPC be considered a viable option, a remedial job needed to be done to regain Google’s trust even in paid traffic.
Facebook pages full of third party spam. A presence on pornography or hate sites – even incidents where members of the business the site represents had some rather incongruous activities from outside the workplace associated with their business site.
The list goes on. If you’ve inherited on-going SEO – check it out – thoroughly.
Assuming it is in fact your work, how did it fare? Did you create, broadcast and promote it effectively.
My second tip is that content creation is not enough
You need to broadcast and promote, often.
Particularly early on in a sites life, this promotion might mean spending a few dollars. It tends to pay ever increasing dividends as the site grows and ages.
If some posts were largely ignored, check the headlines, the feature image, the channels you used to promote. In my experience good content can be promoted several times as long as you aren’t spamming the same channels too often. Sometimes a better image and a good headline is all it needs.
Always Start With A Plan
What is Working?
Your check through of previous work should highlight what is working and what isn’t. Bearing in mind that all social interaction is not born equal. While a Facebook post “Like” or a new Twitter follower doesn’t add much value normally – A click-through to the clients sales page is a win for sure, and from a purely social media view point, as long as you are pre-warming the visitors and they are interested in the niche, this is as much as you can do. If you have no control over the landing page itself, then your remit finishes right here. If however, you or your company also built the website then clearly you have a responsibility to follow the visitors trail through and make sure the conversion levels are good, and always looking for improvements in this regard. Pure website conversion analysis, testing and optimization is outside the scope of this series, but you can take a look at these resources that will guide you.
- Measuring Conversion Rates Accurately
- A Good Outline Of Common Ways To Improve Conversion Rates
- Content Requirements For The Coming Month
Tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, articles, images. The list goes on and on. It would be easy to get lost in a spiral of reacting rather than planning, so get started early and plan your month out.
Source or create as much as you can early in the monthly cycle (assuming your clients run on monthly billing and reporting) A typical month for a client on high end social media management might be.
- 1 Blog post per week (4 a month)
- 3 Tweets per day
- 1 Facebook post per day
Management and Optimization of PPC
If the client has visual products or services, a regular post through to Pintrest might be in order, additionally B2B clients will often expect 150 word posts to Linkedin.
Involvement in bespoke community blogs and forums
Over time it is vital to add value by getting the clients brand built not just on pure social media, but also on WEB2.0 properties, forums and blogs. For brand building these will be the pre-existing “hang outs” for professionals in the same field as you or your client. For customer reach it will be a second set of sites where customers would be likely to congregate.
- JOIN DISCUSSIONS ALL OVER THE WEB WITH AS MANY DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS AS YOU NEED
- ADD YOUR OWN EXISTING SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES OR CREATE THEM DIRECTLY FROM WITHIN THE APPLICATION
- ANALYSE THE COMMUNITIES ACROSS A WIDE RANGE OF PLATFORMS. TWITTER, FACEBOOK, GOOGLE+, YOUTUBE AND LINKEDIN AS WELL AS FORUMS AND BLOGS
- SCHEDULE AND PUBLISH DIRECTLY FROM BUZZBUNDLE
For that initial client meeting. Getting the deal and deciding on the KPIs that are going to be measured as a metric of success of failure First you need to understand the client’s market and existing website (assuming they have one) So let’s deal with an overview of that first;
Initial Thought Process For Social Marketing Or SEO
On The Clients Site
A popular way of working, and the method I prefer, is to create great content regularly on the clients own site. There is always a way to do this if you are creative, even if you need to attach a blog to sub- domain or internal folder of the site. Having regularly updated, fresh content on the target site and using social media to promote it is one of the main differentiators between social media marketing and SEO.
What you post on the clients site provides the “seed” for your social media campaign for the month. The snippets, updates, tweets and images you broadcast through social media channels would be best linking back, most of the time directly, to the fresh content on the client site
What articles, posts, tweets, images or videos have produced a positive consumer response? Which posts did you spend time replying to last month?. ? Which have the most comments, and social activity surrounding them.
Don’t assume that they are finished. Really popular content, like a fine wine, might just get better with age.
Sometimes you might consider re-using popular previously successful content rather than creating new content. This re-use technique should not be over-used, having fresh perspectives and new content keeps regular customers coming back for more.
It’s been suggested that a first posting and promotion only gets around 45% of the potential traffic/visitors. Leaving the content for a month and re-posting would get a further 30% and a third time 15-20%. The figures then drop off significantly, but you can see the value in promoting the same content a few times if it is good enough and not too time sensitive.
On Social Media
Clients Social Media Results Cockpit
These days most paid and some unpaid social media portals supply a good set of metrics. The image above is straight from Facebook. Twitter, Stumbleupon, Linkedin, Google and Pintrest all have similar portals. You need to be using these and reporting on the results on a monthly basis to your client base.
There are paid “clients” (as is social media management applications) like Hootsuite and BuzzSprout that provide reports for you across a while range of social media outlets. However, once you start dealing with large numbers of clients the seemingly low starter price for a paid subscription starts to incur (frankly) huge costs.
Handling 12 clients with 5 social media accounts each in Hootsuite for example will cost in the region of $600 per month. If that sounds expensive enough, wait till you hear the rest. This $600 will not provide full access to all the detailed reports. For this you buy extra credits which cost $45 dollars for 50 and that’s enough for just 3 full reports. Imagine if you have a client that wants a full report weekly – and across a wide range of profiles? Ouch!
Just to re-iterate, this extra reporting cost is per client… per month. This is on top of the already enormous subscription.
Be careful not to get fooled by the inviting $9.95 a month initial offer for the Pro account, which looks like it offers everything in a simple scalable solution. It doesn’t.
Let’s take a look at the features a good social media management application needs to have and cost up the likely amount per month per client (or profile) you might need to set aside to pay for all this.
In my “other life” as a marketing director at Gambit-Nash, I’ve recently had to spec and cost up a solution for this, and was more than a little perturbed to see that the headline figures for paid social media management tools was more than a little understated.
It starts with the scaling up of cost once you need just a little more flexibility than is offered by the (normally heavily advertised) single user or lite version of well-known social media management tools.
Have you recently considered signing up to one of the below because the “lite” version is advertised at under ten dollars a month?
You might end up going on the same research journey I did and finding that the true cost is very much higher than that. So much so, that I came away from the exercise shrugging my shoulders at the nerve of some of the players in this field for advertising I considered a little misleading.
As an agency I looked at managing 50 profiles for clients. Enough for between 5 and 10 clients in our experience. This is what I found. If you are as perplexed as I was between the disconnect between the advertised price (which turns out to be for such a limited service as to be next to useless in all cases) and the real cost of social media management – Follow the links and work out the prices for your own needs. See what I mean?
Sendible – $130 – $2500* Sendible work differently. Not cost per profile, cost per service. Managing a single Twitter feed involves 5 services. Tweeting is a service, following is a service, re-tweeting is a service. Checking mentions is another service, and you pay for each one you use. If you want only one or two services per client then under $200 is perhaps possible. If you want full functionality through the Sendible interface for the dozen clients and 50 profiles we are looking at here, then $2000 per month is closer to the mark.
I mention it every time I post on this topic, but don’t mix your peers with your potential clients.
- Don’t market to your competitors.
- Don’t write in “business speak” to your customers.
This is the single biggest content placement error I see in social marketing.
They are most likely two separate communities, and need their own individual effort.
Outsource FTW
If you are an agency, are you outsourcing and automating? If not, why not?
Consider Automation
There are authors, artists, social media tools, paid content propagation services and new opportunities to improve arriving in social media marketing every day. Make time to check them out, analyse their use, risk testing them on dummy projects, then add them to your clients armoury of tools and outlets. Here’s a short list of just a few areas to look at;
- Content authoring using Elance or services like Iwriter or SEO generals
- Free and/or royalty free images. Consider the new Getty image embeds. (Free)
Small scale multimedia design on sites like Fiverr. Ok not for the clients main logo, but say they have a promotion starting and running for a couple of days that they need a quick image of video creating for – $5 will get you one. $20 (in the form of Gig extras) can get you some amazing work and free up your time
Automate posting, use schedulers (see the tool list above)
For news set up services like Google Alerts to send you the latest info in a niche daily
In my experience, servicing one client a month can take 40 hours – or 10-15. If you want to scale up then charging a realistic fee to cover service costs, and automating process you have taken the time to understand and can vouch for the value of, is vital for success.
Respond To Community Feedback Regularly
This last part is perhaps the most important.
So far we have fed the content monsters regularly. Set up schedules with all the various social portals and diligently posted to them.
The thing is the whole point of doing this is to elicit a response from visitors and potential customers, and if you want to grow the community, build trust and develop brand – you are going to have to respond when the community answers back.
Every post, article, image and multimedia entity you put out there should be doing one of these three things at least.
- Building identity and brand through trust
- Channelling potential clients directly to an offer
- Asking or answering a question that might impact on the two issues above
Building trust requires communication. Answer queries from users, join in conversations, be honest. Engage with those who respond to your posts, even the less flattering ones. A good polite reply to an angry post will show you as a reasonable thoughtful company. An ear that listens to ideas for improvements in your product or service gives your potential client base a feeling of “buying in” to you as a brand. Something that sparks an emotion or makes a connection is also good. Whether that’s something amusing, thought provoking or a little frightening, as long as you are not being sensationalist or off topic for no reason, then emotions win.
Special offer day? Then straight to a sales landing page is fine. Go for it The type of content that wins in this second category is very different. Be pointed and have a clear call to action. This is not about distracting people with community building conversations, this is about getting to the point of sale ASAP.
Why should we buy? Why should we even trust you? By asking and answering questions you build trust and smooth both brand building and any later overt sales push that might be required. Ask as often if not more often than you answer. To an extent let your community set the agenda, consider it free marketing. They are telling you what they want, what concerns them and how they base their buying decisions, listen to them and ask if you are not sure.
Being a smart-ass company rarely works for SME’s. Better to be a listening one.
Be Human!
People buy from people, or at least based on the assurances of people or the trust built up from a brand or person. Being responsive shows that a real company exists, one that can answer queries, offer support and be there for the long haul.
That last point is worth hammering home. For all the benefits of automation, being yourself (in a pro way of course) and developing your own voice and brand is going to get you a long way. It may take a little time for that voice to develop, but work on it, and it will come.