5 Essential Questions You Need To Ask Your Clients Before Creating Their Social Media Calendar

Praveen Kumar

Jun 30, 2016

4 min read

“Failing to plan is planning to fail” that is an old but a wise adage that is true when we talk about social media marketing strategy. For your client, the task might have got over by just outsourcing the social media marketing job to your agency, but your job starts when your client’s job ends. Creating a detailed, goal-oriented social media strategy gives you a rock solid boost to proceed seamlessly during the campaigns. “If your social media strategy is just for the heck of it, your fans and potential customers are going to know” said Amy Porterfield, leading social media strategist and co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies. In the worst case scenario, your clients would turned off of your brand and move on to your competitors. To carefully strategise and plan your every step while marketing for your client, will help you in the long run and smooth relationships with your client. And to plan, you need to ask some specific questions, and we’ll tell you why you need to ask those questions.

1. What your client expects to achieve through social media marketing?

It totally depends on your client’s business type. He may want to use social media to popularize his brand, to directly interact with potential customers, or to promote specific products, services or website. Even if that question is answered, you need a deeper understanding about the customer’s needs. Specifically think about how you can solve those needs by using social media. That’s a big task and needs to be documented.

2. Does the client needs a presence on all social media channels?

That is the question that needs your expertise to answer it correctly. If the client demands that he wants his company to feature on all social media channels then it is you who could tell all the pros and cons involved. If certain channels do match up with the need of your client then you need to inform him. Usually for small businesses it is advisable that they start by using one blog site and one social media network-which one? Where most of your client’s customers are present. To add to the discussion, there are other social media channels than Facebook where your client’s business can show up. One is Twitter, that is a platform easy to learn and use, and it’s 140 character limit is unbeatable. Second is Google+, which is essential to boost your Search Engine Optimization(SEO) efforts. If your client’s firm is a B2B, then probably LinkedIn or Slideshare can help you reach out the influencers in your client’s industry. For B2C, being on Facebook and Pinterest will be a smarter option.

3. Does your client wants to use social media as a customer service platform?

If your client’s answer is yes then you’ll need to dedicate a person for this task. Social media is fast becoming the most common way for current and potential customers to interact with businesses. In such cases, people will reach out to your page either to praise the company’s products and services or to complain about some product. In such a case an ORM(Online reputation management) is essential to handle for your marketing agency.

4. How often do we post on social media channels?

Depending on your client’s industry type, certain content has to be posted on the chosen social media channels. For example, channels like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+ are more of visually attracting channels and hence the posts should be related to these. Memorable images of your products, company event videos, behind the scene employees at work, fun work environment are some of the kind of posts that work well. Frequency of the posts is usually 2- 5 times day that works well with these channels because all of the target audience is not present at the time you post and posts become stale in news feed and are lost. Scheduling the posts at fixed intervals during the day have worked better for many successful campaigns.

5. How we are going to report about the success of our social media marketing efforts?

Your client will definitely want to know how their money is being spent on the marketing efforts. To provide them with the analytics report, you can use either the metrics offered by the social channel itself like Facebook offers Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and many more. If you are looking at using third party tools then you can follow this article on- 19 free social media analytics tools for marketers. You can use the data generated by the report to not only report it to your client but also to better plan your future posts and decide on the most effective ways to interact with the account fans and followers.