10 Ways How a Social Media Agency Can Help Your Business
Most people hiring a social media agency think they're buying posts. The posts are the visible tenth of it, and the other nine tenths are where the bookings come from.
What Does a Social Media Agency Actually Do?
Most people who hire a social media agency think they are buying posts. A certain number per week, nicely designed, appearing on schedule.
That is the visible tenth of the job. The other nine tenths are where the bookings come from, and it is the part nobody puts in the proposal.
Short answer: a social media agency decides what to say, produces it, publishes it, answers what comes back, and tells you whether any of it produced customers. The publishing is the easy part. The deciding and the answering are what you are actually paying for.
What the work involves, honestly
Six things, and the order matters because most of the value sits at the top.
Deciding what to say. Who you are talking to, what they need to hear, and what you are trying to make happen. An agency that starts by asking how many posts you want is skipping this, and the posts will show it.
Producing it. Writing, design, photography, video, editing. This is the visible output and it is also the most replaceable part.
Publishing it. Scheduling, formats, sizes, the right thing in the right place. Almost entirely mechanical and increasingly automated.
Answering. Comments and direct messages, on time, in a voice that sounds like you. This is where enquiries turn into bookings and where most accounts quietly leak money.
Watching what happens. Not reach and likes. Saves, shares, messages, and whether any of it reached the till.
Telling you the truth about it. Including the months when it did not work and why.
Notice that publishing sits in the middle and is the thing most people think they are buying.
Why posts alone don't produce bookings
Someone sees a good reel. They tap through to a website that takes six seconds to load, cannot find a price, and leave.
The post did its job perfectly. Everything after it was missing.
This is the most common reason a business concludes that social media does not work for them. The content was fine. The path from content to purchase was broken, and nobody was looking at it because the brief said "posts".
Publishing is the front door of marketing. A front door is useful and it is not a house. We wrote about where the rest of the house sits in our piece on the website as the foundation.
What a good agency does that a cheap one doesn't
A good one | An expensive-looking one | |
|---|---|---|
Starts by | Asking what a customer is worth to you | Asking how many posts you want |
Content source | Things that happened inside your business | Stock imagery and category templates |
Messages and comments | Answered same day, in your voice | Left for you, or answered generically |
Monthly report | What produced enquiries, and what to change | Reach, impressions and follower growth |
When results dip | Tells you why, including when it's their fault | Shows you a chart that went up |
Will tell you | That social isn't your bottleneck, if it isn't | That you need more posts |
The last row is the one worth testing in a first conversation. An agency that has never told a prospect "this isn't your problem" is an agency that sells the same thing to everybody.
If you're already paying for social and can't tell whether it's producing anything, that's a specific thing to look at. Talk to us.
What you still have to do yourself
No agency can produce the material that makes your account yours instead of generic. That means photos from normal working days, the questions customers actually ask, and a yes or no on drafts within a few days.
It sounds like more than it is. Ten or fifteen minutes a week, mostly forwarding things that already exist on your phone. We set out exactly what and how often in our piece on what an agency needs from you.
The accounts that go generic almost always went generic because that flow stopped, not because the agency got worse.
When you don't need a social media agency
Three situations, and we turn work away for all of them.
If nobody buys from you through social. Some businesses genuinely sell through search, referral or footfall, and social is a slow third priority. Pouring money into it because competitors post daily is how budgets get wasted.
If your offer or pricing is unresolved. Marketing amplifies a clear business and cannot invent one. Posting louder about something confusing makes the confusion travel further.
If you can post well yourself and enjoy it. Some owners are the best content their business will ever have. In that case what you might need is help with the strategy and the website, not with the publishing.
How much should it cost?
Nobody can answer that honestly without knowing two things: what a customer is worth to you, and how much of the work you can supply yourself.
What we can tell you is what the price is usually made of. Strategy time, production time, publishing time, community management time, and reporting. When a quote looks unusually low, one of those has been removed, and it is nearly always the community management or the strategy. Those are the two that produce results, which is why they are the two that get cut to hit a price.
Ask any agency to break the number into those five parts. The answer tells you what you are buying.
The short version
You are not hiring someone to fill a calendar. You are hiring someone to decide what is worth saying, say it properly, answer the people who reply, and tell you whether it worked.
If the conversation is only ever about how many posts, you are buying the tenth of the job that a scheduling tool could mostly do.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a social media agency do?
Decides what to say, produces it, publishes it, answers the comments and messages it generates, and reports on whether it produced customers. Publishing is the visible part and the least valuable. The strategy and the responding are what the money is for.
How much does a social media agency cost?
It depends on what a customer is worth to you and how much material you can supply yourself. Ask for the price broken into strategy, production, publishing, community management and reporting. Unusually cheap quotes have usually removed community management or strategy, which are the two that produce results.
How long before social media produces results?
Engagement can shift within weeks. Enquiries and bookings work on a scale of months, because they depend on people seeing you more than once and on the path from post to purchase being clear. Anyone promising fast sales from organic social is describing paid ads.
Do I need a social media agency if I already post myself?
Possibly not. If you post well and enjoy it, you may be the best content your business has. What owners in that position usually need is help with strategy and with the website receiving the traffic, and not with the publishing itself.
How involved do I have to be?
Around ten to fifteen minutes a week, plus a short monthly call. Almost all of it is forwarding photos and answering approvals. Accounts that drift towards generic content are nearly always accounts where that flow stopped.
How do I know if my current agency is any good?
Look at last month's report. If it leads with reach, impressions and follower growth, it was designed not to be judged. A useful report tells you which content produced messages and enquiries, and what will change next month because of it.