What does a social media marketing agency actually do?

“What does a social media marketing agency do?”

My parents once asked me this recently, and I thought it was funny.

If my parents don’t understand what we do, then our prospective clients probably don’t either.

In a nutshell, most day-to-day activities inside a social media marketing agency are focused on creating and organising content, and then scheduling and publishing that content across various channels.

It is rewarding to know that millions of people have seen our copywriting and hit the “like” button on posts that we’ve created but it’s important to remember that social media is not glamorous and it certainly isn’t about vanity metrics like “likes” and followers.

There is one core component of social media marketing that cannot be ignored or forgotten.

This is the one thing that makes social media a marketing activity and not just a fun pastime executed for shits and giggles.

And what we're referring to is probably pretty surprising to outsiders because when people tend to think about “social media” – the first thing that pops into their heads is cat memes and selfies…

But what we’re talking about is reporting and analysis. 

Social Media Reporting

As a team, we spend a lot of our time aggregating data and analysing it.

We’ve even gone as far to say that we are a data analytics company at times, and we use social media to create the data we need to analyse.

Understanding the data that comes in from posting on social media is the key to a winning strategy.

If you aren’t paying attention to the data, which is right there for you to grab by the way, then you will continue with sub-par strategies and growth will be slower.

Internal Reports: We regularly audit our accounts and use that data to make detailed internal reports that inform our content direction and overall strategy.

External Reports: We also make detailed reports for our clients. We report on our efforts and successes or failures in an effort to prove the client should keep us around for another month.

Ok, but what services does a social media marketing agency offer?

All social media agencies price themselves differently and not all social media agencies will offer the same services. We have our prices clearly on display for transparency.

In fact, most don’t really offer a whole lot of support on the organic side. But, we’ve found the best results using a mix of organic and paid strategies.

Truth is, social media is only as good as what you have to say. 

Core Services

At Honest London, we’ve tested a number of different digital tactics in order to target, engage, and convert the audiences of our clients. Those tactics all boil down into a few categories which make up our main service offerings.

Those categories are:

• Account Management

• Customer Service

• Creativity

• A focused strategy

• Advertising

• Account Growth

There are a few other components that don’t exactly fit perfectly into any of these categories, and I’ll get to those in just a minute, but first, let’s dive into the core services.

Account Management

Account management comes in two flavours.

The first is about publishing and content creation, the second is about engagement.

Tasks like finding relevant content to share (aka content curation), promoting a piece of original content, optimising a headline for a social post, creating visual assets, brainstorming content topics, gathering industry-specific statistics or defining a posting schedule would fall into the publishing and content creation arena.

Responding to messages, reaching out to influencers, creating strategic partnerships, deleting spam comments, participating in a group conversation or messaging a person who has used a certain hashtag would constitute engagement.

Both of these activity buckets increase impressions and therefore, brand awareness, but the engagement portion of account management is really where the relationship building happens.

Social Media Customer Service

While we talked about management just a sec ago, social media customer service is basically taking management to the next level in that we are helping solve customer problems, right there on-channel.

Being able to execute on this requires a close level of communication between us and our clients.

We work directly with the customer service team of our client’s company to get the answers we need, sometimes submitting tickets on behalf of the user, and then solving the problem for the customer as fast as possible.

We like to say that a customer reaching out on social media with a problem is just one step away from being an unhappy customer sharing their problem with social media.

Our goal is to respond to and handle these customer service requests on whichever channel they come in on in order to provide the best brand experience.

Not only is it important to respond to all customer service inquiries that happen on social media, it is also ideal to address any reviews your company might receive, positive or negative.

In terms of reputation, nothing looks worse than a wall of unhandled, negative reviews. 

Social Advertising (Paid Media)

Currently, the main channels to advertise on from a social standpoint is Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn but any of the other large-scale social networks offer advertising and may be used if the audience is right.

Advertising is a whole different ball game than organic, simply because there is a strong need for consistent measurement and optimisation that just doesn’t happen as easily with organic social media. 

Account growth

While management and advertising will increase the growth of a social media account, we tend to think about account growth as a separate component, because the activities you do to grow an account vary with the size of account and industry, and we need to think about growth as a line item in the services we offer.

Sometimes you may not want account growth, sometimes that is all you want.

Oh, and by the way, never buy fake followers, ever ever.

It’s just a bad idea and can really ruin your account. 

If you are looking for an agency who can help you with not only social media but all important areas of digital marketing and strategy, please get in touch.