One of the reasons business will contract with you is because they do not know how to and do not want to deal with social media themselves. Business owners are busy and what you will provide for them is one less thing to worry about. However, your engagement with a business cannot be a “fire and forget” situation. First, the business needs to cooperate by providing information and content as needed. Second, the business needs to continuously appreciate the value you are creating for it. If the business owner does not see the value in the services you provide, you could lose the engagement.
To maintain a positive relationship with the business owner, you must keep in regular contact. We recommend establishing a process that is light touch and allows you to best perform your duties while highlighting the value you bring.
Once a week or once a month (depending on the business) you should send a report to the owner with relevant statistics. You could aggregate all the social networks together or break them up.
Sample report:
Number of social network posts: 38
Number of interactions: 98
Number of new likes/followers: 20
Total number of likes/followers: 500
Number of responses to consumers sent: 25
Number of bad reviews prevented: 6
Services such as Google Analytics provide easily exportable charts and graphs that you can use to quickly create intelligible reports for your customers to see the value you are providing their business.
Notes and highlights:
This is where to note certain posts that did particularly well, customer feedback that could have longer term implications, and any other relevant info.
Information required for next week:
- Specials of the week e.g. for a restaurant, broken up by day, for a hair salon they might be weekly, for a dentist’s off it could be 10% of cleanings.
- Announcements and events e.g. a date/time of closure due to private event, a live show etc.
- Changes to business offerings, new products
- Updates to basic info: Opening hours, new menu of offerings, new return policy etc.
Optional: This is where you can solicit help in creating creative content. For example, ask the owner to make a staff member available for a profile (e.g. Nurse Jackie has been with our practice for 5 years. She started her nursing career at…)
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