How to evaluate the services provided by a social media management company

Includes downloadable PDF evaluation form

Boost your social media efforts from awareness (good) to a money-making machine (great)

I will say this up front – many of you are already doing okay on your social media accounts.  You make posts, you engage with your followers when they make comments. These awareness activities are great and can really help get your business’ name out there and getting to the point where you are engaging fans is awesome.

Where most businesses are missing out is making your social media work to bring you real business in the form of paying clients.

Awareness of your business is good.  Paying clients are great.

Paying clients are what keep you in business, and can mean the difference between a business that succeeds and one that does not.  I don’t know of anyone who is going through all of the effort to set up and run a business whose goal is awareness.  Except maybe a nonprofit which has the specific goal of raising awareness.  If you’re reading this you likely don’t want to be a nonprofit.

There are a lot of people, companies, and services, that will make posts on social media for you.  Even we offer this service, but how we go about it is different and carefully crafted to work towards increasing your business.

Questions to evaluate a social media service

There are some questions you can ask yourself to help you determine how effective social media management services may be for you:

Frequency of posts – I have seen social media management services offered that guarantee to post once a week, once a day, multiple times a day.  This is great for awareness.  If your goal is seeing a return on investment from social media, this is far from the only metric you should pay attention to (and not the most important).

Post content – what types of posts work best on social media?  Just having a post is not necessarily enough to move your social media from awareness to income generation.  Posts of cute puppies and cats are always great but unless you somehow serve the puppy and cat category, they are likely a waste of your precious social media presence. You do want a mix of post types, but without lead generation you’re leaving money on the table.

Linking – posts need to link back to your website, ideally one page on your website which most directly reflects the topic of the post. Or your email or phone number.  Posts with links get more interaction.  For income generation, those links need to strategically connect with the rest of your online presence.

Call to action – posts that are solely for the purpose of awareness aren’t as important to have a call to action, but for all other posts you need to be telling your viewers exactly what you want them to do with what you presented to them.

Lead generation – Posting items that your prospects will find valuable is great.  If those posts are not providing you with contact information of a potential client (a lead), you are missing a critical component.  Having an automated system set up for your lead generation is important.

Social media management service quick evaluation

Download the social media management service quick evaluation PDF

I regularly look into new options for my clients to use to manage their social media (not to mention for me to manage my own). I use a type of value matrix to help me evaluate the services offered by a social media company:

• Lead generation – 10 points if the company can show you a precise method they use for generating leads from the social media services they provide
• Call to action – 5 points if the company can show specific types of call to action they would use for your social media posts
• Linking – 3 points if the company can show a plan on how they incorporate linking your social media posts to your website or other options – apart from the linking that would be part of lead generation and call to action
• Post content – 1 point for having multiple types of post content available
• Frequency – 1 point for having frequency of once per week or more

When I am personally evaluating a social media services, that is the quick matrix I use to determine if the service is worth my time to explore more fully – the total wouldn’t necessarily be enough alone to make the final choice for me, but is designed to exclude services that do not provide all of the components that are most important to help me generate business from my social media accounts.

By the way, Vicky Wu Marketing Guru scores 20 out of 20 using the value matrix above!

With a score of 10 or less, I am less interested in the service offered.  A score under 5 would quickly tell me that I would have to be piecing together multiple service providers to have a fully effective social media strategy – which would mean more things I would have to keep up with, more time and effort on my part, and that means the whole purpose of finding a service that would help me would backfire.

If you have been wondering about your own social media strategy and looking for options to make it easier on your time and generate real results, you can schedule a free marketing strategy call where we can discuss your goals and some options that would best work for your needs – including those options outside of our services.