Social media management for businesses

Every week we design and publish what is in the plan and look at how the previous week went. Once a month we make a new plan and a report for the month just gone.

• photo posts and carousels, posts with several images that swipe sideways
• stories from day-to-day work, which disappear after one day
• a caption under every post, written the way your business talks to customers
• a check of comments and messages, with questions we pass on to you
• a short review of which earlier posts did well

Publishing itself takes the least time. If you have ever run a business profile yourself, you know a single post can eat a whole evening while you think up a caption and find a photo that looks decent.

We make posts to the templates we set up in the first month, from your brand book or from basic colours when you don't have one. The full brand book and complete templates are done through our branding and identity service.

Each week we ask you for photos of finished work and news when you launch a new service or offer. A photo from your business, taken on a phone, is worth more to us than any stock photo, because in it the customer sees your work and your people.

Social media management with us starts from €200 a month. The amount depends most on the number of posts and how much video we make, and the number of networks moves it less. Shoots at your premises and the ad budget are separate items.

Video raises the price faster than the number of posts. Reels, short vertical videos on Instagram and Facebook, need filming and editing on top of design and caption, so they cost more than a photo post. A photographer or videographer coming to your shop or site is agreed separately, when the plan calls for it.

A second network doesn't double the price. Instagram and Facebook can share most of the material with a different caption and format, while TikTok and LinkedIn need content made specifically for them.

We keep the ad budget for Instagram and Facebook separate from the price of running the profile. When the budget is ‘included’ in a monthly package, you have no way of checking how much of that money actually went on ads people saw. We run campaigns through our paid advertising service, with a separate report on cost per enquiry.

If you are comparing price lists and packages for professional social media management, ask what exactly goes into one post. Is it only design, or also the caption, stories and replies to comments? Packages with the same number of posts often don't cover the same things.

Start with one or two networks where your customers already look at businesses like yours and that you can fill with new posts every week. For most local businesses that means Instagram and Facebook.

Instagram and Facebook are a good pair to start with because both belong to Meta and are run from the same account. When you later start advertising, the same campaign can run on both networks. TikTok only makes sense once someone in the business can film a short video every week.

One network that gets a post every week is better than three where nothing new appears after the first month. A profile whose last post is a year old looks to a customer as if the business has closed, so we open a new network only when we know there will be material for it every week.

For some businesses social isn't the first step. A customer who urgently needs an electrician types into Google, so that business is found faster through SEO and a Google Business Profile than through any post.

If you aren't sure you need social before a site or ads, answer three questions and get a recommendation on where to start.

We measure reach, engagement and visits to your site that come from social. The report arrives once a month and has numbers for each network separately.

• reach, the number of different people your posts and stories were shown to
• engagement, everything people do with a post, from likes and comments to saves and shares
• site visits, the number of people who came to your site from a profile or post, from Google Analytics

You see the follower count in the report, but we don't put it first. Followers can be bought or inflated with a giveaway, site visits can't.

Someone who sees you on Instagram rarely calls straight away. More often they remember your name only when they need the service or when someone asks them for a recommendation, then look you up on Google or open your site from the link on your profile.

That is why we don't promise a number of enquiries from social. In the report we track whether the number of people coming from social to your site is growing and which topics bring them there, and those topics get more room in the next plan.