Why your social media agency is responsible for your bad decisions

Farah Winning
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

Just when I want to bang my head against another brick wall I take a deep breath and remember why it is that one of our loveliest clients is asking us to run Like ads on Facebook. Like ads on Facebook in 2017. She tells me she has to justify to senior stakeholders why we’re asking for an increase in budget this year, and the best way for her to demonstrate the return is through an increase in fan numbers.

It’s understandable. Its one of the most visible numbers on all the social platforms. A number that for both brands and individuals, like it or not, has come to represent how popular you are. For stakeholders who are further removed from the running of their brand’s social (this is another problem and another blog post entirely) it’s a tangible number. Add more budget, get more followers. More followers mean more customers. More customers, more sales…and so on. Big bonus for the marketing team. Right!? Unlikely.

If you think these conversations don’t happen anymore you’d be wrong. Even in 2017, there are some powerful and successful marketing managers who still don’t have a clue how to appraise their social media efforts. And it’s our fault.

“It’s our responsibility to educate our clients to know what matters” Tweet This!

Rewind 4 years when I was pitching to potential clients – what were we touting? Fast growth, big numbers, upward trajectories, bar charts through the roof. Big things, lots of things, all the time.

It’s unsurprising that clients still clutch on to these big numbers because big still matters on lots of other channels. These were the very clients that had to justify the very existence of a social media budget in the first place, so I can’t be mad at them for wanting to avoid telling their boss why they should stop fussing over the big numbers and start caring about the small ones, the meaningful ones.

Deep breath number two.

There’s no arguing the point anymore. She needs some big fan numbers and we need to keep our client happy. Number one rule of account management club. But something isn’t sitting right. Imagine for a minute that your client asks you to tie a sack of bricks to your shiny new extra budget and throw it off the nearest bridge. Would you do it? Hopefully not.

There have been countless times I’ve been asked by clients to do something that is ill-considered, independent from any other marketing activity and quite frankly wrong. But no matter how hard I push back and coax and justify why using our budget for Like ads is a waste of money, my words hit a road block. Put simply, if the senior stakeholders don’t see a big increase in fans, we don’t get the budget.

I can either accept the easy way out of this conversation and concede or dig in my heels and find a way to reduce all this time and money wasting.

The solution?

It’s time for a training session. A one-to-one, personalised revisit to social media 101 so my client knows exactly what our goals should be and how to get there (with some charts and graphs to appease the senior team), and more importantly, know how to communicate them back.

If my clients don’t have the tools and the knowledge to stand up confidently and pitch for a bigger piece of the budget pie then it’s my responsibility to help them, to empower them. We must work together to increase the knowledge within their business that will ultimately deliver the best understanding and long term social media success.

“Long term social media success will only be achieved when all stakeholders work together” Tweet This!


If you’re a client and in charge of your brand’s social media get in touch to find out more about how we can help deliver training sessions and workshops that can help you with those tricky internal budget and KPI conversations.

Originally posted on Confessions of a Freelancer here

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