The Future of Agency Social Media Management

Managing social media for different clients is a huge challenge. Each client has different needs and deadlines, making social media management for agencies difficult in keep everything organized and on track. On top of that, agencies are expected to deliver detailed reports and keep up with social listening. This means dealing with a lot of data, often without the right tools to make sense of it or use it effectively. Staying efficient is a constant battle. So is providing value, which can be overwhelming.

What are forward-thinking agencies doing to save time and increase efficiency? How are they demonstrating the business impact of social media for their clients without spending hours and hours inside spreadsheets?

In the following episode of The MarTech show, hosted by Agorapulse’s head of Strategic Partnerships, Mike Allton, and Robin Dimond, Fifth & Cor’s Kira Green digs deep into the future of social media management for agencies. You can listen to the entire episode below or read on for the transcript.

Introducing Kira Green

Mike Allton: Today, we’re focused on helping agencies, particularly those who are managing or want to manage social media for their clients.

With so many different networks and so many challenges about being creative and driving engagement and business results, having a tool and tactics in place can streamline the work.

Kira Green is a dynamic marketing manager at Fifth & Cor, where she orchestrates innovative strategies to propel brands into the spotlight. With a swift progression from a specialist role to a management role in less than six months, Kira exemplifies determination, innovation, and success. She now oversees the marketing department, driving impactful campaigns, and fostering a culture of creativity and collaboration. Her expertise in public relations and social media marketing is unparalleled, as she continuously guides her team to push boundaries and surpass goals.

What is Fifth & Cor?

Kira Green: We work with businesses in several ways. So we can come in and be their full turnkey team. We can start with them on a smaller basis and grow through things like workshops, and we can even come in on a consulting basis. We help in a number of different ways, providing services from social media, marketing, PR, email marketing, website design, influencer marketing. And so much more. The list really goes on and on.

As far as the industries that we’re in, we’re in a lot of different industries from medical aesthetics and plastic surgery, health and wellness, CPG, ecommerce, restaurant and hospitality. Again, the list goes on and on. We really don’t believe in pigeonholing ourselves into just one industry.

Robin Dimond: I know this cause. Obviously working in it and running it, you were in the day-to-day, and we would talk a lot about what were some of our challenges before we switched over to Agorapulse.

Challenges from organic social media management for clients

Kira Green: There are so many challenges that we were facing. You know, when you’re managing several clients, that things can get out of hand really fast.

And we really just lacked the systems and structure when it came to social media management. From things like posts getting missed to content being published on the wrong platforms, the biggest thing was that we weren’t hyping ourselves up and communicating the amazing results that we were driving for our clients, either.

Measuring the business impact of social

Before Agorapulse, we were strictly pulling metrics directly from native platforms. We were going to Facebook, we were going to Instagram, Twitter, all these platforms, and manually pulling those metrics and building out reports. It was time-consuming, it was nitty-gritty, it was not fun to say the least. And for us, we send weekly status reports as well as monthly recaps for our clients.

Deciphering that data can get really tricky, especially when every platform is different and does things differently.

Mike Allton: So just to drill down a little bit: When you were measuring the business impact, it was simply taking the reports to the platforms themselves gave to you. We’re talking about Facebook, we’re talking about reach impressions, likes, comments, and that’s it, right?

Kira Green: We were pulling those KPIs. We’re looking at that brand awareness that we’re driving through each platform and how that was then being brought into their business and what the client’s seeing on their side as well. So, it’s really grabbing those metrics, but also being the brain behind it and figuring out: What does this really mean? What results are we really driving?

A lot of times, that means that there’s gaps and there’s pieces that we’re missing and things that are falling through the cracks. And that means that we’re not properly showcasing our value to the client, and if we don’t show our value, then a client’s not going to stay with us.

How to Do Social Media Reporting as an Agency Owner

Robin Dimond: We talked about how we used to do reporting. It’s talking about how now we do reporting because we’re talking about being an agency owner or an owner of a business who’s going to implement Agorapulse. I can tell you that time is money and we were spending tons of hours doing this. Like Kira just said, it was manpower. Hours, even a whole day, set aside to build these.

Kira Green: How we build reporting now is all through Agorapulse. We build and export the reports directly from the platform. We’re able to get all those important metrics that we were getting before, such as reach, engagement, impressions, but even more.

Agorapulse breaks down the metrics in a way that they make sense, and they make sense to our clients, and they can understand everything that we’re doing as well. Even from pulling ROI, if that’s something that you need to report to your client, you have that capability within Agorapulse.

We’re able to make those custom reportings for each of the clients, and send them out on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, whatever it is that we choose to do.

How much time does that take?

Kira Green: It takes not even a quarter of the time as it used to. It’s so fast. And once you build a report one time, you can use that report over and over again. You don’t have to go through the steps to decide what metrics are included, what metrics are excluded, what platforms you have on there. You do it one time and then you can go back to it.

And it’s super-easy to choose the time range that you want to report on, whether that’s seven days, 14 days, 30 days. 90 days a year, you can pull it all directly within that same report and it exports directly to your email.

For people like us who know that we send reports on a Friday or the first of the month, we can have it scheduled so that Agorapulse automatically pulls that report and sends it to our email.

It’s really optimized to do the work for you. You can focus on other things like coming up with new, amazing strategies that really propel the brand forward.

How have these reports impacted clients and your success as an agency?

Kira Green: Yes, it makes a world of a difference. When it comes to clients, they want to see the data behind what we’re doing. They care about the numbers. They need to see what’s really going on. Being able to deliver that to them and actually quantify what we’re doing gives what we’re doing value and ultimately helps us with retention of our clients.

We’ve had so many clients who come to us and say, “Wow, these reports are so beyond helpful for us to understand just how important what your work is for the growth of our business.” And a lot of clients have been burned before, too. They’ve worked with agencies who don’t show them the results, and they don’t give that data behind what they’re doing. They need that proof to be able to build trust again with us.

Grab your free trial of Agorapulse right away!

Social Listening

Mike Allton: Let’s talk about some other things that are really important to social media management, particularly for agencies working on behalf of clients.

Are you doing social listening? Are you doing brand awareness for your clients? How are you solving those kinds of problems?

Kira Green: Yes and yes. We’re doing both.

Those are actually two of my favorite features within Agorapulse. When it comes to social media, you can’t just post to post. You have to be tracking and understanding trends and leveraging them for your clients. And tracking those trends can be really hard to do, especially when you’re in a bunch of different industries.

By creating those listening searches in Agorapulse, we’re able to find trends and find content that’s relevant to our clients and see how those topics are trending each month.

One example of that is for one of our clients within the aesthetics industry, we created a listing search for hashtag filler, and we were able to see in the last 30 days, that hashtag was used 20,000 times. This really shows us what topics maybe we want to highlight more and even topics that we want to move away from if we’re seeing oversaturation in the market.

Publishing/Scheduling as an Agency

Robin Dimond: I think one of the basic challenges for agencies right now is staying on top of just like the sheer number of them. I don’t know why everyone does this, but they have a Facebook X, a Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and many clients have multiple profiles underneath the platform.

So, I think talking a little bit here, if you could let us know about the publishing and the scheduling right now, and how that really helps you be agile but also efficient?

Kira Green: There’s so many profiles, and I’m sure anybody who comes from an agency background understands the headache that comes with that. For us, we actually create unique packages for every one of our clients as well. On top of that, we also have different posting cadences to keep track of.

So, it becomes a lot as soon as you get over that hill of creating all this content. Now you have to go and schedule it all, and you have this whole other hill to climb. And when you are across all these different platforms, being able to go onto each one and schedule and understand their scheduling capabilities is really confusing, and it’s really just a time-suck. Now, you can come to Agorapulse and do it all in one place.

Mike Allton: And it’s great that we keep having new platforms being born every day. TikTok is adding TikTok notes. I saw today and Threads is releasing their API. So at least we’ll have some third party tools to help with these.

Keeping Up With Agency Clients

Mike Allton: When you’ve got all these profiles, that means you’re generating, I think, almost exponential levels of comments and direct messages, private messages, all this kind of engagement that can be really overwhelming for brands, let alone agencies that are, again, managing multiple clients and then these exponential levels of impact.

How are you keeping up with all that?

Kira Green: You have to have a team. We preach all the time. You can’t expect one person to do everything for you, whether that’s within your business or within your agency. Making sure that you have a team—but when it comes to Agorapulse specifically, that inbox feature is going to save your life. It allows us to see all messages, all comments, all DMs that are coming in from all of the client profiles. And you can group them. You can say, with Client A, you can see all of their messages from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all in one place and be able to respond and organize them in one place.

So, on our team at Fifth & Cor, our community coordinators go in there and manage all these communications. But if you know Jill over here is in charge of managing any inquiries about scheduling appointments or scheduling a call, then you can assign those specific messages to certain people to help with that management and that organization within your team as well.

Tools that Can Revolutionize Your Agency

Mike Allton: Now, I was just curious—and I’ll open this up to either of you.

Are there any other stories of how having a tool like this has really changed and impacted your agency and in the ways that it’s revolutionized how you’re able to go about growing your agency?

Robin Dimond: I think, yeah, because no one was paying for all of these things. So this was, I’m going to talk from an owner’s perspective, and then I’ll allow Kira to talk about scalability.

She said there’s one thing out there right now that one person can’t do it all. And without this tool, I can tell you that people, clients come, and it’s not just agencies that people go out there, and they have this expectation of social media, and they want these reports, and they don’t realize that back in my day, it was taking 12 hours to get a report done.

I will say right now, you can focus on the things that mean something trends. They’re not stuck their head down working on this. And that is something that Agorapulse has changed us as an agency. It’s allowed us to scale faster, and it’s allowed us to give amazing results to our clients all the time.

Everything is trending. Everything happens so fast. I always make fun of developers because developers are code is code, but for us, a trend can change tomorrow or X can go down or this can happen. And so what Agorapulse has been able to do is give us that flexibility and that being agile.

Kira Green: I do want to talk about scalability a little bit because in our world, if you’re not moving the needle, then you’re not succeeding. And it really comes down to: What change are we seeing? How are we increasing the numbers? How are we growing brand awareness and making sure that we are getting our name out there in front of new customers and new consumers?

And so Agorapulse has really allowed us to do that for our clients and be able to show it. That’s one thing, to get on a call with a client and say, “Hey, we had a 3000 percent increase in engagements on your Instagram this month.” That’s incredible. It’s a unicorn. And we are killing it for you.

But to then go ahead and put a visual in front of them and be able to show the increase? To show how it correlates with the content that you’re putting up, which content pieces are resonating best, which ones are getting shares and likes and comments, which ones are not performing so well, and should we not waste our time on, so to say—creating that visual and really having that proof, as we like to say, is a game changer in our business and for so many others as well.

Get Connected to Fifth & Cor

Mike Allton: Love it, love it. Kira, this has been fascinating. I want you to share with everybody who might want to know more about you or about Fifth & Cor where they can go to learn more.

Kira Green: Of course, first off our website, we have a beautiful website, which we recently did in the last year, and we love it. We talk a lot about how we’ve rebranded Fifth & Cor. And so we’d love for everybody to go take a look at that and see who we are, but also check out our LinkedIn, check out our Instagram.

We’ve talked a lot about social media and we’re really proud of ours as well. Internally, we always say we do what we do for our clients and for ourselves too. And we’re really excited to share that with everyone. So be sure to check us out, send us a DM, send us an email, and we’d love to continue the conversation.

In Conclusion

Robin Dimond: I think just knowing for our agencies, our business owners out there, this is something that you really should look into. And I know we get to bring in so many exciting people every week, but—we are a little bit biased about Agorapulse—but I’m saying it’s really worth the investment. It’s really worth sitting down. I promise it’ll pay a hundredfold, honestly, back to you.

And so I just wanted to add that part because without it, I don’t think we would be able to keep up with what we were doing anymore and delivering these great results that Kira’s talking about. So, I’m super excited for people to come and try it out and get a demo, try it for yourself, and see how great it is.

I promise you won’t go back.

Thank you for listening to another episode of the MarTech show hosted by Robin Dimond and Mike Allton, powered by Agorapulse, the number-one rated social media management solution, which you can learn more about at agorapulse.com.