Social media management Posting is the easy part. Answering is the job.

1. Read the accounts before touching them

   Every profile, every administrator, every post from the last year and every unanswered message. The first deliverable is a written picture of what exists, and it is worth having whether or not you go further with us.

   • Who holds administrator access and on which kind of profile
   • What was published, and which of it people actually responded to
   • Messages and comments still sitting without a reply

2. Decide the two or three jobs the account is for

   Written down in one paragraph, agreed by the person who owns the outcome. Everything afterwards points at that paragraph, and a post that serves none of it does not get made — which is how a calendar stops filling itself with filler.

   • Winning new work, reassuring existing customers, or hiring — pick
   • The audience named as a person, not as a demographic band
   • The action you want at the end of a post, in plain words

3. Build the spine out of real questions

   The best-performing content a service business can publish is an honest answer to something buyers ask before they commit. Those questions already exist in your inbox, your quotes and the calls your team takes; they do not have to be invented.

   • The questions your team answers on the phone every week
   • The objections that show up between quote and acceptance
   • The jobs customers were surprised you could do at all

4. Produce rather than curate

   Somebody has to be on site with a camera. Reposting other people's content and buying stock is what an account does when nobody has committed to capture, and it is visible from the first frame. The material that works is your own work, filmed while it happens.

   • Before, during and after on the jobs worth watching
   • Your own staff speaking, because a real voice outperforms a polished one
   • Written permission from the customer before a property appears

5. Capture in batches, publish across weeks

   Filming once a month and publishing weekly is the only version of this that survives a busy season. The alternative — capturing on the day it is needed — fails the first time the crew is short-handed, and the calendar quietly reverts to filler.

   • One capture session feeding several weeks of publishing
   • A standing shot list so nothing depends on inspiration
   • A small buffer held back for the week everything goes wrong

6. Write for the platform, not for the brand guideline

   Each surface has its own shape, its own reading distance and its own tolerance for polish. The same idea is worth publishing in three places; the same file rarely is. Exported clean at the right ratio, captioned for sound-off, and cut where that platform's readers actually stop watching.

   • Vertical where the placement is vertical, and framed for it
   • Captions on everything, because most of it is watched silently
   • Exported from the source, never downloaded and re-uploaded

7. Answer everything, inside business hours

   Comments, direct messages, message requests and reviews left on the social profile, all handled to a written standard so five different people sound like one business. An unanswered question in public is read by everyone who comes after it.

   • A named owner and an agreed response window
   • Standard answers written down for the questions that repeat
   • Anything contentious moved to a private channel, politely and in public view

8. Fix the ownership properly

   Business assets moved onto business accounts, at least two administrators, personal profiles removed from roles they should never have held, and the recovery route documented. Dull, unglamorous, and the reason a business still has its audience in five years.

   • Ownership held by the company, not by a staff member
   • Roles set to the least access each person actually needs
   • The recovery path written down where a director can find it

9. Connect the account to the enquiry record

   A message that arrives on social is an enquiry and belongs in the same place as every other one. Until that happens, social will keep losing the argument at budget time to channels that can produce a list of names.

   • Direct-message enquiries logged like any other lead
   • The source recorded at the point of contact, not guessed later
   • The same outcome fields as every other channel, so they compare

10. Report on enquiries, with the reach underneath

    One agreed figure for what the account produced, with the platform numbers below it as context rather than as the headline. Where a month was quiet it is explained rather than skipped, and where the honest answer is that this channel is not earning its time, we say so.

    • Enquiries first, reach second, follower count last
    • The posts that caused contact named, so the pattern is repeatable
    • A recommendation to stop, when stopping is the right answer

11. Keep the obligations true as you grow

    Testimonials, staff appearing in content, customer properties on camera, competitions and anything a supplier paid for all carry rules in Australia. They are simple to satisfy in advance and expensive to satisfy retrospectively.

    • Commercial relationships disclosed where content is sponsored
    • Permission on file before a customer's property or face is published
    • Competition rules checked before the post, because they differ by state

1. Week one

   Audit and access

   Every profile read, every administrator listed, and the ownership problems fixed first. If a page is attached to somebody who left, that is dealt with before a single post is planned.

2. Week one

   Agree what the account is for

   One paragraph, signed off by the person who owns the outcome, naming the audience and the action. Everything after this points at it, which is what stops the calendar drifting back into filler.

3. Week two

   The first capture

   On site, on a real job, with a shot list agreed beforehand. This is the session that decides whether the whole thing works, so it is planned rather than squeezed into a gap.

4. Weeks two to four

   Publish, answer, and watch what travels

   The first cycle goes out with the response standard already written, so messages are answered from day one rather than after the first complaint about a slow reply.

5. First report

   Enquiries, not applause

   What arrived, from which posts, and what it turned into — read against where you started rather than against an industry average. Early figures are small by nature and are presented that way.

6. Ongoing

   A standing rhythm, reviewed quarterly

   Capture, publish, answer, report. Every quarter we sit down and read the whole thing again, and we drop something, because an account that only ever adds obligations eventually collapses under them.

This is a slow channel and we will not pretend otherwise. The first two months usually produce a handful of enquiries and a much clearer picture of what your buyers want to know, and the compounding starts after that. Anybody promising a transformation in a fortnight is describing an audience they intend to buy.

• Creator-style video for advertisingWhen the footage you are capturing should also be carrying paid placements, and needs usage rights that survive the campaign.
• Facebook advertisingThe paid half of the same surface, for when organic reach has stopped being able to reach people who have never heard of you.
• Instagram advertisingWhere a feed that is finally producing decent material can be put in front of an audience that does not follow it yet.
• TikTok AdsShort vertical video as a paid channel, and an honest read on whether your category belongs there at all.
• Email marketing and lifecycleThe audience you actually own, as opposed to the one a platform lends you and can take back without notice.
• Asking every customer for a reviewThe other public-facing reputation job, and the one that moves a buying decision faster than any post will.
• The listing as a shopfrontPhotos, posts and questions on the profile most buyers check before they ever open a social account.
• Follow-up that happens without anyone rememberingWhere a direct-message enquiry has to land if social is ever going to be judged on names rather than on reach.
• Tracking and analyticsHow an enquiry gets a source attached at the moment it arrives, instead of being guessed at the end of the quarter.
• Fewer, better enquiriesWhat to do when social starts producing volume and the volume turns out to be the wrong kind of buyer.
• SoudCoh's own channelsThe accounts we run for ourselves, published so you can judge the work by something other than a page describing it.
• Accounts with the numbers attachedThe counted, dated results this practice has produced — on lead generation, which is where our published work sits.