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

Often enough that the account looks alive, and never more often than you can sustain through a busy month. For most service businesses that lands at one or two substantial pieces a week plus whatever the day throws up, and the honest constraint is capture rather than publishing: nobody runs out of ideas, they run out of footage. We would rather agree a rhythm you can hold for a year than a schedule that looks impressive for six weeks and then stops, because a feed that visibly died is worse than a quiet one.

Fewer than you have been told. The test is where your buyers already are and where your material naturally fits — a trade with strong visual before-and-after work belongs somewhere visual, a professional services firm usually does not. One account maintained properly beats four maintained badly, and the second platform is only worth opening once the first one is producing something. Part of the first audit is telling you which existing profiles to close or quietly park, which is usually the least popular recommendation we make.

Much less than the number implies. Reach on the major platforms is now driven mainly by whether a piece of content holds attention, not by how many people already subscribed, so a small account publishing genuinely useful work regularly reaches strangers. Followers matter in one specific way: they are the audience you can reach again without paying, which is why we treat them as an asset to be earned rather than a score. If somebody offers to sell you followers, the number will go up and nothing else will.

We write, you approve, and the words come out of your business rather than out of a template. The material that performs is specific — the job you did last week, the thing customers always get wrong, the question your team answers on the phone every day — and none of that can be invented from the outside. In practice that means a short standing conversation with somebody who actually does the work, and a written voice guide so five different hands sound like one business.

With permission, and permission is collected before the camera comes out rather than after. Staff give consent for their likeness to be used and are told where it will appear. Customers give permission before their home, business or job appears, and for residential work that conversation happens at booking rather than on the doorstep. It is a two-minute step that prevents an expensive one, and we will not publish a person or a property without it.

Either us, or your team to a standard we write with you — and the choice matters less than the fact that somebody is named. What does not work is leaving it unassigned, because message requests are effectively a second phone line and an unanswered question in public gets read by every buyer who arrives after it. Where we handle it, anything about a specific job, a price or a complaint is escalated to you rather than answered by an agency, and there is a written line about what we will and will not say on your behalf.

Sometimes not, and we would rather say that on the way in. Organic social earns its place when your buyers research you before they call — they will look, and an abandoned account answers a question you did not want answered — and when your work is visually convincing enough to be worth watching. It does not earn its place when the sales cycle is immediate, the category is invisible, and nobody has the appetite to capture material. If that is your situation the money belongs in the advertising and the enquiry handling instead.

They are the fastest way to grow an audience that will never buy anything, so we use them rarely and only where the prize is your own service. There is also a legal dimension people forget: trade promotion rules in Australia differ between states and some run-of-the-mill mechanics require a permit, so the terms are checked before the post goes up rather than after somebody complains. If the goal is enquiries rather than followers, the same effort spent on a genuinely useful piece of content almost always outperforms it.

You do, and this is one of the first things we fix rather than one of the last. Business assets get moved onto business accounts owned by the company, we take a manager-level role rather than ownership, and at least two people on your side hold administrator access. When an engagement ends we are removed and nothing else changes — the profiles, the audience, the published work and the written voice guide are all yours, because they always were.

There is a written plan before it happens, which is the only useful time to write one. Most negative reactions are a customer with a real problem and are answered in public, briefly and without argument, then moved to a private channel. A small number are not customers at all and are best left alone. Deleting a legitimate complaint reliably makes it larger. The line between those cases is agreed with you in advance and the decision to escalate sits with your side, not with ours.

Because enquiries are counted, not reach. A direct message asking about work is logged the same way a phone call is, with the source recorded at the moment it arrives instead of guessed at the end of the quarter, and the report leads with that figure and keeps the platform numbers underneath as context. Expect the first two months to look thin — this is a channel that compounds — and expect us to tell you if the pattern after six months says the time would be better spent elsewhere.

Our own, which you can read at any time, and that is deliberately the only claim on this page. SoudCoh has no published organic-social engagement with a client, so there is no follower figure, no reach number and no engagement rate anywhere on this site — including here. The dated results we do publish are lead-generation accounts, counted on booked jobs and quote requests and reconciled against the client's own records. If a published social engagement is the reference you need before committing, that is a fair thing to require and you should hold us to it.