You finally decided to take the plunge and hire a social media agency to help you market your business. Only one question…well, one question that leads to a series of other questions.
What exactly do you ask a social media agency to determine if they are the right company for your needs? If you are not sure, we have a list of the top 10 questions you should ask any agency before hiring them to ask.
10 Questions to Ask Your Social Media Agency
1. How long have you been in business?
The first question is pretty basic, yet essential. You want to build a lasting relationship with an agency.
Therefore, you want to make sure you are working with experienced professionals who know what they are doing.
Note: Many agencies might be new, but if the founder has previous experience elsewhere that is a good substitute. You just want to make sure your new agency knows what they are doing right out of the gate.
No sense in being a guinea pig for a new marketing company.
2. What is your greatest success story?
This goes again to experience. Experienced companies should be able to tell you a few examples of how they helped businesses reach their goals.
Also, when they tell you about their greatest success story, you have the opportunity to learn more about how they help other businesses.
For example, if a company tells you how they increased a client’s fan base by over 10,000 fans, you know they have experience working with Facebook.
If you have a business to business service company that does most of their work on LinkedIn, then you might want to consider another agency. The current one could be established, but they might not have the skill set you want.
Success leaves clues as the saying goes, and by finding out a client’s most successful case studies you can replicate that with the agency for your own business.
3. What is your greatest failure?
On the flip side, you want to know where they experienced failure. It is an example of how they learned from the experience, as well as a valuable tool to help you understand what challenges they can help you avoid in the future.
Do not be critical of the failure out of hand. You did ask them after all what their greatest failure was. If a company does not have at least one great failure, then chances are likely your business might be their first.
4. How do you use social media for your own business?
Not sure about you, but we want the premium ideas. The ones the company generally reserves for themselves.
A good social media agency generally tests the latest and greatest ideas on their own business first. Then they show how it works to their clients.
While you do not want to be a guinea pig, ask the company what ideas they are using now to build their own business. While some ideas won’t fit your business model, others will.
5. How are you different from your competitors?
What makes your agency special? How are they different from every other social media agency you spoke with previously?
If you cannot see how a social media agency stands out from the crowd, how can they help you stand out with your marketing?
Understand exactly what makes them different, and you have a good idea of how they can bring a unique approach to your social media marketing.
6. What social networks should I join and why?
Social media strategy is more than just throwing your profile up on as many sites as possible. Instead, it is about a targeted approach to connect with your prospective market.
If your social media company cannot identify where your target market hangs out on social media, then the best strategy in the world cannot help your campaign.
7. How does your content creation process work?
You need controls in place to help you see the content that your agency publishes. While they might have a great strategy, they do not know your business like you do. Therefore, mistakes can happen. It is best to see what they create ahead of time to ensure your information is correct.
This means you need a schedule and plan in place ahead of time. Otherwise, you could run into problems in the future.
8. What would be a successful campaign for you?
This is a question as much for yourself as for your agency. What do you define as success? Do you have specific numbers in mind?
Ask the agency what they think your version of success looks like. Is it realistic and based on your specific situation? A good agency not only can help you define your goals, but also steer you away from bad or impractical goals as well.
9. What is the timeframe for the campaign?
Now that you have a goal in mind, when do you want to complete that goal?
Is it in a week, a month, a year? Do you have milestones on the way to your goal to track your progress? You need them so that when you need to make a course correction you can do so quickly and easily.
The timeframe lets you know if you are ahead or behind schedule, so you can adjust your plans accordingly.
10. What is your social media response time?
The last question is vital for growing communities. If you hire a social media agency, you need to know how often they check your page to respond to prospects’ questions.
For example, some contracts with a social media company require them to check your page three times per week. That might be okay for a new page, but if you have a lot of activity you need someone on the job full-time to respond.
Response rates in social media are huge.
A recent study on Twitter reported that 53% of customers expected a response within 1 hour.Click To TweetHow often does your social media company check your accounts?
Final Thoughts
At the end of the interview, take some time to write down your thoughts about the agency. You are probably interviewing multiple companies, and need to have the positives and negatives about the company clearly written down. Do it while it is fresh in your mind.
Afterwards, you can review all of the social media agencies’ pros and cons based on asking the same questions to each company.