Planning, organising and presenting social media content to clients is easy… if you have the right tools to do it.
I’ve tried everything:
- Presenting social media content on Powerpoint slides
- Creating draft social media posts for them to see in my scheduling tool
- Paper diaries (which failed at the first hurdle, obviously)
- Tables in word documents and briefing forms.
None of them could do all the things I required from them. A good social media manager knows that presenting social media content to clients is so much more than just sharing words and images. They are a tiny cog in a big content machine in the factory of their business.
Believe it or not, the way you present your work to your client is crucial to them respecting you as the content creator, and ultimately supports continued business from them. You just have to make things easy and consistent.
Why is presenting social media content to clients so important?
Ultimately, you should be presenting social media content to clients in a way that conveys how daily posts contribute to their big picture.
Your client, however great they are and however chill they seem, has to have their eye on the success of their business.
When hiring a social media or content manager, your client’s key worries are:
- Will hiring you give them a return on investment?
- How much time will they have to spend bringing you up to speed and making corrections?
- Will you uphold the reputation of the business (and, therefore, them)?
Which means you need to remedy those concerns by:
- Showcasing the look, feel and general brilliance of what you’re creating for them, and exactly how that fits into their business vision.
- Making sure your work is easy for them to check - they’re absolutely not going to be up for downloading and learning an elaborate and unfamiliar piece of software, no matter how many integrations it can manage at once.
- Communicating your understanding of the mission you’re on by never losing sight of the goal, which reassures them that you know the moves you need to make to get there.
Content planner must-haves
To impress your clients and make you and your team’s life easier, make sure you are using a really great content planner (also called a social media planner or editorial calendar).
The best ones will have:
- A neat layout that brings your marketing channels together in one place
- Spaces for top level overviews, at-a-glance planning and granular plans
- Potential to house your creative ideas as they come to you, so you can manage them from conception to publication in one place
- No requirement (for you or your client) to learn a whole new tool
- Nudges towards your audience’s changing mindset throughout the year
- Key dates and inspiration in one place
- Built-in goal tracking so you can keep hitting your targets.
The solution to presenting social media content to clients
After going self-employed and struggling to maintain a stress-free relationship with my social media clients on top of just getting the work done, I decided enough was enough with the printable freebies that couldn’t hold much, the overcomplicated softwares and staring at a blank Powerpoint slide every week, willing inspiration to strike as my deadlines approached.
I designed a content planner that had all those must-haves – the hours of researched key dates complete, audience mindset nudges, a layout that can hold everything from the tiniest seed of a creative idea to the big picture… EVERYTHING – and then doubled down on making that planner take care of all those bumps in the road I’d experience previously presenting social media content to clients.
"The surprising benefit of nailing how you present social media content to your client goes beyond keeping them happy and cash in your bank. It can go a long way to bringing . to your work, which in turn enhances your mental wellbeing."
An amazing thing for one well-made spreadsheet to be able to do, isn’t it?
