Hi everyone! Curious if agencies and social media managers out there do outbound engagement for their clients?
It’s such an important part about helping content succeed, so I always encourage my clients to do it, but I have more people asking me to do it for them. I’m hesitant to do it because I don’t find it authentic and it’s hard to comment and engage with my clients’ prospects in a valuable way.
There’s a part of me that feels like this should be the role of a sales person, but am curious how other people handle this!
I feel like I do this for Agorapulse when I am doing social engagement for the team…just got this added back on my plate. I also do this for one of my restaurant clients. I think over time it gets easier because you grow to know the audience. It helps to get a target list from the client!
That’s good to know! What kind of comments are you leaving, though? Are you leaving comments on prospects content with the intent to attract people to your brand, or are you interacting with colleagues’ content?
Depends on the business & how well you know the ins and outs.
Nothing worse than half answers…
If you are equipped with enough info or quick responses when you need them then you can but don’t do it at risk of leaving customer hanging - nothing worse!
We tend to do blended help for clients - content created to raise profile & recommend they re-allocate their time to responding and helping customers / enquiries!
Thanks @ImTristanG ! With this client, we’re talking specifically about commenting on prospects posts, not just responding to comments people leave on our content.
So to me the comments on other people’s content coming from our brand should be about raising awareness of the brand, building community, etc.
Does that make sense?
Uh, I guess I do outbound engagement technically. Never thought about it that way but I suppose that is what it is?
On Twitter I search specific terms and when I feel like I can insert the brand in there as helpful to the person posting I do. Do I feel like a sales person? Kind of. I felt it was more just sharing the brand. I don’t always try to sell the services. I always come out as helpful without pressure to the user I’m reaching out to.
Would I charge extra for it? Probably I would increase the rate a little yeah at least. Since that’s extra work you’re doing. (I don’t charge because I do it for free lol)
At every agency I’ve worked with we’ve employed both reactive and proactive community management in our monthly retainers. So we cover all inbound engagement (comments, messages, use of hashtag and location tag) and also employ proactive community management (looking for opportunities to authentically insert the brand into conversations that are happening where it makes sense to drive added awareness).
I think it comes down to your stance on community management. A strong community management approach has always been one of our USPs as an agency, so we include both in scope. Also of course depends on who you are marketing for - if it’s a service, saas, etc. I can totally see how it could be more of a sales thing but at the end of the day if it’s a conversation happening on a social platform, I personally think it falls under a social media managers role vs a sales person.
You could definitely structure your offering as an add on. So reactive community management responses are included. But change an additional $x per month for proactive community management to help build reach and brand affinity.
It really depends on the client and my comfort level in their product/services. Often I will do a collaborative thing where I will engage if it makes sense and I know I can do it correctly, but if the engagement is beyond my knowledge, I will ping my client. I also utilize a Chatbot Strategy with a well-trained Ai for one of my clients that not only comments back but can also send messages. It has been pretty game-changing and honestly mind-blowing what it can do for this client. The analytics have been through the roof for engagement since implementing the ai.
Is this client based on an item and not a personality? I’ve been curious about how AI comments and send messages affect a community if the community finds out that its not the person who is actually commenting/engaging.
This is for a company that sells grills and does backyard patios. It has not been an issue. We also have a restaurant client who we created an ai chatbot that acts as a “Beer sommelier” and can answer questions about the beers they have on tap and do beer trivia. It is very fun and the audience knows it is ai. By the way if you want to try it out the tool I use is https://www.Chatbotbuilder.ai
