What Tools do you Need to Deliver Social Media Management as a Website Agency?

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When a website agency expands its services to include social media management and communication, although great for their reoccurring revenue, in my experience, they often aren’t sure how to put the tech together so that it gives a streamlined process for their team, but also, a workflow that gives the new social media clients a great experience too.

Running the social accounts of clients is very different than posting on your own feed.

It goes beyond project management and needs a new set of tools to be able to retain those clients that they’ve upsold to.

When we work with website agencies, we ‘plug in’ our tried and tested tech stack; one that we have found to work the best with our clients. We’ve had the luxury of building (breaking, and rebuilding) our tech stack over the last 14 years, so we have had a lot of trial and error to bring to our systems to our website agency clients!

Here is a rundown of what we use, and why.

Management, organisation, and communication.

Management & planning.

Most Website agencies can hire a reasonably priced social media assistant who can write content, or create a graphic on Canva, but the harder part is getting the structure in place that supports all of that. A structure that serves and helps organise and deliver the high-level strategy that you need alongside the actual content creation. Creating good content is so much more than just the content itself. And often, that assistant doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to do that, leaving it to the agency owner to figure out. So if you need to get these elements in place in your own business, think of it as building the architecture that your content efforts can live in.

This is where Notion comes in. Notion allows you to fully organise your content, right from the strategy and mapping phase, all the way through to planning and writing. It also works for team management, assigning tasks, approval systems, and gives the very best overview of where a social media client is in their strategy.

Honestly, we love how flexible Notion is.

It is essentially like building mini web pages, so visually it works well with lots of images and videos, but it also has really powerful databases, which means that all of your content can be tagged, is searchable, and can live in multiple places. Here at Sheldon we also have a client approval system set up so that the client can comment and approve right in the content calendar.

I haven’t found a better tool than Notion to run your publishing calendar on.

Of course, lots of schedulers have an approval system too (I’ll cover these below), however, as Notion also works as an archive, it means that if a scheduler goes down, or loses posts, (remember back in 2023 when a whole load of Meta posts went walkabout?!) then we have them all stored in Notion. More than that, because the databases are searchable, we can pull up previously posted content, and repurpose or reuse it over time, helping to reinforce the brand message.

I will wax lyrical about Notion all day long, but popular alternatives are Click Up, Asana, and Trello. They can all do something similar, but I have found Notion to be the most powerful tool for content organisation and planning, for both us as an agency, and for our clients.

In Notion, we have a content library, but we also keep all our client images in Dropbox. We find a simple Dropbox link makes it really easy to create an archive so that if they would like a copy of all the images and videos we create, we can send them the folder nice and easily. Dropbox integrates well with my laptop and Windows setup, but you can also use Google Drive as an alternative.

Video meetings.

Another part of delivering social media management services is meetings. We like to use Google Meet as I use a lot of Google products, but Zoom is a popular alternative. I found that for the amount of meetings I run, Google worked well and didn’t cap the time I needed, and is free. Zoom, although a great product, needed a fee to go over 50 minutes of calls, so it made sense for us to go Google. If we need to record our calls, I pair Google with Awesome Screenshot. That said, if you have to record many calls, I think Zoom is well worth paying for.

Microsoft Teams meeting can also work well for some, but personally, I find that logging into Teams if you have multiple Microsoft accounts has been problematic, especially the SharePoint, so it’s not a tool I personally choose, and honestly, I feel sad any time a client comes to me who uses it! 🙈

One other, newer option is Butter, an amazing-looking tool for video calls, however, I have heard from some users that they still need to iron out some errors, but the user interface looks brilliant. This is perhaps one to keep an eye on in the near future, and one that is perhaps suited to regular coaching or consultation work.

Communication.

Clear comms is key to keeping your client in the social media loop, especially if you have a white-label team like us delivering it for you, or your own remote team working on content.

There is a commenting and tagging feature in Notion that we use, but it needs to have a few more options for us to be able to rely on it solely. (Although, Notion has mentioned an email integration option coming soon, so perhaps something is in the works!)

For internal teams, we use Slack. Honestly, I don’t love Slack, but I haven’t found an alternative that I like better.

(Yet!)

For client comms, we use a combination of Notion and email, as this seems to create the least resistance for them, and creates a better user experience, whilst still giving us the oversight of comms we need.

Content Creation.

Design Tools.

You can get some wonderful design tools- when you think about what has come on the market since I began in this industry back in 2010, from Figma to Adobe XD, it’s an ever-expanding sweet shop of design tools, even more so with the AI tools flooding the market right now.

But as a general rule, we use Canva for social media content.

There are a few reasons for this: it allows us to create quickly, create all the client templates we need, and also, for our Website Agency partners, they can give us access to their team really easily as needed.

With Canva, we’ve found that clients can get a free account really easily, it has a low barrier to learning the tool, and many of our clients come to us already using it. Social media design is quick and dirty compared to many other design assets, so Canva is more than sufficient. It’s also being heavily invested in, so the tool is getting better and better.

All that said, if we work with a design that only uses another tool, it won’t put us off working with them, as long as it can work with the needs and expectations of the client, we can be accommodating.

Writing Tools.

When you’re creating a lot of written content like we do, there are some tools that can help with the grammar, and also spotting mistakes. Nothing takes away the benefit of a human editor and proofreader, but the tools on the market can help with the initial draft.

Google Docs, Grammarly, and Hemingway Editor are some good options. Personally, we write directly into Notion and our linked Grammarly account will help flag up errors.

The other thing that we do, that perhaps you don’t get with other agencies, is we have an editor/proofreader. Where possible, and where the budget allows, we have an editor read the content before it goes for approval, so that there are always two pairs of eyes on it, before the client gets to see it. It’s a fine line between poor grammar and getting personality and character into your writing, which is why it is so important to have a human editor, not just using AI.

Video Editing.

Video editing is a beast of a job, and all video editors have their own methods and preferences for tools. Our editors use different tools for the different styles of videos we create, but here is a rundown.

You could choose from Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Descript, DaVinci Resolve, Movadi Video Editor…

But these are the ones that we use on a weekly basis.

Kapwing, a visually appealing tool that includes:

being able to add captions,

and edit from the transcript-

this is a golden part of the tool, and I love it!

I have used it for a number of years, so I have grown into using more tools the better my editing has got, but as editors go, it’s been fairly simple to use.

At some point, I need to explore Davinci Resolve, but you know when you’re busy, testing out a new to you tool, doesn’t always take priority!

The other editing app I use regularly is called Cut Story- it has lots of features, but I use it only to quickly cut a longer video into smaller chunks, for example, when I have a video that is longer than one minute, but I need to post to Instagram stories (which has a 60-second limit.) Super handy.

Another tool that I would recommend if editing isn’t your natural home, is Descript- it allows for captioning and transcript editing, and is very reasonable.

I’d also recommend CapCut, they offer creative templates and captioning- great for TikTok-heavy clients. CapCut is used by one of Sheldon’s video editors, as is iMovie for Mac.

Social Media Platforms.

Social media scheduling.

Many social media platforms have native scheduling (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn for example).

This is great, and if you’re only managing your own accounts, this can work well.

However, when you have to keep your eye on twenty, thirty, forty posts going out weekly, then having them in one centralised place is essential. Running it like this means posts that don’t post don’t get missed, and you have a visual overview of their content ecosystem.

My absolute favourite is Metricool. Simple and intuitive to use, it has great analytics reporting and a repeating list feature that works well for evergreen content, for some strategies.

If that’s not quite for you, there are a LOT of other options, like Hootsuite, Buffer or Sprout Social. To help you work out which one might be right for your agency, this post might help you out:

https://www.sheldon.social/articles/what-content-schedulers-are-there

Analytics and Reporting.

Platform-specific analytics.

I mentioned above about the analytics that I get from Metricool, but they don’t tell the whole picture. Although you can get the file emailed directly to you at the end of the month which is brilliant, and they are clear and easy to read, there are other places for analytics that we need to look at to get the whole picture. (This is why we give our clients a dashboard, and access to an analytics page where we store the file from Metricool, any relevant screenshots, analytics from native insights, plus our running data log.)

Facebook Analytics, Instagram Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, Threads … most platforms have a way for you to view native insights.

Where appropriate, we like to keep a record of these native analytics too. Every monitoring tool, whether native or third party has discrepancies, so keeping an eye on both can be really helpful.

The other thing that we do is keep a record of month-to-month analytics. For our clients that we’ve had for 5 years, we have 5 years of monthly data.

Is it a pain to do, yes.

But what it means is that we can compare this December with 4 previous Decembers, and we can see the patterns. Time is a wonderful KPI that is overlooked, and helps to give you better data where you can see the patterns, which you don’t get in the same way with any scheduler.

So,

There are a multitude of tools out there that can do the job to help you deliver great social media to your clients. Use my suggestions as your starting point, you’ll soon see what works for you and your team, and what doesn’t.

It is ok to have multiple tools, quite often, the tools that offer everything aren’t specific enough for some tasks, so use the bits that you need, and mix and match until you find what works.

By starting with these tools and approaches, you can streamline your social media management process and deliver an exceptional service for your clients. Remember, social media management is about more than just scheduling posts.

And at the end of the day, these are just the ones that I love, and that I know work well together, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other winning combinations! Remember, the perfect tech stack is unique to your agency and your clients' needs. Don't be afraid to experiment and find what works best for you.

If you need help with getting your systems in place to deliver social media as an offer, did you know that we do that?

Get in touch if your agency is thinking about offering social, and let’s have a chat sometime soon.