5 Questions to Test Your Social Media Agency [Updated for 2023]

We're often asked to audit the social media performance for companies in Dubai.  At times, companies are looking for a 3rd party to verify and validate the performance of their in-house team and are looking for advice on what improvements can be made.  Occasionally, we're asked by companies to check the social media activity for pages and platforms that are currently managed by another social media agency.  Based on our experience of this, we thought it would be useful to identify the best 5 questions that businesses can ask their agencies if they're unsure of whether they are a good fit for their business moving forward.

What to ask your social media agency: The right and wrong answer cheat sheet!

Question 1:  What are we doing to target our website visitors in order to get them to connect with our business on social media (or Facebook or Twitter)?

Good Answer 1:  We are retargeting your website visitors using cookies and other tracking tools such as a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) that allow Facebook and/or Twitter to match your site's visitors with their account holders so that we can create campaigns targeting these specific people.

Good Answer 2:  We are looking to drive people from different social media platforms to your website so that we can start to track their activity or their interests in your business and then target those same users across Google's display network, Facebook or Twitter.

Bad Answer 1:  We're placing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn widgets that either drive people to your company page on these platforms or allow them to connect with your platforms from within your site.  There's still nothing wrong with this approach, but it's outdated and not as effective as it was a few years ago. 

Bad Answer 2:   Nothing.  We're focusing on growing your community within the social media platforms only.

Question 2: We are a B2B business so we're only interested in corporate clients.  Why are you focusing so much attention on Facebook?

Good Answer 1:  Your potential customers are all humans (inside and) outside of work and with the high Facebook penetration rates for this region, are all likely to be on Facebook as well as professional networks such as LinkedIn (and Twitter to an extent).  We, therefore, need to keep your brand visible on Facebook, while also sharing content that they will find interesting and engaging when on the platform.  Facebook is also the go-to platform when people are on their 'down time' so keeping your brand front of mind is no bad thing.

Good Answer 2:  Our focus isn't just on Facebook, but we are trying to drive people from other professional platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter onto your company's website.  Once we have them on your site, we are tracking them and follow them onto Facebook where we are trying to increase conversion by showing them content related to what they were looking at on LinkedIn and on your website.

Bad Answer 1:  You're right, we shouldn't be spending too much of our attention on Facebook and will divert our focus onto LinkedIn.

Bad Answer 2:  There are not many ways of interacting with people on LinkedIn but by increasing our advertising on Facebook, we can boost more posts and target the same people on Facebook.

Question 3: We have a lot of very happy customers that I want us to connect with on social media.  How do we do this?

Good Answer 1:  There are a number of different things we can do.  The first is to align your offline strategies with this initiative and raise awareness of your social media pages when we are talking to customers.  The second thing we can do is use your customer databases and use Facebook and Twitter's list marketing service, which allows us to match customer databases with their user profiles so that we can communicate directly with these customers from these platforms.

Good Answer 2:  We can create a campaign that targets existing customers by emailing them or communicating with them when we speak to them.  The campaign can include a Facebook application or other database building tool that allows us to learn more about the customer while giving them every opportunity to connect with us on these platforms.

Bad Answer 1:  It's not possible to do this without emailing each customer and asking them to connect with us.

Bad Answer 2:  We can try and target customers from our platforms based on if they have mentioned us in a post or communicated with us in the past on Facebook.

Question 4: How are you increasing our 'Likes' on Facebook and our "Followers' on Twitter?

Good Answer 1:  We are posting engaging content that your target audience will find interesting, on a regular basis.  We're then using tools such as Facebook's Power Editor to use Facebook's personal profiling capabilities to create campaigns to drive awareness for each piece of content or article we post.  We are not 'Boosting' posts as we want to target genuine customers not just people who will like everything.

For Twitter, we're working on a number of strategies and one of these is creating engaging and interesting content, hosting this content on your website and then driving awareness on Twitter to this by creating interesting posts and communicating this with influencers.  We're also making meaningful connections and introductions on Twitter with potential customers or partners as well as other thought leaders in our industry to increase our own credibility and overall visibility.

Good Answer 2:  We're also looking to create custom audiences on Facebook based on (a) website visitors who we have been matched with Facebook accounts and (b) customers we have matched from List Marketing on Facebook.  We can then create 'Lookalike' audiences of extremely similar people based on Facebook's profiling information on each user.  We can create a much larger target audience with just a tiny percentage difference in characteristics between actual customers / website visitors and the new audience.  We can then create a campaign targeting the new audience and test the effectiveness of this.

Bad Answer:  To increase Facebook likes, we're boosting posts using Facebook advertising to gain new likes and fans. We can increase this more if we have more budget to allocate for this.

For Twitter, we're following all influencers and trying to see if they will follow us back.  Every now and then, we will reduce the number of people we follow and follow this same process again.  We'll also keep posting regularly on Twitter so that we stay visible.

Question 5: How can I track any business being generated on social media?

Good Answer:  There are a number of ways to do this.  We can track individuals who engage with you on social media and then go onto your website from these platforms to either make a booking, download vouchers, send an enquiry to the business or make a purchase on your website.  We can track these people using Facebook Tracking Pixels, Google Analytics or much more advanced platforms such as Hubspot or Marketo.

Bad Answer: It's really difficult to track ROI from social media, but we're sure that we're driving new customers to you.  Our engagement rates are much higher than the average so we must be driving business to you.  Unfortunately, tracking this is difficult.