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Who should write the copy? Me or my client? Unresolved copy is holding up our posting schedule [instagram]
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I'm curious as to what you ask your clients for - not just in terms of content but also in terms of copy.
This is my first social media-related job, I have been on it for three months now and am kind of learning as I go. I didn't seek out the position and never really desired to be a social media manager but had taken a few classes and sort of transitioned from working on visuals and graphics for this organization to the addition of social media management and advising.
I'm working to manage both the account for the organization and the account of the founder.
I've learned to streamline things on the job, continuously improving my prior planning, copy, tags, and approval methods before posting. First we communicated these things over email and eventually, I made a spreadsheet workspace - which has been even better.
Yesterday I finally invested in a subscription to Later. It's the $20 monthly premium subscription.
Up until now I've been posting things manually, which has really eaten into my time because if you're familiar with this, after all of the editing and planning takes place, it can take 3 to even 10 minutes to actually organize the post and get it out there.
As I'm working 20 hour weeks and continuously going overtime, I wanted to streamline the process and plan ahead, implementing auto-posts for stories and content in advance.
I'm having trouble with Captions - now this is the tricky bit. I've been writing a lot of them, both for the organization and the personal account of the founder (who is my client and the person that I communicate with directly). I sometimes write the whole caption, or if it's tricky, I write a draft, or several suggestions of what I think it could say and then let her correct or change it in the spreadsheet.
I repeatedly run into trouble getting her to approve captions... and sometimes gathering content for them. I have a decent grasp of what the organization is about, and what language to use, but it can be tricky to word certain things as there are sensitive topics and we have to be careful of the way that we speak about things - it's a nonprofit dealing with mental health.
Sometimes, especially with newer projects, I don't really have a full picture of the brief. I read the newsletters but it's actually difficult to free-write some of the content for the images that I'm provided. Recently, one of the managers overseas has been sending in photos of the work taking place in his area... they're all great but I'm not getting any explanation of what is actually going on. I find myself writing the same thing over and over again, something vague, a positive message about community and working together. etc. It's getting stale. I have contacted the manager who is sending the photos in about the content, asking for more specifics, descriptions, a small story of something that happened that day, etc. There is a small language barrier and a huge time difference so it's difficult to get a prompt and clear response. I am often left with too little information. I then speak directly with my boss, asking for more information, copy, storytelling, anything. She just gives me a vague answer.
This has caused me to actually miss a few days of posts because I have nothing to work with.
The same goes for the founder's personal Instagram. I advise her, give her caption suggestions, but ultimately this is up to her to choose and approve because her account is hers, first-person. I have given her a lot of advice on the content that I need from her in terms of images and storytelling but it's difficult to get everything I need to fully run it on my own. I am currently out of the country but we typically work together in person twice a week and take photos - this works better but is not possible right now.
Additionally - the posting rate is hard to keep up with. She wants a post for her personal account every day. She used to want 6 posts for the organization per day (just posts, not including stories). After she became frustrated with me for not being able to do this consistently (do you know how much advance planning that would need?), I told her blatantly that this would not be beneficial to her growth, nor would it be a sustainable or practical rate. We negotiated 3 posts. Due to caption hold-ups I average 1 to 3 on the account per day... sometimes missing a day, again, due to hold-ups.
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Should I be writing the copy at all?
Is there a better way to streamline the process of getting a photo captioned and approved and ready to post? I haven't actually asked her to pay for the Later subscription, which almost makes me want to keep it to myself because it's out of my own pocket... I haven't really decided how to approach this yet.
Do you ask your clients for full copy or do you have a specific set of questions that you use to triangulate what you're going to write?
How much work should I be doing and how much should my client be doing?
I am currently - curating and editing photos, I'm the photographer for some, captions and copy, newsletters, and then all of the back-end social media research.
Initially, I was having her approve of the posts that were already on the schedule. Now, with Later, I'm thinking I'll just throw a collection of selected images at her - starting with maybe 20 and reducing to 10, twice a week.. maybe less.. to approve captions for so that I can throw them on the schedule. I also want to reduce the expectation for posts from 3 a day to 2 a day max - usually one. Is this a good method?
What should I do differently!
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February 04, 2020 at 03:02AM