How can agencies use this tool to serve multiple clients?

Our social media tool can help your agency grow by giving your clients access to social media campaigns that bring in measurable engagement and referrals to their business. You will be able to provide reports proving this.

The question that we explore in this article is how to structure your client accounts. 

Should you run all clients through a single account OR run each client through a separate account? 

The sweet spot for you might be a mix of the two, where less demanding clients are served in the main account and others get their own account (hopefully paying a small technology fee to help out). Since using a single account is less expensive, this article is written as a how-to for serving multiple clients in one account, but the drawbacks are also detailed so you can make your own decision on a client-by-client basis. I won’t mention convenience factors as a drawback, I will stick to what can and can’t be accomplished.

Social Publishing

You can schedule posts for multiple clients using a single account.

1. In Account Preferences, add the social profiles of all clients.
2. In the publisher, select only the profiles for that client.
3. Create separate Categories for each client and select their Category when posting to their profiles. You can even create multiple Categories for each client, so you might have ‘Client A – Promotions’ and ‘Client A – News’ for example.
4. If your client will need to have publishing rights as one of your three allowed sub-users, be sure to restrict their Social Profile access to their accounts only, so they can’t post to your other clients' profiles. Do this in User Settings.
5. If you have one or more clients that need to approve posts before they publish to social, you will need to create a sub-user for whoever does the posting (even if it’s you) and a separate sub-user for you that is set to approve the posts. As approval emails come to you, you can click the ‘Approve’ button if that client doesn’t require pre-approval. If that client requires it, you would need to forward the approval email to them so they can click the ‘Approve’ button or reply if they have changes.

Drawbacks to a single account versus separate accounts:

• All of your shared links will include the parameters set in Account Preferences. This means that if you have a client who doesn’t want Google Analytics UTM parameters added to their links (even though it doesn’t hurt anything to include them even if they don’t use Google Analytics), you would need to strip out these parameters from the global settings and from that point forward, manually add tracking parameters to each URL you share.

Calendar

You can use the marketing calendar for multiple clients using a single account.

1. To share the calendar with your client, instead of issuing them a sub-user account with calendar permissions, you will need to filter the calendar for their Categories, then screenshot the calendar and send it to them as an attached image or PDF.
2. You may still add reminder notifications for each client on the calendar, and even have it email them directly with the reminder at the assigned time. This allows any email address to be used.

Drawbacks to a single account versus separate accounts:

• You won’t be able to share a live calendar with your client unless you have a separate account, or they would be able to access other client’s calendar items too.

Campaigns

You can run campaigns for multiple clients using a single account.

1. Most campaigns insert the company name in the terms of use/rules, so you will want to change the company name in Account Settings for the duration of the campaign and you can only run them one client at a time. We are adding a custom field for company name for Sumolings in the next couple weeks at no charge though, so you can simply enter your client’s company name in each campaign. This will allow you to run campaigns for multiple clients simultaneously. [UPDATE: We have completed this task and it is live! It is located in the Design step of the campaign setup process and can be found in the ADVANCED SETTINGS in the left nav.]
2. If you have one or more clients that need to approve User Generated Content entries as they come in, you will need to set your personal sub-user account as the Moderator, then as approval emails come to you, you would need to forward the approval email to them so they can click the ‘Approve’ or ‘Delete’ button or reply if they have concerns. There’s no need for them to log in to Approve or Delete.
3. Select the integration for that company. However, keep in mind that each account can integrate with one MailChimp account and one Aweber account, etc. You can map multiple lists within those accounts, but you can’t integrate a single Campaign Share account with company A Mailchimp account and company B MailChimp account, only one Mailchimp account (for example). If you have two clients with Mailchimp or 2 Aweber or 2 Infusionsoft, etc. accounts, you can use the integration feature with the first client, but for the second client, you’ll need to download their campaign participants database as a CSV file and send it to them to upload to their system manually.
4. Create separate email notification templates for each client and assign to their campaigns
5. Create custom subdomains on the fly, by replacing the system generated subdomain with your client’s company name. We have a ‘catch-all’ subdomain system to allow for this. For example, if the system generates https://demo.sociamonials.com/testimonials/c12256/  you could replace ‘demo’ with ‘Clientname’ so you could share https://Clientname.sociamonials.com/testimonials/c1156/ with your client to promote and it works. It even keeps that URL in the browser location bar throughout the visit.
6. If you are running a Referral Sweepstakes or a campaign with Referral Rewards, you should create a separate custom tracking pixel in Account Preferences just for that client. Otherwise, if Client A and Client B share the same customer and are using the same tracking pixel used as the goal for the referral campaign, if an entrant to Client A’s referral rewards or referral sweepstakes campaign and shares their entry, then Friend A clicks on the shared link and later navigates to Client B’s tracked page a week later, this would count as meeting the goal set by Client A even though they didn’t get that visit, Client B did.

Drawbacks to a single account versus separate accounts:

• The integration issue described above.
• There is a global email template feature in Account Preferences that adds a custom HTML header and footer to all notifications. You won’t be able to use this or it will add client A branded headers/footers to all notifications. You’ll need to add branding within each email notification you create for that client.

Social CRM

There are limited features that can be used when using a single account.

1. You can share individual contact detail pages with your client by using the blue ‘Assign’ button on the detail page. Then enter the client’s email address. The system will email them a link to the detail page without having to log in to the software.

Drawbacks to a single account versus separate accounts:

• While individual campaigns can be exported or integrated for individual clients, Social CRM is a consolidation view that pulls in all activity from all campaigns, share buttons and social post activity into a single view. That means that contacts from all clients will appear in this view and there is no way to filter them out by the client.

Share Buttons

You can generate share buttons for multiple clients using a single account.

1. Include the name of the client at the beginning of the share button name (Ex. ‘Client A - white paper’). This will allow you to filter using the client’s name to find their buttons if you need to edit or delete them. It will also help in reporting.

Tracking Pixels

You can track multiple custom events for multiple clients using a single account.

1. Provide each client with the Sale and Lead tracking pixels to add to their websites.
2. Generate a custom tracking pixel (you can create up to 6 of them) as your clients request them for tracking things like blog visits, email newsletter signups, etc. Once you create one, all of your clients may use the same custom pixel. For example, if you create a blog visit tracking event and Client A places it on all their blog pages and Client B places it on theirs too, what will happen is when you run a social post for Client A and filter the report for their Categories, it will show all blog visits for their posts only. Similarly, it will report on blog visits resulting from clicks on Client B’s social posts only. The same thing with Campaign reporting, it will work too. The risk here is that if Client A and Client B share the same customer, if they click on Client A’s post then navigate to Client B’s blog a week later, this will register as a blog visit and will inflate the blog visit count for Client A. The referral campaign issues are discussed in that section above.

Drawbacks to a single account versus separate accounts:

• Reports will include reporting on all custom tracking events. For example, if you have a client that wants to track people who sign up for White Paper A and White Paper B separately, you can create separate custom tracking event pixels for each of those events. However, now when you run social publishing and campaign reports, it will show ‘White Paper A’ and ‘White Paper B’ on their reports. The values should be zero since they don’t have those pixels on their pages, but it will look a little odd to them.

Reporting

You can track multiple custom events for multiple clients using a single account.

1. To generate a Published Message report, select the Category of your client from the dropdown filter. If your client has multiple Categories assigned to them, like ‘Client A - blog posts’ and ‘Client A - promotions’, you would need to run the reports separately for each Category.
2. To generate a Campaigns report, select their campaign from the dropdown filter.
3. To generate a Share Buttons report, enter the client’s name in the search field and it will only show their share buttons, assuming you followed the instructions above and included the company name in the share button name.
4. To generate a Videos report, select the videos for that client.

Drawbacks to a single account versus separate accounts:

• The Overview report will not work for multiple clients, as it pulls in information from all activities across the entire account.
• The Optimal Publishing Times report will not work for multiples clients, as it pulls in information from all activities across the entire account.

Conclusion

The most cost-effective way to manage multiple clients is through a main account for all clients except for clients who are more demanding. The most convenient way is to have a separate account for each client.