How to tell whether your social media agency is doing a good job

Judge the agency on what it controls first. Open the agreement, count the pieces it promised, then count the pieces that went live in the last thirty days on the public page. Check whether each one carries a real title, a made thumbnail and a caption written for that platform. Check how long the agency took to answer you and to turn footage around, against what was agreed. Then read the last report and ask whether it says what changed and why.

Follower count and any single week's reach stay out of it. Neither is something an agency controls, and both are noisy at the volumes most businesses run. What an agency does control is output, packaging, responsiveness and learning. If those four are in order after three months and nothing is improving, that is the moment to question the vendor. If they are not in order, you do not need three months.

The question owners ask, and the wrong number they reach for

A few months into a retainer the question is usually "is this working?" and the first thing opened is the follower graph. It is the number every platform puts on the profile, the number the agency's report leads with, and the least useful one on the page.

Followers lag. They move on the back of content that was useful to someone at the moment they were ready to act, and they move slowly at small counts. A flat follower line three months in says almost nothing about whether the agency is doing its job, and a rising one can come from a single piece that travelled. Which social numbers a business owner should look at covers the metrics that do connect to revenue. For judging an agency, start earlier than that, with the things that were promised.

The five checks below take about an hour with three things open: the agreement or proposal, the public page, and your inbox.

Check one: did the promised output go live

Take the number of pieces per month in the proposal. Open the public page and count what appeared in the last thirty days, on each platform the agency is meant to be managing. Count a cross post once.

• The count matches, or the agency told you in advance why it would not.
• The cadence holds. Eight pieces posted on the last two days of the month is not the same as two a week.
• Gaps are explained. If a week is empty, there should be a message from that week saying why, ideally before you noticed.

If footage from your side was the bottleneck, note it, because that is your gap and not theirs. If the agency had the footage and the pieces did not go live, the retainer is not being delivered, whatever the report says.

Check two: packaging quality on the public page

Open the page as a stranger would. Watch the first three seconds of five pieces picked at random and read the caption under each.

• Titles and hooks. Is the first line something a stranger would stop for, or is it the file name, the date, or a description of what the video contains?
• Thumbnails and covers. Made deliberately, with text legible at phone size, or a frame pulled from the video?
• Captions. Written for the platform, in your voice, with something to do at the end? Or the same block of hashtags under every post?
• Format. Correct aspect ratio for each platform, captions burned in where the platform plays muted by default, audio level consistent between pieces?

This is the check most owners skip because it needs no data, and it catches a struggling agency earliest. Packaging takes judgement rather than software, and it is the first thing that slips when an agency is stretched.

Check three: response and turnaround against what was agreed

Search your inbox and chat history for the last ten things you sent the agency: footage, a question, a change request. Note the timestamp on each reply.

• Footage delivered to first cut back: how many days, against the turnaround in the proposal?
• Questions answered: same day, next day, or when you chased?
• Revisions: how many rounds did a piece need, and did the second round fix what you asked for in the first?
• Who replied? The person who sold you, the person doing the work, or a rotating name?

None of this needs the agency's cooperation; the record is already on your side. Slipping turnaround is usually the earliest sign that an agency has taken on more than it can serve.

Check four: does the report say what changed and why

Read the last two reports side by side. A dashboard export is not a report. What should be on the page:

• What went live, listed, with links.
• What performed, in the agency's own reading, with a reason offered. "This one did well because the hook was a question people argue about" is a reading. A green arrow is not.
• What performed poorly, named. An agency that never reports a miss is either not looking or not telling you.
• What will change next month because of the above.

The last point is the one that matters. If a report contains numbers but no decision, nobody is steering. You are paying for judgement, and the report is where you can see whether any is being applied.

Check five: is month three different from month one

Put a piece from the first month next to a piece from the most recent one. Same platform, same format. Look for evidence that something was learned.

• Are the hooks tighter?
• Has the caption style settled into something that sounds like you?
• Has the posting mix shifted toward whatever the reports said was working?
• Did any format get dropped because it was not working, and was that decision explained?

If the answer to all four is no, the agency is executing a template rather than running your page. That can be worth paying for at the right price, but it is a different service from the one most retainers describe. What moves in month one sets out what should and should not have shifted in the first thirty days, which is the fair baseline for this comparison.

When to give it more time, and when to leave

Give it more time when checks one to four pass and only check five is weak. Learning sometimes takes a cycle to show. Set a date, say the next report, and put in writing what you expect to be different by then.

Leave, or at least renegotiate, when check one or check three fails. Missing output with footage in hand, or turnaround that drifts week on week, are not things that fix themselves, and the other checks cannot compensate for them.

Leave when check four never improves. An agency that will not say what it is changing and why will not change it. Planable's guide to what to expect from a social media agency, written by Corrie Jones, who has run one, calls posting that has become a box ticking exercise a complete red flag, and that shows in the report before it shows anywhere else.

Do not decide on a single week's reach, in either direction. One piece that travelled does not prove the agency, and one quiet week does not condemn it.

VALORAE Media is a video first social media management agency. Clients film, and we edit short form, long form and thumbnails, then write the titles and captions, schedule and post on the client's channels. The three packages, Edit, Manage and Full Page, differ in how much of that we own, and the checks above are the ones we expect to be judged on: the pieces promised went live, packaged properly, on time, with a report that says what changed. Pricing depends on volume, and the place to work that out is a call, which you can book here.