Let’s get something out of the way.
SMR Social isn’t a big social media marketing agency.
We don’t have an enormous office full of employees, dozens of departments, a fancy boardroom or an account management team that changes every few months.
We don’t have hundreds of clients, and we’re not particularly interested in becoming the biggest social media agency in the country.
In fact, there are only two of us.
And we think that’s one of the best things about working with SMR Social.
We understand that some businesses might see our size as a disadvantage. Perhaps they’re looking for a large marketing agency with an impressive office, a huge team and a presentation full of ambitious promises.
That’s absolutely fine. There are plenty of agencies out there offering exactly that.
But if you’re a small business looking for reliable, experienced and genuinely personal social media management, we’d encourage you to consider whether bigger really does mean better.
Because when you work with SMR Social, you’re not hiring an agency where your account gets passed between different employees.
You’re getting two dedicated people who become part of your team, take responsibility for your social media and genuinely care about helping your business succeed.
And for a lot of small businesses, that’s exactly what they need.
Small by Design, Not by Accident
SMR Social is a family-run social media management business, run by husband-and-wife team Stephen and Abby.
We’ve been working in social media marketing for years, helping businesses build their online presence, create engaging content, connect with customers and generate new opportunities through organic social media and paid advertising.
Stephen began freelancing in 2014, and Abby joined the business several years later. Between us, we’ve built long-term working relationships with clients across a wide range of industries, from small local businesses to established companies and organisations.
Over that time, we’ve learned a great deal about what businesses actually need from their social media managers.
And perhaps more importantly, we’ve learned what they don’t need.
They don’t necessarily need complicated marketing jargon, endless meetings, enormous reports that nobody reads or a different person answering their emails every week.
They need somebody who understands their business, creates good content, responds to their customers, communicates clearly and does what they’ve promised to do.
That might sound relatively straightforward.
We think it should be.
Our approach has always been to keep things personal, practical and focused on the work that actually makes a difference.
And staying small allows us to do exactly that.
When You Hire SMR Social, You Know Exactly Who You’re Working With
One of the biggest differences between hiring SMR Social and working with a larger social media agency is the relationship you’ll have with the people managing your accounts.
With some larger agencies, you might initially speak to a salesperson or senior member of the team. They explain the services, discuss your goals and persuade you to sign up.
Then, once you’ve become a client, somebody else takes over.
Perhaps there’s an account manager who communicates with you, a content creator who writes your posts, a designer who produces the graphics and another person responsible for scheduling everything.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that structure. For certain businesses, it can work very well.
But it can also create distance between the client and the people actually doing the work.
At SMR Social, things are much simpler.
The people you speak to are the people managing your social media.
We’re the ones getting to know your business, writing your content, creating your posts, monitoring your accounts and responding to your messages.
If you’ve got an idea, a question, a concern or something you’d like to change, you can speak directly to us.
You don’t need to explain something to an account manager and hope the message reaches the person creating your content.
You don’t need to wait for somebody to check with another department.
And you certainly don’t need to introduce yourself to a new member of staff every few months.
You know who we are, and we know who you are.
That makes a surprisingly big difference.
We Become Part of Your Team
One of the things we enjoy most about managing social media for businesses is getting to know the people behind them.
We don’t want to simply receive a brief at the beginning of the month, create a few generic posts and disappear until it’s time to send an invoice.
We want to understand what your business does, how it operates, who your customers are and what you’re trying to achieve.
What makes your business different from its competitors? What do your customers regularly ask about? What are you particularly proud of? What’s happening behind the scenes that might make interesting content?
The longer we work together, the more familiar we become with your business.
We learn your tone of voice, your services, your priorities and the little details that make your company unique.
Eventually, we want working with us to feel less like outsourcing your social media and more like having two additional members of your team.
The difference is that you don’t need to employ us full-time, provide office space, manage our holidays or worry about all the other responsibilities that come with taking on employees.
You get dedicated social media support without the commitment and expense of building your own in-house marketing team.
For many small businesses, that’s an incredibly useful arrangement.
You Can Be as Involved as You Want to Be
Something we’ve noticed over the years is that business owners have very different ideas about how involved they want to be in their social media marketing.
Some love it.
They enjoy taking photographs, recording videos, coming up with ideas and sharing what’s happening within the business. They simply need somebody with the experience to turn all of that into a consistent, professional social media presence.
Others would quite happily never open Instagram again.
They’re busy running their businesses, dealing with customers, managing staff and trying to get through everything else on their to-do lists.
The last thing they want is another responsibility.
And we completely understand both approaches.
When you work with SMR Social, you can be as hands-on or hands-off as you like.
If you want to be heavily involved, brilliant. We can work closely together, discuss content ideas, review upcoming posts and make sure your knowledge and personality come through in everything we publish.
If you’d rather take a back seat, that’s absolutely fine too.
Once we’ve got to know your business, established your objectives and agreed on how we’ll work together, we can take responsibility for the day-to-day management of your social media.
We’ll still need your input when something requires your expertise, approval or information that only you can provide. After all, nobody knows your business better than you do.
But you shouldn’t have to spend your working day chasing your social media manager to find out whether anything is happening.
Which brings us to something we think is particularly important.
Your Social Media Doesn’t Stop Being Managed After We’ve Published a Post
For us, social media management isn’t simply about creating a calendar of posts and scheduling them.
That’s only part of the job.
Your social media accounts are an extension of your business. They’re places where potential customers discover you, ask questions, read reviews, interact with your content and decide whether they want to work with you.
That activity doesn’t only happen when you’ve scheduled a post.
This is why we believe ongoing account management is so important.
During the working week, we’re actively involved in our clients’ social media accounts. Depending on the services we’ve agreed, that means creating content, checking messages, responding to comments, monitoring activity and making sure things are running as they should.
We’re not simply scheduling everything at the beginning of the month and forgetting about it.
We’re there, Monday to Friday, keeping an eye on what’s happening and making sure your social media is being looked after.
We generally keep weekends free, although we’re available to help with genuine emergencies when necessary.
We think that’s a reasonable balance, and it’s something we’re clear about from the beginning.
The important thing is that you know somebody is taking responsibility for your accounts throughout the working week.
If a customer asks a question, we want it to be noticed.
If somebody leaves a comment that needs a response, we want it to be dealt with.
If something important changes within your business, we want your social media content to reflect it.
Because effective social media management involves much more than pressing the publish button.
Reliability Shouldn’t Be a Selling Point, but Here We Are
This might be one of the least glamorous things we could possibly say about our business.
We’re reliable.
Not particularly exciting, is it?
We’re not promising to revolutionise the entire marketing industry or discover some secret Instagram strategy that nobody else knows about.
We’re saying that if we agree to do something, we’ll do it.
If we’ve agreed to create content, we’ll create it.
If we’re responsible for managing your accounts, we’ll manage them.
If we’ve arranged a meeting, we’ll be there.
If you send us a message, we’ll respond.
And if something isn’t working as well as we’d hoped, we’ll talk about it and work out what we can do differently.
We think those things should be standard.
Unfortunately, anybody who’s ever hired a freelancer, contractor or marketing company and then struggled to get a response will know that reliability isn’t always guaranteed.
When you’re trusting somebody with your business’s online presence, you need to know they’ll actually be there.
You shouldn’t have to chase them constantly.
You shouldn’t have to wonder whether your posts are being created.
And you shouldn’t be paying a monthly management fee while worrying about whether anybody is actually doing the work.
We take that responsibility seriously.
Our clients are trusting us with something important to their businesses, and we believe they deserve to feel confident that it’s being looked after.
We’re Not Going to Promise You the World
Let’s talk about marketing promises.
You’ve probably seen them.
Agencies promising explosive growth, thousands of followers, viral content and incredible results in record time.
Some businesses are very good at making their services sound almost too good to be true.
And sometimes, that’s because they are.
We’d much rather have a sensible conversation about what your business wants to achieve and what social media can realistically contribute towards those goals.
Can we help you create a more professional and consistent social media presence? Absolutely.
Can we help you develop better content, communicate more effectively with your audience and make better use of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms? That’s what we do.
Can we create and manage Meta advertising campaigns designed to generate enquiries, website traffic or awareness? Yes.
But can we guarantee that every post will go viral, every advert will generate customers or your follower count will triple in a month?
No.
And we’d be suspicious of anybody who told you they could.
Social media marketing involves testing ideas, understanding audiences, creating content, reviewing performance and making improvements over time.
Sometimes a post performs brilliantly.
Sometimes something you thought would be incredibly popular barely gets noticed.
That’s the nature of social media.
Our job is to use our experience to make informed decisions, manage your accounts professionally and keep working towards the objectives we’ve agreed.
We believe that’s far more valuable than making impressive promises that nobody can realistically guarantee.
We Don’t Need to Make Things More Complicated Than They Are
One of the benefits of being a small social media management business is that we can keep things straightforward.
You don’t need to navigate several departments to ask a question.
You don’t need a formal meeting every time you want to change a caption.
And you don’t need to spend half an hour explaining a simple idea to somebody who’s never spoken to you before.
If you’ve got a photograph you want us to use, send it over.
If there’s something important happening within the business, tell us about it.
If you want to try a different approach to your content, let’s discuss it.
If something isn’t quite right, we’ll sort it out.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have processes or a strategy behind what we do.
Of course we do.
Planning, organisation and consistency are essential parts of effective social media management.
But the process should make your life easier, not become another job for you to manage.
We want working with SMR Social to feel simple.
You tell us what you need, we agree on the best approach and we get on with the work.
Your Business Won’t Be Just Another Account Number
This is another area where being small makes a difference.
We don’t want hundreds of clients.
We want to work with businesses where we can provide a genuinely valuable service and build strong working relationships.
That means understanding the individual businesses we manage rather than treating every account in exactly the same way.
A local window company doesn’t need the same social media strategy as a recruitment business.
A luxury driving experience company needs a different tone of voice from a freelance marketplace.
A technology company communicating with IT professionals needs different content from a residential property brand.
We’ve worked with businesses across very different industries, and one thing we’ve learned is that good social media management isn’t about applying the same formula to everybody.
It’s about understanding the business, the audience and the objectives.
Some clients need regular educational content.
Others benefit from behind-the-scenes photographs, customer stories and short-form video.
Some want help generating leads through Meta advertising.
Others are primarily interested in building awareness, maintaining a professional presence and communicating with existing customers.
Our job is to work out what makes sense for your business.
Not simply sell you the same package of generic content that we’re producing for everybody else.
Experience Matters More Than the Size of the Office
We’ve been involved in social media marketing for a long time.
Stephen started freelancing back in 2014, when social media looked very different from the platforms businesses use today.
Instagram was a very different place. TikTok hadn’t arrived. Facebook business pages operated differently, and short-form video hadn’t become such a significant part of social media marketing.
Since then, we’ve seen countless platform updates, algorithm changes, new features, trends and supposedly revolutionary marketing strategies.
We’ve also seen plenty of things come and go.
That experience is useful because it helps us distinguish between changes that genuinely matter to businesses and things that probably don’t deserve quite so much attention.
It also means we’ve worked with a wide variety of clients, challenges and marketing objectives.
We’ve created organic social media strategies, managed ongoing content, developed paid advertising campaigns and helped businesses communicate more effectively with their audiences.
And we’ve learned that the fundamentals of good social media marketing are often much simpler than people make them sound.
Understand your audience.
Create content they have a reason to care about.
Show what makes your business worth choosing.
Communicate consistently.
Pay attention to what works.
And don’t forget that there are actual human beings on the other side of the screen.
You don’t need an enormous agency to do those things well.
You need people who know what they’re doing and are prepared to put the work in.
What About the Advantages of a Big Social Media Agency?
We should probably acknowledge something.
There are advantages to working with larger agencies.
If you’re a multinational company running enormous marketing campaigns across several countries, you might need a large team with specialists in different areas.
If your business requires extensive video production, complex international advertising, public relations and multiple marketing departments working together, a bigger organisation might be the right choice.
And there are plenty of excellent agencies out there doing fantastic work.
We’re not suggesting that every large agency overcharges or underdelivers.
But we do think businesses sometimes assume that bigger automatically means better.
It doesn’t.
A large team, impressive offices and an expensive-looking website don’t necessarily tell you how much attention your social media accounts will receive.
They don’t tell you whether your messages will be answered promptly.
They don’t tell you whether the people creating your content will understand your business.
And they certainly don’t guarantee results.
Those are the things we’d encourage small business owners to ask about when comparing social media management services.
Who will actually be managing your account?
How often will they check it?
Will they respond to comments and messages?
How will they get to know your business?
What happens if you need something changed?
How easy will it be to speak to the person doing the work?
These questions are much more important than how many people appear in the agency’s team photograph.
Affordable Social Media Management Without Unnecessary Overheads
Another benefit of keeping our business small is that we don’t have the overheads associated with running a large agency.
We don’t have expensive city-centre offices, layers of management or a large payroll to support.
That allows us to keep our pricing competitive while focusing our time and resources on delivering the services our clients are paying for.
We know that for many small businesses, marketing budgets need to be carefully managed.
You might recognise the value of having somebody look after your social media, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got thousands of pounds available every month.
And even if you do have a larger budget, you still want to know you’re getting good value for money.
Our approach is to offer practical social media management services that reflect what businesses actually need.
That might involve creating and scheduling content, managing comments and messages, developing a social media strategy or running targeted Meta advertising campaigns.
We can discuss the level of support that makes sense for your business rather than assuming you need every service available.
Because the goal isn’t to sell you the most expensive package possible.
It’s to build a working relationship where you feel the service is worth paying for.
We Want Our Clients to Stay Because They’re Happy
We don’t want clients to stay with SMR Social because changing social media managers feels too complicated.
We want them to stay because they’re happy with the work we’re doing.
Because they trust us.
Because they know their accounts are being managed.
Because they feel comfortable asking questions, sharing ideas and getting involved whenever they want to.
And because having us on their team makes running their business a little easier.
We understand that social media isn’t always going to be the most important thing on a business owner’s mind.
Sometimes you’ve got staff problems, customer enquiries, suppliers, deadlines, finances and a hundred other things demanding your attention.
You might not have time to think about what to post on Facebook today.
That’s precisely why you’ve hired somebody to manage it.
Our job is to take that responsibility seriously so you can concentrate on everything else.
And if you do want to get involved, we’re here to work with you.
That’s the relationship we want to build with our clients.
Two People Who Actually Care About Your Business
There’s one final thing we think is worth mentioning.
SMR Social is our business.
It’s not a job we’re doing for somebody else. We’re not working towards somebody else’s targets or waiting for the opportunity to move to another company.
When you hire us, you’re supporting a family-run business that we’ve spent years building.
And we know what it’s like to be a small business owner.
We understand the pressure of finding customers, managing workloads, paying bills and trying to make the right decisions about where to invest your time and money.
We understand that paying somebody to manage your social media is a commitment.
And we understand how frustrating it would be to make that investment and then feel like your business isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.
That’s why we care about doing a good job.
Our reputation matters to us.
The relationships we build with clients matter to us.
And delivering the service we’ve promised matters to us.
We’re not going to pretend that everything we create will be perfect or that every campaign will produce incredible results.
But we will be there, doing the work, communicating with you and looking for ways to improve.
We think that’s what a good social media management service should look like.
Maybe Being Small Is Our Biggest Strength
So, what makes SMR Social different from other social media agencies?
We’re small.
Really small.
Just two people.
For some businesses, that won’t be what they’re looking for.
And that’s fine.
But for others, it’s exactly the reason we’re a good fit.
You get two experienced social media managers who know your business, understand your objectives and are personally responsible for the work being delivered.
You can get involved as much or as little as you want.
You can speak directly to the people managing your accounts.
You can trust that we’re checking your social media throughout the working week, creating content, responding to messages and making sure things are being looked after in line with the services we’ve agreed.
And you won’t find us promising you overnight success or pretending that social media marketing is some mysterious science that only enormous agencies can understand.
We’re a husband-and-wife team who enjoy helping businesses make better use of social media.
We work hard, we communicate, we do what we say we’re going to do and we genuinely care about the businesses we work with.
It might not sound as impressive as a huge agency with an enormous office and a team of 50 people.
But we think it sounds pretty good.
If you’re looking for reliable, affordable and genuinely personal social media management for your small business, we’d love to have a conversation.
Tell us about your business, what you’re trying to achieve and where you need help.
We’ll tell you what we think we can do, how we’d approach it and whether we’re a good fit.
No enormous promises.
No unnecessary complications.
Just two dedicated social media managers who want to help your business succeed.
And we think that’s something worth shouting about.