Social media management for Canadian brands
Running social accounts for a Canadian audience is not the same as running them for an American one, and the difference is more than spelling. The calendar is different: Canada Day, Victoria Day, Thanksgiving in October, and a retail year where the winter runs longer and matters more.
We manage accounts for businesses in several provinces, which mostly means scheduling around their local time rather than ours. A post that lands at nine in the morning in Toronto arrives at six in Vancouver, and for a British Columbia audience that is simply a wasted post.
There are also rules worth knowing. Canada’s anti-spam legislation is stricter than the American equivalent and applies to a good deal of commercial electronic messaging, contests advertised to Quebec residents carry their own requirements, and advertising in French is not optional for some audiences.
We report on what actually came of it — enquiries and traffic — rather than follower counts, which are the easiest number to grow and the least connected to revenue.
Social Media Management in Toronto — Frequently Asked Questions
Cost, which platforms are worth your time, how long results take and who owns the accounts — the questions Toronto business owners ask before handing over their social media.
Most small businesses land between $600 and $2,000 a month. The range comes down to how many platforms, how often you post, and whether we are producing the photography and video or working with what you already have. Paid advertising budget sits on top of that and goes to the platform, not to us. We quote a fixed monthly fee in writing so there is no drift. Fewer than you think, done properly. Most Toronto small businesses are better served by one or two platforms posted consistently than five posted occasionally. Which ones depends entirely on who buys from you: a restaurant or salon belongs on Instagram, a B2B consultancy on LinkedIn, a trade business often does best on Facebook where local community groups still drive real work. We will tell you where not to bother. A content plan agreed ahead of the month so you know what is going out. Writing and design for each post. Scheduling and publishing. Replying to comments and messages within business hours. Monitoring what performs and adjusting. And a monthly report that shows what happened in plain language rather than a wall of numbers. Engagement usually moves within four to six weeks. Followers grow slowly and steadily after that. Enquiries that can be traced back to social typically take three to six months to become meaningful. Anyone promising faster than that is either buying followers or describing a paid ad campaign, which is a different thing with a different budget. Yes, and the difference matters when you are comparing quotes. Management is the ongoing running of your accounts — posting, replying, community. Marketing usually means paid campaigns with an advertising budget and a conversion target. Many businesses need both, but they are priced differently and measured differently. See social media marketing. We can, and for most businesses it is the part that decides whether any of this works. Stock imagery is visible from a mile away and performs badly. We shoot on location or work with what you have — and if you can take reasonable photos on a phone yourself, we will show you how and keep the cost down. You do. Accounts are set up under your business, with you as the owner and us added as a manager. Every image, caption and video we produce is yours to keep. If we stop working together you keep everything and we remove our access. Ask any agency this before you sign — some register accounts to themselves. We flag it to you the same day and draft a response, but we do not post a reply to a complaint without you seeing it first. Handled properly, a public complaint answered well does more for your credibility than a page of positive posts. Deleting them, which is most businesses' instinct, does the opposite. The running of it is ours. What we need from you is roughly an hour a month — approving the content plan, telling us what is coming up, and passing on anything happening in the business worth posting about. The accounts that perform are the ones where the owner still feeds us the real material. Yes. We are based in North York and work across Toronto, the GTA and Ontario, with clients elsewhere in Canada. Social media management runs perfectly well remotely, though for businesses close enough to visit we prefer to come and shoot content in person a few times a year.How much does social media management cost in Toronto?
Which platforms should my business actually be on?
What do you actually do each month?
How long before I see results?
Is social media management different from social media marketing?
Do you create the photos and videos?
Who owns the accounts and the content?
What if I get a bad review or a negative comment?
Do I need to do anything, or do you handle it all?
Do you work with businesses outside Toronto?
