Managing social media for 3 clients is slowly killing me. How do people do this at scale?

I want to automate stuff anyone can help here?

I run content for 3 small businesses. That means 3 different brand voices. 3 content calendars. 3 sets of captions. Scheduling. Posting. Monitoring comments.

I work 6 days a week and still feel behind. Every Sunday I spend 4 hours just planning the week ahead.

I started doing this because I thought it would be flexible.

It is the least flexible thing I have ever done. How are solo social media managers handling more than 2 clients without burning out?

Comments

skylerDevops•about 2 hours ago•3

They up their rates and get a team.

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Dry_Bag8911•about 2 hours ago•1

I'm not an SM Manager, just a solo founder with very little SM experience or time trying to automate as much of my SM content as I can, so take my words with a grain of salt. How much of this are you already automating?

I'd say at this point it is possible to automate essentially anything which is just clicking and typing. e.g. Scheduling/Posting, brainstorming content ideas, uploading pictures and videos, putting together basic brand-aligned graphics, writing appropriate replies, data analysis etc. You can also AI generate basic product shoots, e.g. a picture of an energy drink with beads of water on it, NOT whole Reels (which is possible, but more expensive and time consuming than you may like).

You CAN'T automate: Taste (sure an image it may match your guidelines but is it good? thats still your job to decide), shooting & editing IRL content, overall strategy and direction (I mean, you can automate this, but it will always need adjusting and its a bit silly to be managing a strategy that you haven't set or engaged with yourself), probably loads more that I'm not aware of (as I mentioned I am very new to Social Media management)

A big limiting factor is how much control platforms are willing to give away via their APIs - some won't allow you to post comments or properly schedule posts without paying them a bunch of money which may or may not be worth it to you (last time I checked, the twitter API cost around $200 per month!). It also obviously requires a lot of time still looking at AI generated content and will involve teething problems at the start as you get your workflows to align with your actual ways of working, brand guidelines and your own taste.

If you haven't already, a Claude Max subscription is imo completely worth it. You can connect it up to no-code platforms like n8n via MCP connectors, install skills for building these and have it write basically any kind of workflow you wish (quality not guaranteed). You can even create brand guidelines and instruct Claude to create graphics and posts based on that.

tl;dr - yes, you can automate stuff a bunch of point and click stuff, but set up takes a while and some things simply cannot be automated

Happy to discuss it more between prompts, though I am off shooting pictures today for my barely existent channel so may not be immediately responsive.

mydrop_ai•about 2 hours ago•1

felt this hard, the sunday 4-hour planning thing is so real. I run Mydrop AI, a social management tool, so I'm biased, but batching all 3 brands in one sitting is what actually saved my sundays

fletchergray_1•about 1 hour ago•1

yeah 3 is the killer number.. too much to do by hand, not enough to bring on help, so it all just sits on u

couple things that actually help-

get all 3 into one dashboard with a separate space per client so you are not logging in and out all day.. and batch by client not by task, do one client's whole week in one go while ur still in their head, then move to the next one

thats basically the setup i work on at content studio, a space per client with ai drafting the first caption pass so you are tweaking not staring at a blank box. wont fix everything but it takes a real chunk out of that sunday

LongjumpingLab8•about 1 hour ago•1

It’s a difficult balance basically. 3 clients is pretty much the optimum number in terms of what you can run on your own.

automation isn’t really an option, if they are 3 clients in completely different industries.

Content calendars, scheduling, posting etc should all be presented the same and shouldn’t change too much once you have a handle on it, appreciate 3 clients might want all this done in different ways which is the time consuming part.

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