Social Media Marketing Services: A Plan, a Calendar and Reports Tied to Enquiries

Our social media marketing services take the platform work off an owner's desk: a written plan for one or two networks, a monthly content calendar you approve before anything is published, replies to comments and messages within agreed hours, and a monthly report that counts enquiries, not just followers. Lightray Solutions runs this for B2B firms and local service businesses, and you deal with Edward Pinela, MBA, directly rather than with a rotating account team.

The first step is a free 30-minute strategy call in which Edward looks at your current profiles and asks where your customers actually come from. The service has no published price, because the scope depends on the number of platforms, how much content you can supply and whether paid boosts are included; you get a written monthly quote after the call. If you would rather compare fixed tiers first, the social media marketing packages page sets them out.

What do social media marketing services include each month?

Five pieces of work, repeated monthly: planning the month's themes, writing and designing the posts, scheduling them, answering comments and messages, and reporting on what happened. A modest boost budget can be added when a post deserves wider reach. You approve the calendar in advance, so nothing goes out under your name unseen.

Behind those five sits a written plan, drafted in the first month and revisited each quarter. The U.S. Small Business Administration's guide to marketing and sales tells owners to describe their audience in detail and to compare marketing costs with the revenue they generate. A social plan should pass the same test: who it is for, what they need to hear, and which number proves it worked.

• Plan: audience, one or two platforms, three to five recurring content themes, and the enquiry you want each post to lead toward.
• Calendar: a month of posts drafted in a shared document, with copy, visuals and links, approved by you before scheduling.
• Community management: comments, mentions and direct messages answered within the hours agreed in the plan, with sales questions passed to you the same day.
• Boosts: small paid promotion of posts that are already performing, capped at a budget you set.
• Report: reach, engagement, profile visits, link clicks and enquiries, with a short note on what changes next month.

Which social platform should a B2B or local business focus on?

The one where your buyers already spend working or local attention, and rarely more than two. A B2B firm selling to managers usually belongs on LinkedIn; a restaurant, salon or contractor usually belongs on Instagram and Facebook, where neighbours look for photos and opening hours. Spreading thin across five networks produces five neglected profiles.

The table shows how we usually match platform to business. It is a starting point for the strategy call, not a rule, and the first quarter's report decides whether to stay, add or drop a network.

How is a monthly content calendar built?

From your business calendar first and the platform second. Seasonal demand, events, new services and the questions your staff hear every week become the month's themes; each theme then becomes a few posts in the formats that platform rewards, such as short video, carousels or a plain text post on LinkedIn.

Most of the raw material already exists inside the business. Photos from finished jobs, a quote from a happy customer, a staff member explaining a common mistake, a chart from your own data: these outperform stock images because nobody else can post them. We ask for a monthly folder of phone photos and a 20-minute call, and write the rest.

When employees or paid creators post about your company, the Federal Trade Commission's Disclosures 101 guidance expects the relationship to be disclosed in the post itself, not in a profile bio, and superimposed on Stories or spoken in videos. The calendar marks every such post so the disclosure is written in from the start.

Who answers comments and direct messages?

We do, within the hours written into the plan, using answers you have approved in advance for routine questions such as prices, opening hours, service areas and booking. Anything that needs a decision, such as a complaint, a quote request or a billing problem, is passed to you the same working day with the message attached, so nothing waits in an inbox nobody checks.

A short response guide is agreed in the first month: tone of voice, which questions we answer, which we escalate, and what we never say publicly. Negative comments are answered once, politely, with an offer to continue privately; they are not deleted unless they break the platform's rules.

How do you know social media is producing customers?

By tagging every link and counting what arrives. Each post that links to your website carries UTM parameters (short tags added to a link that tell analytics which platform and post sent the visitor), so your analytics show which posts produced form fills, calls or bookings. Follower counts are reported, but they are never the headline.

The monthly report puts four figures side by side: what the month cost, link clicks, enquiries attributed to social, and enquiries that became customers where your CRM records it. When those numbers say a platform is not paying its way after a fair trial, the report says so and proposes moving the effort elsewhere, including into search engine marketing, where buyers are already searching for the service.

Enquiries that arrive through social still need fast follow-up. If they sit unanswered, an automated reply and a CRM handoff usually help more than more posts; marketing automation consulting covers that side.

When do paid ads make more sense than organic posting?

When you need predictable reach to a defined audience by a date, such as a launch, an event, an open-house weekend or a hiring push. Organic posts build familiarity with people who already follow you; paid campaigns reach people who do not, with targeting and budgets you control. Many businesses need a small amount of both.

Boosting a well-performing post is included in the service. Full campaigns with their own audiences, creative tests and conversion tracking are a separate engagement: see Instagram ads management for visual, Reels-led campaigns and Facebook ads for business for lead forms and conversion campaigns. If the budget is mostly your own time, the guide to low-cost social media marketing shows what to do yourself first.

Further reading: U.S. Small Business Administration — Marketing and sales.