Module 05 of 11
Run Your Social Presence
Scheduling so posting does not depend on your mood, a CRM so leads do not depend on your memory, and a plan for the day someone is angry in public.
- Estimated time
- 75 min
- Tools used
Hootsuite
HubSpot
Learning objectives
By the end of this module you will be able to:
- Schedule social content in advance instead of posting reactively.
- Explain what a CRM records and why memory is not a substitute.
- Add a contact to a real CRM and say what each field is for.
- Respond to a public complaint without making it worse.
Lesson
Social media done badly is a slot machine: you post when you feel like it, watch the numbers, feel briefly good or bad, and repeat. Done properly it is boring in exactly the way that works — a decision made once about what you publish and how often, then executed whether or not you are in the mood.
Scheduling is what turns intention into output
A scheduler lets you write several posts in one sitting and have them go out over the following weeks. That matters for three reasons: you write better in a batch than under deadline, consistency beats volume for almost every small account, and a queue means a busy fortnight does not become a silent fortnight.
It also forces the question most people avoid — what am I actually going to post about, twelve times? If you cannot answer, the problem was never the tooling.
A CRM is memory you cannot lose
A customer relationship management system is a record of every person connected to your business and everything that has passed between you: who they are, where they came from, what was said, what happens next. For a solo business the argument for one is unglamorous — you will forget. Not the big things, the small ones: the client who asked to be contacted in the spring, the lead who wanted a quote after their budget renewed.
The fields a CRM asks for are also a checklist of what is worth knowing. Name and email are obvious. Source, stage and next action are the ones that turn a contact list into a pipeline you can look at and act on.
When someone complains in public
Sooner or later somebody says something bad about your work where everyone can read it. The response is a small, well-understood procedure, and almost all the damage in these situations comes from deviating from it.
- Reply, quickly, in public. Silence reads as guilt and deleting reads as worse.
- Acknowledge the specific thing rather than offering a general apology. "Sorry you feel that way" is widely read as an insult.
- Say what you are doing about it, concretely — not that you take it seriously.
- Move the detail somewhere private, once, with an actual route: an email address or a direct message.
- Then fix it, and if the fix is public, say so where the complaint was.
Handled well, a public complaint is worth more than a compliment: everyone watching learns what happens when something goes wrong with you, which is the question they actually care about.
Tools in this module
Hootsuite
Put One Post in a Queue
Hootsuite connects several social accounts to one dashboard, so you write, schedule and monitor from a single place rather than logging into each platform.
Beyond scheduling, it gives you streams — columns watching mentions, replies and search terms — which is how you notice someone talking about you without living inside every app.
Scheduling separates the decision to publish from the act of publishing. That single split is what makes consistency possible for people who have other work, and consistency is the only thing that reliably grows a small account.
Your mission
Start the Hootsuite free trial, connect at least one social account, and schedule one post about a project of yours — with the Canva graphic from Module 4 if you made one.
Open Hootsuite(opens in a new tab)Which platforms did you connect, and what did you schedule? Then answer the harder question: could you fill a queue for a month, and if not, what would you post about?
HubSpot
Record One Lead Properly
HubSpot is a marketing and sales platform whose CRM is free and genuinely usable on its own. It stores contacts, companies, deals and the history of every interaction.
The pieces that matter for a small business are the contact record, the lifecycle stage, and the ability to see every conversation with one person in one place — including the email you sent them four months ago and forgot.
Most lost work for a small business is not lost to a competitor, it is lost to nobody: an enquiry that was never followed up, a client who said "next quarter" and was never contacted again. A CRM turns those from things you must remember into things the system reminds you of.
Your mission
Create a free HubSpot account and add one contact to the CRM — a real past client or lead. Fill in every field it offers, including lifecycle stage and source, and note what it asks for that you would not have thought to record.
Open the free CRM(opens in a new tab)What information does HubSpot ask for when adding a contact, and how could that help you track client leads? Name one field you would not have recorded on your own.
Lifecycle stage and original source are usually the two that change how you work, not just what you store.
Quiz
Match each job to the tool feature that does it.
Pick the matching item for each row.
- Writing eight posts on a Sunday and having them go out over four weeks
- Seeing every email, call and note about one client in one place
- Noticing that someone mentioned your project without tagging you
- Knowing which enquiries are still waiting on you
A customer posts publicly that your work broke their site. Put the response in the right order.
Put the steps in the right order.
- 1Acknowledge the specific problem they described
- 2Fix it, then report back where the complaint was made
- 3Reply publicly and quickly, before the thread grows
- 4Say concretely what you are doing about it
- 5Offer a private route — an email address or DM — for the details
Someone leaves an angry but fair comment about a genuine mistake you made. What is the worst available option?
A stranger with no connection to your work starts a stream of personal abuse. What now?
Which CRM fields turn a plain contact list into something you can actually work from?
Select every answer that applies.
Decide your posting cadence honestly: how often will you publish, on which platform, for the next three months? Then say what your queue would contain for the first month.
Once a fortnight, kept up for a year, beats daily for three weeks and then nothing.
Score: 0 / 5
Recap
Before you move on, the things worth keeping:
- Scheduling separates deciding to publish from publishing, which is what makes consistency survive a busy month.
- A CRM is memory you cannot lose — and most small-business work is lost to being forgotten rather than to competitors.
- Source, lifecycle stage and next action are the fields that turn a contact list into a pipeline.
- A public complaint gets a fast, specific, public reply, then a private route, then a fix — in that order.
- Abuse is not a complaint. Disengage, block and report, and do not mobilise your audience.