Social Media Client Questionnaire: 30 Questions to Ask

A social media client questionnaire is a structured intake form you send before any work starts — ideally before the contract is signed — to extract the four things that decide whether an engagement runs smoothly: how the brand sounds, who is allowed to say yes, what you're permitted to touch, and what "working" means in numbers. Thirty questions is about the ceiling before completion rates collapse, so each one has to earn its place.

The questions below are grouped by what they unlock rather than by topic. The mechanics around them — access handover, the first-30-days plan, the document stack — are covered in the client onboarding system for social media managers. This post is the questions, what the answers tell you, and the two answers that should make you walk away.

How to Send It

Send the factual half — accounts, assets, approvals — as a form with a stated deadline, and run the voice half as a 40-minute call you record. Clients articulate voice far better out loud than in a text box.

Then note how long the form takes to come back. Response time on the questionnaire is the best predictor of approval turnaround for the rest of the engagement. A client who returns it in fragments over three weeks will approve content the same way.

Group 1 — Brand Voice (Questions 1–8)

Unlocks: writing in their voice without a tone check on every draft.

1. Describe the business in one sentence you'd be happy to see quoted back to you.
2. Which customer do you want more of — role, life stage, and what they were doing right before they found you?
3. Name three accounts, any industry, whose content you'd be happy to sound like. What specifically works about each?
4. Name one account whose content makes you cringe. What specifically is wrong with it?
5. Words, phrases, or claims we must never use — legal, regulatory, or just taste.
6. Words you always use: product names, capitalization, spellings, internal shorthand that has leaked into customer language.
7. Emoji, exclamation marks, slang, memes — yes, no, or sparingly? Does the answer change by platform?
8. Who signs the posts: the company ("we"), a named person ("I"), or the reader ("you")? Does that shift by platform?

Questions 3 and 4 do most of the work. Adjectives are worthless here — "professional but approachable" describes roughly every brand on earth. Examples with reasons attached are what you can write from, and they convert straight into the do/don't pairs of a brand voice guide for social.

Question 2 seeds real audience work — take the answer into building a social media audience persona. If the client uses target audience to mean "everyone who might buy," that's a gap to close in week one, not a finished answer.

Group 2 — Approval Authority (Questions 9–14)

Unlocks: content that ships on the day you planned it.

9. Who writes the word "approved"? One name.
10. Who else sees content before it goes live — and are they approving, or being informed?
11. Realistic turnaround on an approval request: same day, 48 hours, or a weekly batch review?
12. If the named approver is away, who acts in their place?
13. Is silence approval? After how many working days?
14. What must be escalated regardless: pricing claims, named customers, anything touching legal, HR, or finance?

Question 13 is the most skipped and most useful question in the form. Without an agreed silence rule, every unanswered draft becomes your problem and your fault. Get "no response after two working days means approved" in writing and half your chasing disappears.

Question 10 separates approvers from spectators — the day nobody tells you which is which is the day a post gets pulled at 8pm. If reviews will run inside a scheduler rather than over email, set the roles now; the content approval workflow guide covers the stages.

Group 3 — Asset and Account Access (Questions 15–21)

Unlocks: the ability to publish at all.

15. List every account the business owns, including dormant ones and the profile someone set up years ago that nobody can log into.
16. For each account, who currently holds admin, and can they send a business-role invite this week?
17. Where do brand files live, and do we get write access or read-only?
18. Are there logo variants for dark backgrounds, and source files rather than screenshots of a PDF?
19. Photography: what exists, who shot it, what are you licensed to use, and until when?
20. Who can appear on camera — staff releases, customer permissions, anyone who must never be filmed?
21. Who handles inbound comments and DMs today, and does that change when we start?

Question 15 turns up ghost accounts, and ghost accounts outrank real ones in search often enough to matter — pair the answer with a sweep using the social media audit checklist. Question 19 saves you a legal conversation eighteen months later; stock licenses expire quietly.

Question 21 needs honesty from your side too. Scheduling and community management are different jobs — SocialKit has no unified inbox, social listening, or comment-moderation queue, so if replies are in scope, agree that they happen in the native apps or a dedicated tool and name the owner in the contract. The scheduler covers everything upstream: planning, drafting, approving, publishing, measuring.

Group 4 — Success Definition (Questions 22–27)

Unlocks: a renewal conversation based on evidence instead of vibes.

22. Ninety days from now, what has to be true for you to renew without a discussion?
23. Which single number would you look at first, and where does that number live?
24. Which business event downstream of social matters most: demo booked, store visit, email signup, application, reorder?
25. Can we see that number, or are we working from platform metrics only?
26. What is the current baseline on it?
27. What would you call failure at 90 days, in numbers?

Question 27 is sharper than question 22. People describe success vaguely and failure precisely — ask what failure looks like and you'll get the real threshold within seconds. Write it down verbatim and quote it back at the month-three review.

If question 26 comes back as "we don't know," your first deliverable is measurement, not content. That's a scope item, not a red flag — bill for it. Agree the numbers you'll report against before the first post; social media KPIs that matter is a fair shortlist to negotiate from.

Group 5 — History and Constraints (Questions 28–30)

28. Who ran this before us — in-house, agency, nobody — and what specifically ended it?
29. What's the worst thing that has happened to you on social so far?
30. What's off the table entirely: topics, competitors you won't name, dates you go quiet, anything the founder has strong feelings about?

Question 28 is not gossip. If three managers have cycled through in two years and every explanation blames the previous manager, you're the fourth data point in a pattern that isn't about managers.

The Two Answers That Should Make You Decline

Most warning signs are fixable with a conversation. Two are not.

Question 9 answered with a committee. "We'll all weigh in," "just send it to the team," "we decide together." Push once, politely and specifically: I need one name for final sign-off — everyone else can comment. If they still won't name a person, decline or restructure the engagement. Diffuse approval doesn't produce careful content; it produces revision loops, consensus-flattened captions, and a missed launch that belongs to nobody. No scheduling tool or SOP fixes an organization with no decision-maker.

Questions 22 and 27 answered with a fixed target sitting on fixed inputs. Say the target is a tenfold audience increase in 90 days from a standing start — with three posts a week, no ad budget, nobody willing to appear on camera, and a two-week approval cycle. Do that arithmetic out loud on the call. A good client moves something: the target, the frequency, the budget, or the approval speed. A client who moves nothing has hired you to be the reason it didn't work.

Everything else — vague answers, missing baselines, a chaotic asset folder — is scope you can price. These two are structure you can't.

Turning the Answers Into Two Artifacts Before Kickoff

A questionnaire that sits in a folder is admin. Convert it into two things the client sees at kickoff.

Artifact 1: per-network caption rules. One row per platform, built from questions 5 through 8 plus question 30:

Where limits and formats differ, link the rules rather than memorizing them — our social media character limits reference and the image and video size guide keep this table about voice, not specs.

Artifact 2: a first-month calendar the client sees before day one. In SocialKit you compose a post once and then customize the caption, hashtags, and media per platform, so the LinkedIn row genuinely reads differently from the TikTok row across all 11 supported networks. Drop four weeks of drafts onto the visual calendar, place them using the best-time-to-post recommendations, and walk the client through it at kickoff. On Team and Enterprise plans, the named approver from question 9 signs off inside the tool instead of over email.

Drafting a month before you're paid to post it isn't free work — it surfaces the disagreements that would otherwise appear in week three, and turns the questionnaire from a form into a plan.

Start Here

1. Cut the 30 to fit the client. A solo founder doesn't need question 14; a regulated business needs nothing more.
2. Send groups 3 and 4 as a form with a deadline. Book the call for groups 1, 2, and 5.
3. Time the response and log it.
4. Run the two decline checks before you sign anything.
5. Write the caption rules table the same week and send it back for confirmation.
6. Build the month-one calendar as drafts, present it at kickoff, get it approved in one sitting.
7. Save the lot as your template, then change exactly one question after each new client.

As of December 2025, every SocialKit plan includes all 11 platforms and unlimited scheduled posts from €29/month for Solo (€17.40/month billed annually), so drafting a client's first month before kickoff doesn't cost you a tier upgrade.

Once the answers are in and the calendar is live, the work shifts from intake to routine — managing multiple social media clients picks up from there.