Social media client onboarding questionnaire and access checklist

It turns a signed proposal into an operating plan. The proposal says you will run three channels; the questionnaire tells you what each channel is for, where the content comes from, who says yes before a post goes live, and what you do when someone complains in the comments at 9 p.m. on a Friday.

Most templates stop at goals, audience and brand. Those matter, but the problems in the first month usually come from the operational gaps: an approver who is on holiday, a product photo nobody has rights to, a customer complaint the agency was never told how to route. The question bank below gives equal weight to both halves.

Shared passwords cause three problems. They break two-factor authentication, because the code goes to the client's phone. They leave no record of who did what. And when the engagement ends, the client has to change every password and hope nothing else depended on it.

Every major platform has a role or partner system for this, and using it gives the client a clean way to limit and revoke access. Your questionnaire should ask who owns each account and can grant access (question 33), then you send the platform-specific instructions separately. If a client does send a password in a form, ask them to change it and move to invitations.

Agree it in writing during onboarding, because the first missed approval is a bad time to invent a rule. The workflow needs one approver with a backup, a fixed review window, a format for drafts, and a rule for silence.

Community management is where agencies most often overstep or underreact. The questionnaire's escalation section (questions 28–32) should produce a one-page routing note that anyone on the account can follow.

The first is agreeing a cadence before knowing where content comes from. ‘Three posts a week’ is easy to promise and hard to deliver if the client is supposed to supply photos and does not. Record the content source beside the cadence (questions 20 and 27).

The second is treating account access as approval. Being able to publish does not mean a post is approved, and a questionnaire response does not authorise publishing on the client's behalf. The third is leaving scope implicit: original posts, adaptations, moderation, direct messages and paid promotion are different jobs. List which are in and which are out.

Zunoform handles the questionnaire. The Social Media Client Intake template covers channels, audience, topics to cover and avoid, content suppliers, approvals, cadence, moderation and access owners, and its access question tells clients to name an owner rather than send passwords. If you add the paid and moderation questions above, conditional logic (on every plan) can hide them when they are out of scope; partial responses are saved as the client works through it, and file upload collects brand assets (10 MB per file on Free, 100 MB on Pro). Responses go to Google Sheets on every plan and to Slack on Pro.

It does not schedule posts, manage approvals or grant platform access. Use your scheduling tool for approvals and each platform's partner system for access. The Free plan allows 500 responses a month; if you want unlimited free responses for a simple form, Google Forms and Tally offer that.