Career Advice

Get advice from other social media professionals. Learn what it takes to build and make an impact in your career. Get inspired with our stories and resources.

  • 69 Topics
  • 168 Replies

69 Topics

Jonathan Zuluaga
Community Manager
Jonathan ZuluagaCommunity Manager
published in Career Advice

Giveaway Extravaganza: Day 1Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza

Kickstart your week by sharing a standout moment from your social media journey! Whether it’s a thrilling triumph or a hurdle you conquered, your story enters you to win a $50 Amazon gift card and a Wireless Lavalier Microphone. Join in the giveaway by sharing your experience in the Career Advice Forum!How to Participate:Share a moment from your social media marketing journey. It could be a triumph that made you proud or a challenge you successfully overcame. Let's celebrate and learn from each other's experiences!Go to the Career Advice Forum, create a new post and drop a link to the post that you created there in the thread below to be officially entered  into today’s giveaway.Want to see be the first to know of the other upcoming prizes and challenges? Subscribe to our giveaway thread:Want to see the other giveaways? See the full line-up here:  The Promotion begins at 9:00 a.m. Central Time (“CT”) on December 11, 2023, and ends at 11:59 p.m. CT on December 11, 2023. To participate i

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4 minutes ago
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marisa.stephensFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Standout Moment: Social Sets the Stage for Recruits & New Hires

A standout moment for me was when one of the Senior Executives came to tell me that while interviewing a candidate and beginning to describe our company culture to them, the candidate stopped and said no explanation was necessary. From following our LinkedIn page, they had already seen everything they needed to know that our company is an extraordinarily special place to work. One of the best compliments I could ever receive - and proved that I was making a true difference with our organic posts! That was a few months after I started in my current role. Now I’ve been with the company for nearly 3 years, and I continue to hear from recruits and new hires all the time about how our social media helped them make the decision to come work for our company. 

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4 minutes ago
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rachel.pittmanFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Standout Moment

A standout moment in my social media journey this year is leaning into video content creation and UGC for our social channels! We’ve seen a significant increase in utilizing content created by our community and creating our own video content! 

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24 minutes ago
morgncam
Frequent User
morgncamFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Achieving What They Thought Couldn't Be Done

In 2022, we all saw the emergence of Taylor Swift and how her brand is so powerful, especially to a higher educational audience (aka students). As she announced her first new album in a few years (Midnights), I decided last minute to use that as a way to bridge our brand to her. With nine albums at the time, I took a deep dive into what each album represented and matched those with a relevant business degree. For example, I matched her debut album with our staple general management degree because “it’s the OG, the one that started it all, and had a great foundation to build on. It really gives you A Place In This World.” By using song titles to show the connection between the degrees and the album, we were able to connect all nine albums with nine areas of the business school.This was posted on Instagram the night before Midnights released and our students ended up loving it. I knew it was a success when I overheard students talking about the post while on campus. I really couldn’t hav

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morgncam
Frequent User
37 minutes ago
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melissa.riekeNew User
asked in Career Advice

Staying true to self.

This year my social media journey “offically” took a turn to a full time position.  I have worked as a photographer for myself for over 12 years and my talents got recognized.  It was a wonderful accomplishment to be recognized for my years of work by an outside company.  It is exciting to get to put my skills to work in this new position.

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Jonathan Zuluaga
Community Manager
47 minutes ago
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nataly.daviesFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Standout moment: Show me the data!

We are a small social team working in a technical industry, so when it comes to social media we talk through numbers and strategy. I’m only a year and a half into this profession and the area I’ve been growing in is reporting. Using the reporting features in Sprout, we are able to have conversations with our partners about the success, and not so great success, with data. In addition to collecting this information, honing down on tagging has aided us much more than we anticipated! There is much more to learn when it comes to analytics and showing our leadership the power of social media marketing! We are proud of these recent milestones in showing results through metrics. 

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Jonathan Zuluaga
Community Manager
48 minutes ago
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kiyauna.mFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Standout Moment: Employee Engagement

A triumph in my social media journey this year was finally launching our employee engagement/advocacy program. This had been in the works for over a year and a half, but it was great to finally check it off the list. We started by creating a series of internal videos to educate our team members on the importance and power of social media. We followed that up with prompts to complete after each video and a company-wide huddle to discuss the topic of social media further. So far, it has been well received and we’ve seen an increase in the number of people who’d like to build confidence sharing on social media. Still lots to work on in 2024, but...A WIN!

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51 minutes ago
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carsen.trinkinoNew User
posted in Career Advice

From Zero to Hero: A Crash Course in Influencer Marketing

My standout moment in my career has to do with standing up a pivotal Influencer program, with basically no background in it at all. I was lucky enough to have a Creative Director and Manager in my corner to give me some guidance, but at the end of the day it was completely up to me to work with everyone I needed to in order to standup a program from scratch. As far as I know (this was a few companies ago) they are still using the same platform I introduced and working with the same vendors I brought on to streamline the process and find the perfect influencers for a B2C CPG brand in the health & wellness space. 

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1 hour ago
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heather.disarroFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

It's never too late

I came back from a decade-long hiatus from the traditional workforce as a mom, and wondered what I had to offer. It’s been so fun to see how my experience as a blogger/influencer previously led to success in this field today, and how that experience + my role as a mother has allowed me to multi-task and pursue excellence where I likely wouldn’t have been able to before. All to say - it’s never too late, and don’t underestimate how your previous roles (no matter how random) will work in your favor!

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Frequent User
1 hour ago
craig.cordell
Advanced User
craig.cordellAdvanced User
posted in Career Advice

Standout Moment: Assumption testing with AI 🤖

What’s my standout moment from 2023?One recent example that comes to mind was how we used Choppity, an AI 🤖 powered tool that creates quick social media videos, to chop up longer form content and assumption test. Once we had positive signals that these short videos were generating engagement, we spent the time and energy internally to create a more polished version of each video! 🎉 

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craig.cordell
Advanced User
1 hour ago
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jordan.ccmediaFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Stepping In

One pivotal, standout moment of my social media career was the day I realized that there was an opportunity for me to step in. I came into a role thinking that the person above me was the expert since they had been tasked with training and managing me in my new position. As days passed in my new role, I came to realize just how much of our processes and procedures were solely based on best practices from years prior and weren’t being revisited often at all. I saw this miss as an opportunity, so I stepped in and began learning everything I could about the ins and outs of each platform. With this I was able to confidently recommend new tools and practices that soon became integrated into our workflow. This new trend of stepping in and taking leadership continued to develop until I had worked my way from Intern to Executive Digital Producer.

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1 hour ago
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terra.petryshynFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Viral (for us) - from Medicine Hat to Texas!

From our small city in Alberta (Medicine Hat ~65,000 pop’n) we had a reach of over 500,000 (more than 7 times our population) on one of our (get this) road safety posts about a particularly troublesome highway intersection through town. There were 428 comments on that post - one that even took the time to say “I’m in Texas, why am I seeing this?” Just goes to show you: you’ll never really know what will perform best until you try it!

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2 hours ago
rebecca.taylor
Frequent User
rebecca.taylorFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Standout moment: launching employee advocacy

My standout career moment recently has been launching my organization’s first employee advocacy program and seeing people get excited about sharing on social! Making it easier for them to get involved with pre-written copy and content to post has been a game changer, and it feels especially good now that we’re at a point that I can shout out our top users, giving us both visibility internally.

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rebecca.taylor
Frequent User
2 hours ago
thecolinwylie
Frequent User
thecolinwylieFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Campaign Planning Win 🏆

Last year, my team worked on a campus-wide campaign that involved a ton of partners. After hours and hours of planning and preparation—everything went off without a hitch and we had some great numbers.1,508,649 Impressions 963,453 Video Views 75,759 Engagements 51 Posts 9 VideosWe also had communications and marketing professionals across campus join in on the fun! 14,811,399 potential impressions is definitely something to love.Amazing to see what can happen with intentional collaboration and strategic thinking!

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thecolinwylie
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2 hours ago
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amanda.coeFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Recognition from Respected Agency's Brand Audit

Earlier this year my team received incredible feedback in a follow up report from an well-respected agency who performed a brand/communications audit across our larger ‘umbrella’ organization. They referred to our division’s overall communications efforts, especially our website, social, and email as a ‘role model in your midst’ and ‘sets the standard.’It was a significant moment of recognition from professionals who have a deep understanding of marketing and communications and work with with much larger organizations/budgets. The report made it around to senior leadership and boards, giving great visibility to the quality of our work with stakeholders.It also provided a sense of vindication, as there is a strong desire for ‘communications on demand’ within our larger organization, while our small but mighty communications team pushes for well-informed, strategic, valuable messaging. 

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2 hours ago
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jacky.tsangFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

My social media marketing journey

My most proud moment in social media was definitely when I switched over to work in social media full time. Initially, I was working in SEO/content marketing, and discovered it wasn’t something that I particularly enjoyed. After working with a previous social media manager, I got the opportunity to make the switch officially, and it’s been a blast ever since. I’ve had successes, for example, reels that went viral or executed campaigns that helped us gain new leads, failures like posts that don’t perform well, and even opportunities for me to grow and learn, and expand on my career.

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2 hours ago
hellis4
Frequent User
hellis4Frequent User
posted in Career Advice

Celebrating on Social Media

One of the stand out moments of my social media career came about 8 months in to my career. I work in Higher Education and had gone through my first admissions cycle. Signing Day arrived in May and on that day 200+ students shared photos and videos on social media announcing the exciting news that they were attending the University. Getting the opportunity to see all of these amazing students share this news and getting to celebrate with them was such an important moment in my career to see the joy and excitement that can come from social media.

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Abhijeet
New User
2 hours ago
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Runis2liveNew User
posted in Career Advice

LinkedIn Carousel

One of our wins this year was our company social media leads giving us kudos for figuring out the LinkedIn Carousel posts and how to leverage them for annual reports, guidance documents, and Federal Register Notices. These are things that historically may have not had much engagement on LinkedIn but by using the carousel feature we crushed it.  (30) Post | Feed | LinkedIn

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2 hours ago
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amanda.lorFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Create with accessibility in mind

Upon embarking on my social media career, transitioning from an administrative background, I initially overlooked the critical aspect of accessibility. I crafted content and designs without considering accessibility factors.After participating in an accessibility webinar, I underwent a significant shift in my social media approach. I began incorporating elements such as alt text, color contrast, and more to ensure I reach all kinds of audience. In addition, I also implement an accessibility policy to ensure the organization is producing accessible documents and assisted in redesigning the website to meet ADA compliance.Helpful websites I use:color contrast: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ website checker: https://wave.webaim.org/ emoji: https://emojipedia.org/ connecting with the state’s office of accessibility: https://mn.gov/mnit/about-mnit/accessibility/

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3 hours ago
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kristen.jeffersonFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

Finding Success on an Unexpected Platform

A big highlight in my social media journey comes in the form of galvanizing my D2C company around the value of LinkedIn for our business and our employees. When I started LinkedIn was an underutilized landscape for the business with no formal strategy other than thought leadership posts for the CEO. With the help of Advocacy by Sprout Social, our internal communications strategist to help get buy in from the community, and the work of our PR director fueling a wealth of amazing stories around the brand, we launched our employee advocacy program to great success. Instead of only sharing marketing-focused content about our products and company, we are able to support the program with a diverse offering of third-party features including corporate social responsibilty stories, business highlights created by partners, vendors, and press, and non-corporate content created by other teams within the company.We were able to educate all levels of employees on the value of personal branding, offe

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3 hours ago
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ohva.commsNew User
posted in Career Advice

Find tools that help you save time!

I was pleasantly surprised when I got a notification from Canva that I was my company’s ‘power Canva user’ that was before we changed over to a different account in Canva and I am sure I am on my way there again. I love to find tools that work for me and help me save time like this one does. That combined with scheduling posts on Sprout has opened my schedule up to be more helpful to the parents in our school on a more personal level through our social media channels. Find something that works for you and learn all you can about it! 

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3 hours ago
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nussbaum.marketingNew User
posted in Career Advice

Christmas Caroling & Trucking??

An odd combo, but it created our first viral moment on Instagram: Social Media Success with Christmas Caroling | the Arboretum (sproutsocial.com)

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3 hours ago
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nussbaum.marketingNew User
posted in Career Advice

Social Media Success with Christmas Caroling

Last Christmas, we posted a video of our annual office Christmas caroling on Instagram. (We’re a trucking company, so not exactly the typical, but content is content :) A reeeeaaaallly good video on our Instagram up to that point would get 2-4K views. This one soared to over 20K views. Point being - yes, you want to strategically post content that fits your industry/audience etc. But sometimes, going a little off-script and trying something new can be rewarding! You might discover something new that your audience cares about. ~ Keep posting! 

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3 hours ago
katie.gould
Frequent User
katie.gouldFrequent User
asked in Career Advice

Attracting Talent in 2024

One of the primary goals of our B2B company’s presence on social is to attract new talent. A triumph from the year was increased job applicants due to our social media presence, which was previously nonexistent. Since I was brought on just a year ago, seeing this direct impact has helped validate my efforts (and my job!).The challenge in 2024 will be to keep this up. Our small team is discussing how to make job posts more engaging than just a simple description of the role. We would like to create a series of video shorts where we interview current employees about their experiences.How do others creatively promote job openings?

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katie.gould
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3 hours ago
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bfrymanFrequent User
posted in Career Advice

My Standout Social Media Moment

The day I got my confidence changed how I approach social media and my career. It was the day when I realized I wasn’t faking it. Before that moment, I struggled with debilitating imposter syndrome - always in my head second-guessing my decisions. But one day it struck me that my situation was no different than most who work in social. SMM’s have to learn on the fly because there are so many day-to-day platform changes and no two clients are the same. We all have to use our knowledge of the space to our best abilities and then prepare and post accordingly. Being equipped with this knowledge allowed me to make confident recommendations and push my own boundaries. My biggest social media moment wasn’t going viral or getting a promotion it was the day I realized I had all the tools I needed to be my version of successful.  

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3 hours ago
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