Career Advice

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 bran

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! 

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

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! 

When I first got started as a SMM, about 8 years ago, my clients used to ask me about ads vs boosted posts. I still get this question sometimes. I was new to SMM and new to their account history/audience, too. The one thing I didn’t want to do was waste anyone’s budget, and those were very tight for my clients. Eventually, I secured a client that had the budget and needed all the ads available to let me explore everything Facebook Ads Manager, now Meta Business Suite, had to offer. Wow! I finished that campaign as a whole new perspective and grasp on what it’s truly like to dive in! I can answer questions revolving around ads and boosting with confidence and experience now.

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.  

I remember the first time I attempted a social media contest early on in my career… It was humbling to say the least. I had so much excitement going in and I thought SURELY this would work wonders and boost engagement. But to my surprise, there was no participation whatsoever - a big fat zero! In hindsight, with more experience now, I understand why it didn't take off. It was a small local brand, and I naively relied on just one or maybe two Instagram posts for promotion. Social media contests are a whole different ballgame; they require careful planning, intention, and most importantly, value. I'm grateful for the insights I've gained along the way, which now help me guide my clients when they approach me with that all-too-familiar excitement about running a contest. Has anyone else had a humbling experience with a social media contest? 

I am approaching the end of my 2nd year in my current role as a SMM. I’m excited to share that for the 2nd consecutive year, I successfully grew impressions, engagements, and our audience across our 5 brand’s 13 accounts!To date in 2023 (vs. 2022):Impressions: Up 7.6%Engagements: 16.3%Engagement Rate: Up 8.1%Net New Audience: Up 18.5%Beginning to use a social media management tool was one of my first priorities when I started, and I’ve been very happy with decision to go with SproutSocial.  They make tracking these types of accomplishments very easy!What are some of your accomplishments this year?

A standout moment for me in my social media journey was when I realized that in order to build credibility and authenticity as a brand, you have to be a responsive brand! When I signed on to a previous role in 2019, I noticed my predecessor was very reactive with social media, and they only engaged with customers when someone left a negative comment or question. Our content had low engagement, and the engagement we received was solely negative. When I started, I created a new SM strategy that included a level of expectation with responsiveness - a simple “thanks for sharing!” or even a cheeky emoji in response to someone can go a long way. Once we started engaging with our audience when the comments were neutral and positive in addition to the negative, we saw so much more engagement (and even had UGC rolling in regularly!) It added a whole new pillar of content that essentially created itself!

Read more about how I trusted my gut and it paid off here:  

Throughout my social media career (close to a decade), it’s always been me + a manager in a marketing communications role that’s been willing to listen. Sometimes, they’re there as a requirement and don’t really care about the impact of social.This year’s standout moment was finally getting an intern and being able to manage and, more importantly, see their growth and curiosity formulate. It puts things in perspective if you’ve been wondering if “am I right for this role?” and also gives small teams/solo team the opportunity to flex in other areas instead of spinning their wheels. If you’re in this situation, always push for the ask since it can give you time to focus on the most important areas while also testing your abilities as a people manager.

I took on the social media role kind of unexpectedly when I started in my current role two years ago. I’ve really had to learn a lot quickly. As part of my role, I manage an ambassador program with 90+ brand ambassadors and 50+ active Facebook pages. I’m happy to report that across all our active pages, our engagement increased by more than 200% and impressions increased by 130% from last year. Makes me proud of my hard work and excited to see what can be achieved next year!  

One of the biggest lessons I’m continuing to learn in my career is the ability to pivot/be flexible. I naturally have a tendency to be fairly rigid when it comes to accomplishing tasks. If I made a list of tasks that need to be accomplished, in an ideal world, I’d live in a bubble and could just quietly do my tasks in order. But...I chose to work in a very fast paced industry, and it’s taught me the absolute necessity of being flexible! In my current role, this looks like not being married to the social calendar I’ve created. I’m learning to use the calendar as more of a guidepost than a contract. 

I recently joined my Communications team back in May of 2023 and have been immersed in the social media world even more than ever before. I had to do a total overhaul of the platforms to get them up to snuff and engaging our audience. Our recent success was partnering with our Development team for end of year fundraising. They wanted to do a philanthropy initiative highlighting the effects that private support has on our mission. Their initial suggest, highlight over one week in November.  My rebuttle: Why limit it to one week when philanthropy has such a huge impact on everyone far beyond that. We therefore created #ImpactMonth and highlighted the hundreds of ways private support works towards our mission throughout the entire month of November and it was a raving success! Engaging more than 80% of our audience and being in the top two campaigns the company has ever done on social!  What other tricks have you found on social that changed the way you highl

I had a very important moment, because a client was very difficult, but one day, thanks to the social listening module, i catcah a very important thing that didn’t develop as a social media crisis, we stopped it and it was very thankful! Today, this client not only extend their contract, but are giving us a lot whole new pair of countries because we can resolve a lot of things!My boss was very happy with that action.

Earlier this year, I was drowning in work but I loved what I was doing. A new role at my company opened up, and I saw it as my dream role, but didn’t think it was meant for me at this time. I thought “that’s the job I’ll have in five years.” When I told my supervisor at the time that X person was leaving their role, he asked “so you’re going to apply for it, right?” I was taken aback by his response, I genuinely hadn’t even thought about applying. I was under-qualified, in my head, and was in my current role for less than a year. He gave me a pep talk, telling me you never know when your dream role will open up again. What’s the worst that could happen, I don’t get an interview?  That night I fixed up my resume, after he also scolded me for not always having an up-to-date resume (spoiler: it’s not up to date now, either!) Long story short, a few months later I was leaving my first role at the company for my NEW role at the company! I’ve been in this job for 8 months no

I am pretty fresh in my career in social media, with just under two years of experience in the field so far. One of the things that I learned right away in a social media role is to find inspiration through other pages’ social media accounts. I of course look to similar and larger competitors to evaluate what types of content they are posting and how they are sharing it in an interesting and creative format. But, I also found that I can even find lots of inspiration from other companies in completely different industries. Each company shares their brand in a unique way via social media, and just by spending the time to see what’s out there you can find all sorts of inspiration!

Social media is evolving so fast, I found that I have to read about it everyday to stay up to date with updates and trends. I love using an aggregator like Flipboard to find relevant articles and follow blogs (like Sprout’s Insights, for example). :)

Thank you so much to those who attended our Retail Industry Peer Group!@colette.mitola @lexa.krajewski @joe.seta @tiffany.torbik and @ben.marcus please continue to collaborate with each other when you need assistance!For those who weren’t able to attend, here are some of the things we discussed. Let us know if you have any thoughts or questions about the topics below:ChatGPT and AI, how are folks feeling about it?  How to respond to folks who think your social channels are using AI for content? What are some best practices for keeping inbox responses fresh?@kassandra.quinn @megan.molique