Career Talk & Job Board

Social media moves at such a quick pace that social media professionals tend to move just as quickly, always trying to be a step ahead rather than fall behind. But in that rush to always know what’s coming next, we forget to celebrate the moments that have so quickly come and gone - even moments of excellence.If you’re like me, you’re always so busy trying to surpass your last greatest effort that you sometimes miss just how remarkable that effort had been. Oftentimes, we don’t take the time to sit and appreciate the strategy and creativity that we put into something like a social media campaign, so we miss the fact that others may find value in that work beyond the norm.Luckily, I’m part of a company that took the time to not only notice that value, but went a step further in seeking out an opportunity to have it recognized at a larger scale. Earlier this year, that effort resulted in a social media campaign that I led becoming a finalist in the Social Media Campaign

My standout moment in social was realizing the skills that I had developed as a journalist not translated so well to working in social media. Key among them, honestly, has been the willingness to admit when you don’t know something but being eager to learn.t’s astonishing just how quickly social moves sometimes, but a willingness to try new things has served me well.

Project OverviewDr. Josh Axe is a leader in the health & wellness online space, most well-known for his Nashville Private Practice, his website DrAxe.com, and his NYT Bestseller Eat Dirt.Then, in 2016 Dr. Axe co-founded Ancient Nutrition. This supplement brand has a mission of helping connect modern lifestyles with ancient nutrients (and they created powdered bone broth and collagen which we all know is super trendy these days!)As you can imagine, because of these amazing accomplishments and innovations, Dr. Axe and team didn’t have much issue growing an engaged following.However, the did have one big problem.Creating content that communities engage with on-platform is one thing, while creating content that encourages your community to make a purchase is a different story.The Dr. Axe brand and the Ancient Nutrition store needed a collaborative social media strategy that built brand authority, engaged users, and

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. 

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! 

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 co

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. 

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!

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. 

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!

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! 🎉 

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.

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!

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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.

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

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/

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.