A Career in Social Media Marketing: Dante Sellers' Thoughts on the Most Recent Developments, and Mastering Social Media Management

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet Dante Sellers virtually through a seminar hosted by Wendy Greenwood at George Brown College. To give you a quick glimpse of who Dante is and what he does:

Dante Sellers is a Customer Account Manager at Hootsuite. He graduated from Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina, double majoring in Film and Theater Productions. Although the Arts are his passion, he has found a home at Hootsuite, adapting to social media, while partnering with Higher Education Accounts to build their social strategies. George Brown happens to be one of his key accounts as well.

Dante shared with us his inspiring story of how he got his break at Hootsuite and how he leveraged his innate passion for Arts and transformed his career. He also gave us an insight into the latest trends in the Social media marketing world which were backed by Hootsuite’s exhaustive surveys from over 10,000 respondents, 109 countries and 11+ industries.?

ALL EYES ARE TURNING TO SOCIAL SEARCH

No matter what industry you are a part of, Social Media and the digital world always plays a part in how you reach out to customers and engage with audiences. Dante, talked us through 7 social media trends by categorizing them into 3 groups- Social Marketing trends, Social Commerce trends & Social Customer Service.?

Dante talked about a particular trend under the umbrella of Social Commerce that resonated with me since I had been making similar observations. The trend is?“All eyes are turning to Social Search”

For years, Google has now been the number one go-to for searching for all kinds of things. But interestingly, what we are seeing right now is that Gen Z is looking at Tik Tok and Instagram to find out various things like- What’s latest in fashion, what and where to eat, what are their favourite celebrities doing, and what products should they buy. So instead of going to Google for making a “search query”, they open up social media and search consciously or subconsciously. And the big companies are taking a notice of this and are trying to be where their customers are and not make them come to where they are.?

This resonates with me because this semester we have a course called Omni-channel marketing. Which is fundamentally different from the multi-channel marketing that companies have been using currently. Multi-channel marketing utilizes various digital channels to reach out to the customer and then incites them to take an action and come back to a hub where the company or brand is for example using social media to get the customers to click and visit a shopping website.

But what?Omni-channel?does is, in my terms it is the brand being omnipresent. This approach involves keeping the user at the centre rather than the product. Unlike Multi-channel which is like the traditional hub and spoke model where channels pull back the customers to the hub; Each omnichannel channel serves as an independent point of sales or engagement avenue.

For example, a Gen Z user is on Instagram and she is looking at her favourite fashion brand's Instagram handle. She likes a particular outfit that a model is wearing and so she clicks on the interactive image to see what outfit it is. On clicking Instagram shows her the name of the product and the price and asks her if she wants to add it to her cart. After clicking add to cart, Instagram itself functions as an e-commerce platform or rather here?as Dante calls it a Social Commerce platform.?Now the user can directly become aware, consider and compare products and buy straight from the channel he or she is on currently without having to navigate to other platforms or jumping through several hoops before making the purchase.?

Dante summarized the trend of?“All eyes are turning to Social Search”?as:

1) Google’s been the go-to in search forever– but that’s changing

2) Social networks are visited by more people than search engines every month.

3) Younger people are more likely to use social networks for brand research

4) Although search engines and TV are still ahead in discovery for now that is likely to change in the coming years

Another interesting fact is the biggest spenders on
Social marketing are the 2 Ns of the world- Netflix and Nike.        

THE BEST-CASE STUDY YET AND DANTE’S FEEDBACK

Dante gave us one of the most interesting group case studies yet, where we have supposed to create a social campaign from start to finish to get fans to purchase a new blackout colorway jersey, and wear it to opening night.

In our groups, we had to really work our way through discussing how we are going to plan and execute a 6-month campaign prior to the game day. We structured our discussion around 4 things to consider-?

1) Scheduling/Posting Content

2) Audience Engagement

3) Campaign Measurement/Reporting

4) Customer Service Strategy

We created a fun campaign involving posting cryptic images and video teasers, partnering with Toronto Raptors’ players themselves to reveal the new jerseys, creating User-generated content, running a contest and a digital pregame countdown and a few viral hashtags.

We also incorporated Dante’s idea of utilizing Hootsuite’s Owly feature to generate quite a few hashtags and content for us and planned on utilizing Hootsuite’s social listening and inbox and message replying capabilities along with integrating Zendesk for social customer service.

Dante gave us very constructive feedback on our work highlighting some of the following key points:

1) Utilizing user-generated content is a definitive way to get the customers more involved

2) He liked how we designed our contest strategy for a free VIP box ticket in the middle of the month rather than waiting for the last month since it allows us to engage the customers more and get them involved in the entire process early on

3) Although he loved the hashtags that we came up with, he suggested we keep the hashtags limited to just 1. Having too many of them can confuse marketers at times when looking at the analytics and data from 2 or more different reports to make sense of it and generate insights.

4) Finally, he also loved the Zendesk integration standpoint and leveraging Hootsuite’s native capabilities to boost our social medial campaign.

Certifications, skills and experience you need to pursue a career in Social Media Marketing

If interested in Social, it is important to be hungry to learn new things and be at the top of the latest and newest. One of the most crucial things is having certificates since recruiters keep an eye on this and if they see people who have them they are interested in knowing more about you.?

A few certifications that come to my mind to be successful in a Social Media Marketing career are:

1) Hootsuite Platform Certification

2) Social Marketing Certification?

3) Social Selling Certification from Hootsuite

4) Facebook Blueprint Certification

5) Google Ads Certification

6) HubSpot Social Media Certification

7) Twitter Flight School Certification

These are some of the topmost industry-needed certificates that recruiters look at and want you to have.

Best practices for job hunting?and leveraging LinkedIn

Dante gave us some tips and best practices on how to leverage LinkedIn to hunt for jobs.

Firstly, build meaningful connections and connect with people from the industries and sectors you are planning on entering.

Secondly, join groups, follow hashtags and know what the latest is in your industry and what top people in your sector are talking about.

Go ahead and engage with people and posts, if you see something you like in a post, respond to it. Like it, share it or better yet comment and spark a discussion and start a conversation

Increase posting on LinkedIn make your own brand and eventually create your own community and you will be surprised what people want to listen to and read.

Dante shared with us an example of how to build meaningful conversations on LinkedIn and also shared his own story of he went from working as an account executive at Uber to working for Hootsuite. When he wanted to grow in his career he looked up on LinkedIn and Hootsuite popped up, so he found someone who works there and messaged her that he really doesn’t know how Hootsuite really works but he is passionate to grow his career and understand how Hootsuite can help him and the rest is history as he terms it.

The essence is, always make sure you put yourself and your brand out there and reach out to the recruiters and most will reply.

Finally, Dante suggested us some groups to join and hashtags to follow for us to dive in and follow conversations.

Expanding my network for Job Search

In order to enhance my job search, I have been networking a lot on LinkedIn, posting more frequently on topics I like and the industry I want to be in, connecting and following people from the sectors I plan to build my career in and follow conversations that are relevant for a marketer.

I have also been creating my own website- The Next Gen Marketing to promote my skills and write blogs on topics I want to share with the marketing community around the world.