When Starting as a Social Media Strategist
In December 2017, I started a new job at (then) Beckerman PR - now known as Antenna Group. Now approaching 1.5 years since starting at the agency, I came across some notes about my experiences that I made when I first started with the intent of writing about it. I have been sitting on these notes - scribbled on a post-it note - for well over a year now and figured it would be a good time to read them through, reflecting on my own advice to see if it remained true.
In no particular order, here are the notes I made for myself, and you!
Get organized - and stay organized. Organization doesn't come easy to everyone and it's a constant learning process. Plus, every job will require you to keep track of your hours and to dos differently. My advice - find a foundational method that works for you, whether it's a task management platform like Todoist, hand-written notes (my preference) or sticky notes - as long as you have a way to travel with them and keep track of them.
Accept that you're always always "on." As a social media strategist, it's tricky to unplug because you're managing clients' social media channels, which are running 24/7 whether you're working or not. The nature of the job automatically requires you to be on alert on nights and weekends. That doesn't mean you won't have time to yourself or you have to be checking your phone constantly, it means you should take a few minutes out of your weekend (each day) to make sure everything is running smoothly. Plus, if you catch something over the weekend, it is likely to make your job Monday much easier. Pay it forward!
Fall in love with social media and the complexities of the digital world. There is so much that affects social media that's happening outside of the platforms, and vice versa. If you truly enjoy working on social media, you'll start to explore the digital world and all its complexities. With this, you'll learn new skills that will make you a better strategist and help advance your career.
Make sure your family and friends accept that you're always on your phone. If you're not working, you're probably catching up with friends or scrolling through your own handles. That's the thing about being a social media strategist - all the time your colleague spend during the day checking their own profiles, you spend scrolling through your clients' feeds.
Set up your content streams. When you first start as a social media strategist, you need to figure out where you can get quality, relevant content to populate your clients' social media profiles. If you're doing traditional PR in addition to social, you will also learn about key journalists, influencers and professionals relevant to your client(s) who you can work engage with on social or IRL in the future. If you know where to find content and you have an ample database of sources, you'll never run out of it.
Make sure you know what trackable links look like. This is a personal pet peeve, but if you're sharing an article with a really long URL, it's probably because it's not the real URL for the article or there is a tracking link attached to it. These tracking links can include information about you, including your name, email and the source through which you accessed the article. So, before you plug this into a link shortener like Bitly - or worse, share it as-is on a profile - take off the tracking code at the end.
Don't be afraid to ask for what you need. You're the expert and your colleagues and clients are looking to you to tell them what you need in order to be successful. The most important things to ask for are approved visuals; any marketing graphics created to promote events, webinars or other business development assets you intend to share on social; logos; visual/style/brand guidelines; and your point of contact for any future visual needs.
There's never one good general answer that will tell you how to succeed at a job - or anything for that matter - but these suggestions are things that were top-of-mind for me when I first started, so I hope they will serve as a helpful guide to those just starting their social media careers. When you start a new job, things are typically slow to pick up, so you should take this extra time to get settled, ask questions and set up everything you can in advance before things get crazy.
What are your best tips for starting a new job or succeeding as a social media strategist?