What it’s Really Like to Be a Social Media Manager

For the past year, Beach House’s Senior Social Media Manager Brittany Lamp has worked at the creative agency overseeing the social media presence of up to 15 unique fashion, lifestyle, and beauty brands who active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat. On any given day, Beach House is pushing out anywhere from 50-100 pieces of unique content to hundreds of thousands of followers across networks; and it’s Brittany’s job to create the strategy and oversee implementation.

Here’s what Brittany does on the daily:

8:30 a.m: (status meeting) At Beach House, our social media team starts everyda with a short status meeting. Here, is where we review the upcoming content for the week, review any quick learnings from the previous week, and of course, discuss trending news topics, or upcoming holidays that we made need to create content for, such as #NationalDonutDay or the season premiere of Game of Thrones. It’s vital for our brands to insert highly relevant, timely content into their overall communication themes.

9:30 a.m: (client communication) At any agency, client communication is key, and I spend a good chunk of my day communicating with clients. In the morning is when I really sit down to proactively reach out to clients to inform them of any learnings we’ve had, news from within the social media world, or to report on any analytics. It’s important to keep our clients in the loop with every project we’re working on, and the easiest way to do this is to be in constant communication.

11:30 a.m: (strategy meeting) While our social media specialists oversee the day-to-day content, I work hand in hand with them to infuse our overall, bigger picture strategy into everything that we do. Each of our unique brands and each of their campaigns will have different strategies based on their individual goals. Developing a solid social media strategy is all about working backwards to figure out the most efficient and effective way to achieve that goal. That’s where I come in, and outline the strategy in a formal presentation so the client understand why we are doing what we are doing.

I feel like a method actor. When I work on 5-10 different brands in the scope of a day, I have to change my mindset on the fly to reflect each unique brand identity. It definitely keeps things interesting!

1:30 p.m: (content calendar review) While we develop some of our content on the fly here at Beach House, we are also simultaneously building out content calendars up to a month in advance. I sit to review the month’s upcoming content with our social media specialists on a regular basis. We build out the content calendar based on a bigger picture master marketing calendar that our clients provide to us. This ensures that messaging across social media, digital, email, and in-store is cohesive. There are several phases of content calendar review; the first (and my favorite) involves the initial stages of planning, including setting up any content shoots that need to happen. Once we’ve created all the assets we need, we move into the first round of reviews and edits before we send it to the client for final approvals. The content calendars are fluid and open to change, allowing us to insert timely content as we feel is relevant.

3:30 p.m: (analytics) It’s important to step back from the content and analyze the numbers, because the numbers never lie! I actually really enjoy working with numbers and use them to help define the overall brand strategy. One of the most important lessons I have learned is that each of the brands I work on will have an entirely unique set of data dependent upon their unique audience. It’s so interesting to see how different audiences behave.

5:00 p.m: (competitor research) As the days slows down, I will check-in with clients again as necessary, and then I’ll spend some time reading articles from my favorite social media & digital news publications. Social media changes every single day, and it’s vitally important that Beach House stays abreast of trends and changes within the market place.

Contrary to what my friends and family may think, I don’t spend all day on Instagram and Facebook. As the social media manager, I spend my time making sure that our social media strategy is aligned with each clients bottom line goals and that we have analytics to prove that our efforts are making a contribution towards these goals.

At the end of the day, I love how dynamic my job is. It’s always changing, which means so am I!

Check out Brittany’s articles on social media strategy for PR Couture!