Interview with a Social Media Manager

I work as the Media Specialist in the communications office at a state college. I’ve been working with online media for four years, two years of which I worked as an intern and the latter two years consisted of full-time work. I also hold a degree in marketing from a prestigious business school.

I wear many hats in my role: I write content, create videos, manage a student blog, maintain the school’s presences on various social media networks and participate in weekly brainstorming meetings about the direction towards which we want our marketing efforts to go. If I had to boil my duties down to single phrase, it would be this: content creation. Every day, across all media, I am brainstorming, creating, finessing and distributing content.

When I tell people that I’m a social media specialist, the reaction I get most is, “Oh, so you get to mess around on Facebook and Twitter all day? Cool!” In a way, that’s true, but I don’t think that line of thinking does justice to what I do. Being a social media manager consists of so much more than just throwing content online and sparking a conversation with your followers, although that is indeed a part of it; there’s a lot of thought that goes into everything I do. With every status update I post or video I create, I am constantly refining the following questions: what am I trying to say? How does this best communicate our brand?

I love my job. If I had to give it a rating on a 1-10 scale, I’d give it a 10. I love the stories that I’m telling, the people that I’m talking with and the act of content creation. The only thing I could imagine improving my situation would be to shift my start time so I get to sleep in every morning. I’m not a morning person.

At its core, marketing is marketing is marketing; meaning, if you’re marketing anything from stocks and bonds to a college experience, the day-to-day activities are basically the same. I suppose, in that way, if you enjoy the act of social media marketing itself, you can be happy doing anything. It’s the stories that differ, and for me, that is huge. I don’t particularly care to tell stories about finance or toothbrushes or mass-market items that the bigwig marketing firms handle. At my job, I get to tell stories about people’s deepest dreams, their aspirations and how they want to change the world. I don’t think you can get more honest and uplifting than that. In that way, this job really does touch my heart. It’s what I was meant to do.

There isn’t really anything unique about my situation that readers should know when considering my position.

I didn’t mean to end up in this line of work, which is funny to me. My story starts during my college applications, when I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do and settled on business school as a fail-safe. From there, I decided to major in marketing because it seemed more interesting than studying accounting or finance. I need extra cash in college, so I took on internships related to my field, and purely by chance fell into social media marketing just as it started to explode. It was then that I began to see the possibilities.

I think the single most important thing that I’ve learned outside of school about working in the real world is how hugely important it is to have real-world experience. I’ve learned exponentially more in my internships than I have in my college classes. I can’t even remember half of what I learned in college classes (and I was a good student), but the lessons that I’ve learned in my internships and full-time jobs have continued to help me daily.

One of the reasons I consider myself so lucky is that I am immensely proud of my work. It gives me deep creative satisfaction, and that’s the reason I wake up every day and look forward to going to work. I take most pride in a recent email piece I developed, outlining the reasons that our college is so special. We used beautiful photography and thoughtful quotes by current students. Everyone who receives it comments on how gorgeous the piece is, and their excitement over it makes me extremely happy.

One of the most difficult things about being a social media manager is dealing with people who aren’t happy with your institution, for one reason or another. We have nasty comments coming into our blog, our Twitter account and our Facebook page. Sometimes it’s difficult not to take it personally, but I always remind myself that this sort of thing just comes with the territory. You can’t make everyone happy, and with the anonymity of the Internet, those people will often make their voices heard in a public space. It’s up to me to stay cool, diffuse the situation and reply in the best way that I can.

My job isn’t that stressful. I have colleagues who live for the job, but I’m able to maintain a healthy work-life balance. As much as I love what I do, I always take care to leave work at the office.

The salary for my job ranges widely, depending on client and location. I know people in New York City who make six figures doing social media marketing for global brands. I make significantly less than that, and although I would like to be earning more, it’s a comfortable sum.

I get a whopping four weeks of paid vacation a year, plus fourteen paid holidays and fourteen paid sick days; Working in higher education has its perks!

To get hired and succeed as a social media manager, it helps immensely to have a background in online marketing. A marketing degree is always useful, but solid work experience in the field is so much more important, I think. I’ve always been a good listener and a creative thinker, which are two qualities that I believe has helped me succeed as a social media manager.

I tell friends who are considering working in my field that although it’s not the dream job you may imagine it is (for example, you don’t actually get paid to go on Facebook all day), it can be immensely fun and rewarding.

I haven’t given much thought to what I’d like to be doing in five years. I suppose since I stumbled into this position by accident, and since it’s worked out so well, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to plan exactly where I’ll be down the road. No matter what I’ll be doing, though, I hope I’ll still be telling good stories.

 

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