A Day in the Life of a Social Media Team
After working on the social media team at Kaplan for the past two years, if there’s one thing I get asked most about my job its ‘what do you actually do?’ As according to friends and colleagues, I just get paid to ‘go on Facebook all day...’ As good as it sounds, there’s so much more to working in social media than hopping from one social media network to another.
For those that are intrigued by a career in social media, here’s a rundown of the tasks that I do every day, and a glimpse into what a day as part of Kaplan’s social media team is really like.
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Creating content
For anyone that reads our blog and follows our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to name a few) you’ll know that our channels are bursting with new and updated content.
Creating social media calendars for our social platforms takes up the most of my time, as we have to ensure that there are multiple posts going live across our channels on a regular basis. Whether it's a tweet, Facebook update, Instagram post or Snapchat video, these posts are all written and scheduled by me on a daily basis. In addition to writing our social media content, another key part of my role is to create assets to share on social platforms. From writing blog posts, to drafting memes, making idioms or designing GIF’s, a large portion of my day is spent creating fun and interesting content for our followers to read.
Scheduling & posting content
After I have written and created content, the next part of my role is to schedule and post the content across our social platforms. Scheduling our social media updates into a tool such as buffer means I can make sure we have a constant flow of content filtering through our numerous accounts throughout the evenings, week and even weekends.
Monitoring and responding
Once content is live, one of the biggest and most important parts of my role is to respond to any comments, queries or questions from our users online. Whether it’s simply retweeting a tweet, favourite-ing a photo or responding to an inbox message it’s important that all forms of user communication are responded to. In addition to responding and replying, it’s also necessary to engage with our users. From joining in on conversations, to leaving comments on users photos, engaging with our online fans shows them that were interested in their experience and that we value their input.
Sourcing Images
For anyone that has been on our social media channels, you’ll know that our students share their study abroad photos with the hashtag#KaplanExperience. Thanks to over 60,000 of you sharing your photos, every day I search through the hashtag and pick our favourite photos to feature on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. Once I have permission to use your photos, I share them with the rest of our team and update our online KaplanExperience photo book, which displays our destinations through our students amazing Instagram images.
Measuring and analysing
fAfter writing and scheduling content, it’s then important to measure and analyse the performance of our posts. From looking at the posts engagement and checking out how many clicks, shares and likes a post received, to looking at it’s reach, conversions and leads, analysing the performance of the posts helps us to understand our users and the content that they like to read online.
Social Listening
Aside from writing content and responding to our users online, another crucial part of my role is social media listening. Performed through an external tool, it is the process of monitoring and ‘listening’ to digital conversations in order to determine what people are saying about our brand online. If users are talking about us online, it enables us to not only provide them with customer service by answering their questions, but also enables us to identify positive and negative feedback.
As you can see, contrary to what my friends and colleagues think, I don't spend all of my time on Facebook. (Just a lot of it….) Creative dynamic and fun, this is the perfect job for those who enjoy writing and enjoy engaging with people. Want to know more about this position or any other positions in a marketing department? Send us your questions in the comment section below.
