* This article is a paid service of Digiday[Japanese version]a media for next-generation leaders responsible for branding.DIGIDAY+This is a reprint from.
In the summer of 2020, when Sarah Wildman started her job as social media manager at California-based PR firm Segal Communications, she was tasked with managing Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for one client. Toyin), was to create a social media plan that spanned Twitter.
What the client usually wanted was still images for those multiple channels, two or three per week. But soon the number of clients with similar requests grew from one to four, then six.
“We knew we had to quickly put systems and protocols in place to create a team that could meet the growing demands,” Wildman recalled in an email. Her agency clients include jewelry company Shane Co., birth control brand Nurx and Johnny Donuts.
The then 28-year-old novice social media manager was faced with the demands of not only executing the optimal social media strategy, but also maintaining and managing the brand’s social media channels, monitoring community engagement, and creating content for each of the brands she was responsible for. It was a wide variety of works, including continuous production of As the social media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up.
“The social media landscape has changed dramatically in the last five years, especially from a brand perspective,” he said, adding that “the simplicity that social once had is completely gone.” .
Social media work is overcrowded
To keep content production on track, Wildman hired a contractor and a full-time staff to shoot and edit the content, allowing him to “unleash the shackles, explore new business opportunities, Now we can concentrate on our own marketing.”
Three years ago, Wildman’s posting schedule consisted of two to three still images per week on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And with the craze for short-form videos, he puts one or two on TikTok or Reels every week.
He’s not the only one. For many social media managers, the upheaval in the social media landscape has upended their roles. In the past, it was enough to post relevant photos on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter along with a witty copy, but now it is possible to create a consistent brand identity and content through multiple layers of social media platforms. Continuous production and data analysis have become the norm.
A lot of things to manage
Social media has long been revered in the digital advertising world as a guiding star, making it an integral part of every stage of an agency’s digital marketing and advertising workflow, executives say.
It’s all because people are spending more time on social media (2 hours and 28 minutes per day on average, according to social media management platform Hootsuite), and eMarketer According to a report, marketers are expected to spend $71 billion to get in front of those people in 2023. In other words, social media teams have a lot to manage.
“Today’s multi-channel landscape is one of the major challenges facing brands looking to build a solid digital presence,” said Myra, founder and president of digital marketing agency MG Empower.・Mr. Genovis points out in an email.
It’s not just that the social media platforms themselves are “always evolving,” as exemplified by Instagram’s introduction of reels and Reddit’s superior advertising infrastructure. That’s partly due to the growing number of new platforms coming out with their own products, such as BeReal’s dual cameras and TikTok’s short-form videos, Genovies added.
“This shift is forcing marketers and marketing agencies to adapt to a more integrated approach to flexibly respond to changes in platform and consumer behavior,” he said.
new social media team
According to eight agency executives Digiday spoke to for this story, “there is no formula for hiring, staffing and training internal social media teams.” “Especially so,” he says, in a fragmented social media landscape.
Also, “what is not keeping up with the social and digital world is literally changing day by day is agency deals and agency models,” said Courtney Berry, managing director at digital agency Barbarian. speaks. “We know we have to be much more flexible and fluid for our clients.”
Berry said agency deals have historically been based on a candidate’s deliverables, skill set and background. Now, with platforms reshaping product offerings and how audiences are using each platform, agencies need to be more responsive, he said. To that end, Barbarian recently created an in-house creator collective that can pivot appropriately at the pace of change in social media.
Similarly, agency Beekman Social has hired 45 long-term freelancers and full-time employees to double its size and increase flexibility in 2022, according to the agency’s founder. CEO/CEO Jeffrey Tosay said.
Video needs surge
With the rise of video-centric platforms and a video-centric strategy becoming more important, influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy equips its entire staff with both video shooting and editing proficiency. I’m doing training.
“Clients are actually demanding video content at a faster rate than ever before, so this is a significant investment for us,” said Billion Dollar Boy founder Edward East, who shared TikTok and The rise of its competitors, such as Instagram Reel and YouTube Shorts, is also a threat.
In addition, digital agency MG Empower has moved away from the traditional form of hiring one person for each platform, such as a chief TikTok officer and a Meta strategist, and will focus on applicants’ knowledge of the latest platforms and social media platforms. It is adopted based on its evolutionary ability to keep up with the ever-advancing movement.
“In the past we used to have a headcount working on each platform individually, but now we’re running the whole business based on core expertise/technologies,” MG Empower’s Genovice said in an email. do. “We understand that the best way to succeed in such a multifaceted digital world is to have multidisciplinary teams working in an integrated fashion.”
Affecting all aspects of digital advertising
The future of social media management will be complicated and intricate, experts say. Because of the fragmentation, some agencies will seek to hire holistic platform-agnostic practitioners with general knowledge of each platform, while others will seek specialists who work on a platform-by-platform basis.
“Inevitably, we’re going to rely on the individual strengths of our employees and then work to ensure they have a solid base of knowledge and a certain amount of expertise,” said Mekanism’s chief social officer. One Brendan Gehn explained in an email. “This is also at the platform and content creation level, at the strategy level.”
Either way, the future of social media management will undoubtedly touch every aspect of digital advertising. It spans everything from creative and content production to media planning and data analysis.
“In the early days of social media, the attitude of strategists was basically to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and hope that one of them worked, and then hit a few bad shots. ‘, said Beekman Social’s Tousei. “But these days, the best strategists all have a holistic skill set, thinking about the entire digital ecosystem and choosing the best strategy for each brand.”
[original text]
(Text by Kimeko McCoy, Translation by SI Japan, Editing by Ryohei Shimada)
Source: BusinessInsider
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