How fragmentation has changed hiring in social media

By Kimeko McCoy

When Sara Wildman first started as a social media manager at California-based public relations firm Segal Communications in summer 2020, she was tasked with creating a social media plan for a single client across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Mostly, the client needed two to three still images per week across those channels. Soon, those needs grew from a single client to four clients and then six.

“I quickly realized I needed to set systems and protocols into place and build a team to keep up with the ever-growing demands,” Wildman said in an email. Her agency has worked with the likes of Shane Co. jewelry company, Nurx birth control and Johnny Doughnuts.

For the 28-year-old social media manager, those demands weren’t just limited to creating social media best practices. They also included maintaining brand social media channels, monitoring community engagement and keeping a constant flow of content for each brand handle — all of which have become more difficult to keep up with in an increasingly fragmented social media landscape.

We’ve lost the simplicity there once was [on social].

Sara Wildman, social media manager, Segal Communications

“The social media landscape has changed drastically in the last five years, especially from a brand perspective,” Wildman said. “In my opinion, we’ve lost the simplicity there once was [on social].”

To keep up with the content creation, the social media manager has hired a contractor and one full-time staff member to shoot and edit content, allowing Wildman to “get out of the weeds to focus on marketing our agency for potential new business.”

Wildman’s posting schedule has grown from that two to three still images per week standard across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter three years ago to two to three pieces of video content across those platforms in addition to one to two posts per week on TikTok or Reels — given the short-form video boom.

For Wildman and many other social media managers, the social media landscape explosion has expanded their roles beyond posting relatable images and witty copy to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, to creating a uniform brand identity across a multitude of social media platforms with a constant flow of content and data analysis.

Social media has largely been embraced as digital advertising’s guiding star, making it integral at every stage of an agency’s digital marketing and advertising workflow, executives say. That comes as people spend more time on social media (an average of two hours and 28 minutes per day, according to Hootsuite social media management platform), and marketers are projected to spend more than $71 billion to get in front of them this year, per reporting from eMarketer. In other words, social media teams have a lot to manage.

“The current multichannel landscape is one of the key challenges brands face when establishing a solid digital presence,” Maira Genovese, founder and president of MG Empower digital marketing agency, said in an email.

Not only, Genovese added, because the …read more

Source:: Digiday