A Personal Case Study
The Challenge:
The brand’s social media presence had beautiful photography, but repetitive copy with no opportunity for further engagement via click throughs or videos. This resulted in a stagnant rate of engagement and no opportunity to further nurture relationships. Furthermore, social production and management had been outsourced, and was rather expensive to maintain for little measurable impact.
Goals and Objectives:
- Bring social production and management in house, without overwhelming internal resources.
- Develop a robust social media calendar across channels, focused on increasing engagement.
- Experiment with formats, topics, and posting frequency to find the best cadence for optimal resutls.
Strategy:
As the brand had a vast repository of beautiful images to use, the focus was on improving copy, developing a linking strategy to drive website traffic, adding video and carousel content to the mix, and differentiating across social platforms as appropriate for each audience.
When new long-form content was created for website or partners, six to ten social post would be created and scheduled across the next six to ten months. Older content that still held interest for our core audiences (such as project galleries), were examined on a rolling basis and two to four pieces were developed and scheduled over the next year. Each piece would either include a link or have a link added to LinkInBio. We were able to use the skills of a multi-media specialist on another brand to recut long form videos for social content. Content that previously was not included on social media, such as new products, product updates, blogs, and announcements, were added to the calendar as appropriate.
We organized content into five message frameworks based on our overall brand value propositions and used that framing to optimize copy and later evaluate which message frameworks were resonating with our target audiences. By experimenting with frequency and looking at audience reactions across channels, content was optimized to two or three weekly post, with increased frequency for events or campaigns. Content was further optimized across primary channels, with Instagram and LinkedIn being recognized as the two biggest opportunities.
Outputs:
Transition to my management was completed by May 2022. Content through December 2023 was under my oversight.
Outcomes:
The changes in direction and management saved the company $16000 in the first six months, compared to the previous approach. The new approach also made preplanning and content creation much easier, allowing the team to front load content by as much as 6 months. This helped the lean team, with no team members solely devoted to social media, balance their diverse workloads. It also gave a few junior teammates an opportunity for stretch assignments in content creation, project management, and other areas.
We saw initial engagement spikes of up to 50% above the previous baseline. After the initial testing period, channels saw a steady increase in engagement and followers, with further increases in the second year, including:
- Facebook: 12% increase in fans, 1361% increase in engagement, 2316% increase in impressions, and 250% in brand awareness
- Instagram: 20.2% increase in followers, 22.9% increase in engagement, 491.5% increase in impressions, and 77.3% increase in brand awareness
- LinkedIn: 37% increase in engagement and 33.4% increase in impressions (entirely organic)
- Web traffic: LinkInBio became a top 3 source of website traffic.
Additionally, changing management of social interactions to be in-house team members helped us identify a gap in customer service. Working closely with our sales support and service teams, we were able to close that gap on our end and saw our SS and CS teams enhance their workflows to further optimize the customer experience.
My Role:
- Owned social channel management end to end
- Created strategy and messaging frameworks
- Drove creative direction and project workflow
- Managed employees handling day-to-day social management and content creation
- Reviewed and edited all social media posts
Lesley M. Weiss 