6 things I guarantee will happen if you work as a social strategist

“🎶 I move the stars for no one…🎶”

When you take a step back from ‘doing’ social and being really hands-on, and you step into the strategy side, it can be a bit of a bubble of intangibility at first.

At least that’s how it was for me when I started as a social strategist, agency side, in late 2019. I was so used to doing all the things; controlling all the dashboards, buttons, composing content for posts, optimising them, sorting out the assets…etc, and having to think very, very quickly about things all the time.

Now, in contrast, I have more time to think and less hands-on stuff to do… well, it was a transition that brought me mixed feelings at first. I have never had the time to *think* in any role I’ve ever had, and boy, is it different now. In a good way of course.

I can say, more than a year and a half on, being a social strategist has been a great role for me to get stuck into.

I wouldn’t be ‘me’ though if I didn’t notice all the niggly things that happen and didn’t want to write about them.

I don’t think social strategists (real ones) actually write enough about what it’s like to work in this role, so I thought I’d make a start by giving you a quick run-down of what I’ve noticed are now common occurrences. Because, as it happens, the nature of my job means there have been a number of niggles that I find happen pretty often.

Perhaps my peers out there might recognise some of the following…? (I’d love to know.)

1. A new social platform update is released, but you find out about it a week after it’s happened

It sort of pains me to say it, but I can’t think of a single major social platform I work with that is any good at keeping people like me updated on what’s happening with their own product.

And hey, I know the onus is somewhat on me, sure I do. But, I’ve signed up for every email newsletter and alert going, I follow the official social accounts, I check all the relevant media sites each working day, and still… still… I’ll get that Teams message from a colleague which goes something like:

“I heard that the dimensions of a LinkedIn single image ad have now changed…can you confirm what they should be now please?”

WHAT?!

Who told you this? 😤

And why am I always the last to know? *Cue: me furiously searching around trying to find an update on this new development.*

It annoys me somewhat because I’m supposed to be one foot forward on these things; the fountain of all knowledge internally. But, despite best efforts, bar me perhaps WORKING at these big social brands, often I just can’t seem to find out about things like this in time.

2. You saw a really useful stat, you want to use it in a slide deck, but now you can’t find it anywhere

This has become a classic. Being in the job I’m in, I naturally munch my way through a lot of papers, reports, articles, and social posts each week — I can’t be expected to note down or remember every stat or finding I see; it just wouldn’t be efficient.

But you just know there will come a time, soon, when one of the stats you glimpsed at comes to mind when you’re formulating something. Now, where was that? Was it here? No.. Here? No.. Maybe that brand mentioned it? No...

It’s the most irritating game of content hide-and-seek ever. 👀

And, because I got sick of this in the case of LinkedIn, I actually pulled this article together earlier this year, just so I could just have a reference point for all the stats they were releasing. (And, I made it publicly available because I figured there’d be others experiencing this same niggle. Aren’t I nice?)

3. You’re looking for an example of a social ad that contains x, but now you can’t find a single one in existence. It’s suddenly rarer than a Hainan gibbon 🐒

This is a prime example of ‘sod’s law’ at work. Whereas, on most days, my newsfeeds will be positively festooned with a wide variety of different ad types, orientations and styles, on the one day I need to find one ad (any ad!) with a native lead gen form attached so I can look at the content within… not a dickie bird.

Not a sausage.

*Refresh browser.* *Look through newsfeed.*

*Log out.* *Log in again.*

*Refresh browser.* *Look through newsfeed.*

*Cry*

4. You’re trying to blitz through an urgent social listening project for an important client, and a key feature of your social listening tool unashamedly fails you

Picture the scene:

You’ve got your brief. You’ve meticulously and methodically worked through all the set-up. You’ve written the queries and pulled the data.

“And now.. to search and sort and categorise and tag! Geronimo!!” 🦸🏻‍♀️ ☄️ 🗂

“Oh. The search function isn’t working.”

OR:

“Oh. The social post preview viewer I always use isn’t working.”

That kind of thing.

Well, dear reader, it’s more than just a slight inconvenience. It really puts you back considerably in the ‘time vs work needing to be done’ stakes.

In my experience, it can add roughly a third more time onto your journey to the research project finish line. This creates a new additional pressure on you: you now must work faster and do more to get to the same point you would have got to quicker if just that one thing had been working.

“How much do we pay for these tools? £30k a year? Brilliant.”

5. People underestimating/not having a clue how much time something like a social listening project really takes

This is a difficult niggle to mention, as I don’t really blame anyone for this.

I guess it’s like the HS2 project or when a building contractor is working on a new town centre redevelopment or something — yes, there is some kind of deadline, but is that really ever met? Nope. It will just take “as long as it takes” to complete. Yes sir; it’s just how it is.

I’ve found it’s the same with social listening, but without the incompetence, lack of budget planning or inefficiency.

It truly is hard to know the score on the timings front. If you have a specific set of handles, hashtags, keywords/phrases, themes/topics and you want to know x, y, and z, it just really depends on the volume of data and how things can be cut — and that’s not something I feel I can ever give an accurate estimate on, time-wise, which I’m sure sounds unbelievable to whoever I’m trying to help with a time estimation.

When you’re doing social listening, you just don’t know how long it’s going to take until you’re probably about halfway through it, and you’ve started forming your report of what you’ve found. By then, you really are in the position of knowing the limitations of the results the tool has found/what you’ve collected manually, and the extent to which you can stretch and ‘milk’ the data and information you’ve got.

6. *You* don’t actually have a clue about how long the social listening project you’re being asked about is going to take

Even if you’ve done some initial scoping and digging to try and get some kind of idea—and you’ve got your raw results all lined up, just examining the odd component/bit of content within a post and exploring it further by clicking on something can take you down a number of rabbit holes which may or may not lead to an extra finding, or a ‘path’ into a new thing you can include in your final findings. You don’t know this until you really go into that cave and have a proper look with your super-bright flashlight.

A bit like in that film Labyrinth, where the girl goes into that room with the staircases and stuff. 🤷🏻‍♀️

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