Rekindle the Flame: How to Fall Back in Love with Social Media

21 Jun Rekindle the Flame: How to Fall Back in Love with Social Media

By Sarah Dawley

“So how’s work going?”

If you asked me this question while I was a social media manager, you’d get a different answer almost every day. On a good day, I felt unstoppable. I loved what I did and the brands I did it for. Other days, it felt like I was stuck running as fast as I possibly could inside a hamster wheel.

It’s a tough job that not everybody understands or appreciates. Is your work actually making a difference? Is this really what you should be doing with your life? Will your uncle ever understand that you don’t “make the internet” for a living? Instead of going through an existential crisis every time you fire up your computer like I did, here are three ways you can rekindle your love for social media and stay focused on what matters.

1. Prove that social is impacting the business

I worked as a social media manager in the television industry, which meant that no matter how “successful” our channels were doing on social—no matter how many Retweets we got or how many new followers we gained—if the ratings weren’t high, our marketing efforts weren’t succeeding.

Directly attributing a spike in ratings to our efforts on social media, however, was an impossible task. Vanity metrics and anecdotal observations were all I had to report on. Even though I knew that the number of Likes a post received didn’t actually mean much on its own, I didn’t have the kind of data that could help me paint the bigger picture. As a result, I became increasingly frustrated and started to feel like my job didn’t matter.

But it did matter, and the work you’re putting in on social media matters too. The key is figuring out how to connect that work to real business objectives, properly analyze the data, and articulate the results in a compelling way. Here’s how. View Full Article >>

Article Compliments of: