The Evolution of the Social Media Manager

I was sitting in what was then J387 Communications History upstairs in Allen Hall in 2004, when an email invitation popped up in my University of Oregon student account.

The Facebook seemed like something interesting. It seemed like a story to my newly tuned journalism mind. A digital tool to connect university students one to another.

We were learning about blogs and digital research and forums. Myspace was still on the periphery.

When I signed up for The Facebook that day, I had no idea that my entire career path just shifted monumentally.

I was going to be a whiskey swilling, ink-stained print reporter, but with a few clicks on my laptop, I had inadvertently sealed my fate.

The Executive Editor at my first newspaper job asked me to establish a MySpace account for the paper. I would later establish a Twitter account and live-Tweet a major bomb threat in the city.

De Facto Social Media Manager

In fact, over the first four years of my journalism career, I would establish Facebook and Twitter accounts for several newspapers and a television station.

Meanwhile, over on my personal Facebook account, I was documenting almost everything I was doing. I was commenting with people and poking my friends. I was up in all kinds of comment threads writing novels as replies and posting about my kids so their grandparents could watch them grow up far away in Montana and Alaska.

My ability to translate my personal use of Facebook and Twitter to my workplace accounts took me further and further away from those ink-stained hands I had envisioned.

I carried a video camera everywhere and published multiple editions of every digital story I’d post from my phone or a tablet.

Eventually, I got an office and a laptop, and they put me in charge of social media and apps and websites.

I leveraged that job into another job managing social media, apps and websites, this time at a television station.

Later, I became the digital manager at WBEZ Chicago, where I not only managed the station’s social media, I consulted for “This American Life” and the producers at “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me.”

In all of this, through every iteration of Facebook and its News Feed, I was always convinced that the only thing that kept people there and interacting was, in fact, authenticity, immediacy, proximity and simplicity.

Those were the hallmarks of my personal usage, after all.

My wife joined Facebook in 2007. My parents joined a year or so later. Soon there was a flood of personal friends and family, as well as something new, followers.

I had opened my Facebook account to outside followers. Why? Because it was authentic, and I wanted them to experience that.

With every change to the algorithm, my parents and their generation would freak out. I’d watch them panic about the way the page looked. Where did this go? How come I can’t find that anymore?

Ultimately these little tweaks helped people interact even better. They were, I felt, little needed adjustments to keep the juggernaut that is Facebook authentic, immediate, proximate and simple.

Facebook soon reached a billion users. It stretched from friends and families and simple salutations to corporations and small businesses and lots of little tweaks.

And then I suspect the money began to really roll in like a tide, and Facebook, like so many other businesses, fell into the trap of what master to serve. Users or shareholders?

Facebook isn’t like other businesses. It’s primarily a social engine that serves up communications for communities ranging from families to cities and even countries.

A Real Social Media Manager + other duties as assigned

As Facebook settled into its second decade, it became familiar and trustworthy. I started to use it more from a business perspective than from my original personal usage.

Even my personal usage changed to reflect a more careful approach to it. It was all professional now. I bought ads and targeted groups of people. I produced the kind of content recommended by hot shot social media managers.

Much like Scott Kleinberg says in his article, Facebook overhauling News Feed is actually good for social media managers, I began to see the writing on the wall. It was all becoming automated. There was no heart to it. Very little engagement and interaction with the public. If anything, we avoided it.

I left journalism then. Not because I wanted to. Because journalism was cataclysmic and changing almost daily. There was no foundation to build anything on, which led to that automation of social media and really all aspects of my career at the time.

Pure Social Media

I took a healthy pay cut and a job managing social media for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

It was no longer other duties as assigned. I inherited a stable of social media platforms and started another half dozen myself. And I poured myself into it in ways I had forgotten since the inception of it.

I no longer had to be driven by metrics. Not that they didn’t matter, of course, but now social media was a blend of customer service, education, outreach and something completely new, conversation.

I was a conduit between the agency’s ideals and the public’s perception. I could be a lightening rod, or fun and familiar way to engage with a state agency around some of the most fond and cherished highlights of youth — hunting and fishing.

Ten Things I did Differently When I Became A Full-Time Social Media Manager

1. Unplugged the mass-posting social media management systems and got a feel for each platform and the changes that had been made over time. I’m not saying social media management systems aren’t good. But you need to get back to the original platform once-in-a-while to see how they’ve addressed UX issues and other aspects of how people engage there.
2. I spent a year learning about the agency I worked for, the history, the major issues, the places where opinions on management differed. I traveled around to the far-flung corners of our state to talk to the people who would be reading my posts on a daily basis to make sure I could connect with them, and they felt a part of telling the agency’s story. This translates directly to social media, because it made me much more of a subject-level expert in the comments on Facebook than I would have been otherwise. I was able to converse fairly fluently in many topics that tended to be our most-asked questions or most-talked-about subjects. It meant there was very little delay between the public asking the question and the public getting a direct response.
3. Built a river of content through personal relationships by identifying and selecting the best storytellers in our agency. These are people that are either already highly visible on social media, or people who just communicated their programs or research really well through other avenues like photography, videography or just implicit excitement. Once a relationship was established, I worked on building trust, building their storytelling skills and handing over more and more responsibility for the content. This allowed them to build in as much of the science and biology as they needed to while still considering how clean and simple it could be communicated to the general public.
4. Being the only social media person in the agency, I knew they wouldn’t be hiring more of me, so I began to work with all of the communication people from each division to create regional versions of me. I took existing skills and provided some training and gave these people new tools, new platforms to make their own. And I modeled my own interaction and engagement for them.
5. Responded constantly to comments, messages and public postings to our page. I responded early in the morning and late at night. On weekends and holidays and anytime somebody needed to know something. I provided links and page numbers so they could search our hunting and fishing regulations on their own. I taught them how to use the data on our website and created a safe place to ask really dumb questions. This led to a familiarity, which led to a voice for the agency, which is often hard to achieve with a logo instead of a face.
6. Opened up access to our managers and decision-makers by bringing my phone into their offices or out in the field with them and putting them on Facebook Live and letting the public ask direct questions of them. We turned our data-heavy website into live updates from Wildlife Area managers as videos that people could watch instead of wade through pages of data entries.
7. Created communities through social media platforms like Instagram. We opened up our Instagram and Snapchat accounts to public takeovers to allow the public to start telling our story and theirs. Because it is a shared story, after all. This created many networks, especially with influencers around the state. We started putting them in touch with our local biologists to provide support and fishing poles and information. These communities are now hotbeds of angler and hunter education and mentoring.
8. Brought the public out into the field with us for live hunts and live fishing trips. There is, perhaps, nothing better than being there, than being made to feel like you’re there. The closest thing to participation is to be able to watch it and ask questions while it’s happening. This is one of the many ways in which people learn, and the response has been overwhelming, with many of our live videos achieving a reach of a quarter million to a half million people. Audiences chiming in from all over the world and dozens of states.
9. Slowed it all down. We spend the time to think through the agency’s ideals and look for meaningful ways to communicate them or reinforce them with every post and every comment. It’s not necessary to post every single #WildlifeWednesday and #ThrowbackThursday. It can be fine when it matters, but struggling to achieve a calendared approach to social media means you’re losing authenticity with every pre-programmed post. We gave ourselves a chance to make every post count. We don’t always hit the mark, but every post educates and informs and helps us look at even better ways to say what we need to say with no barriers.
10. It all extends from something I’m passionate about. I love conservation work and habitat restoration. I love helping people understand the vast diversity of fish and wildlife within steps of their homes. In terms of interacting with the world around us, I find this job to be incredibly satisfying. Thriving on social media and not burning out extends from being incredibly passionate about what I do every day. But that doesn’t mean I can’t walk away sometimes. I may respond to questions in the morning or late at night and on weekends, but sometimes I won’t post anything because there isn’t anything that important to say right now, and like others, I need some time to get away and fish or go for a hike. Great social media often extends from a place of being passionate about what you do.

It All Comes Full Circle

When The Facebook showed up in my student email that day, I had no idea what it would hold for my future. I didn’t know that fourteen years later, I’d be working in that medium full time.

In those early days, I used it purely to engage with people. It was fun and new, and I didn’t have to watch what I said, because the people looked and sounded a lot like me.

That has changed as the business expanded.

But now Facebook is turning back in on itself after years of expansion. Zuckerberg, has decided that the base is too important, and if people enjoyed interacting with each other on Facebook more than reading up on the news or seeing posts from brands and businesses, then they were going to deliver what makes people happy, what makes them want to be here in this space.

This isn’t the death spiral of Facebook. It’s become too big a part of our lives. This is a massive readjustment that hints at the power of engagement in the first place. It hints at what we all struggle to attain, which is interacting with our community and telling and hearing stories.

Social media managers have to evolve with the platforms and the changing mechanisms for interacting. But in the end, the biggest thing we have to be good at has nothing to do with technology. We are basically in charge of facilitating relationship and fostering conversation.