The mini trade fairs of the Communication We Are COM X ISCOM, present the daily life of communicators. In this episode 23, an overview of the professions of social media management. Let's go! 😎
Expert opinion
For this mini-show, two experts from the advertiser agreed to answer our questions. #️⃣ Thanks to Joanna Civil, Social Media Manager at Nickel, the alternative banking service and Aurélien Claudez, Head of Social Media at Carmignac, a French asset management company.
What is your definition of social media management?
Joanna Civil: Social media management is a specialty of conversational communication, which is increasingly gaining momentum. Our job is not to sell a product to this or that community on any social network. We are the guarantors of dialogue and therefore of brand awareness.
Aurelien Claudez : Indeed, doing social media management means seizing all the opportunities offered by the Social Media, to put them at the service of a business strategy. This job requires a lot of expertise: strategy editorial, creation of contents, influence, sponsoring, social selling, etc. In other words, social media management is a multi-business lever that seeks above all to increase the reputation of a brand.
What is the difference with community management?
AC: Literally, community management means “community management”. This specialty of digital communication is more focused on content production and the pure conversational aspect. The community manager manages the content and the interactions it generates. Finally, I would say that community management is only a subset of social media management.
JC : The social media manager develops and implements the strategy, while the community manager declines it on the various social networks. This one must permanently be in action. This communication professional manages relations with Internet users, he must respond to comments, making sure never to harm the brand image.
#1 – Why did you choose the field of social media? What was your course ?
J.C. : I have always been very attracted by the editorial. Initially, I wanted to go into journalism. And you will see that communication is never far from journalism. As for the field of social media, to tell the truth, it fell on me a bit by chance.
After a fairly classic course, a license and an MBA in marketing and communication, I did an apprenticeship in digital communication. It was then that I was asked to host the Facebook page of the company I worked for, a social network that was still in its infancy. Thereafter, I simply continued to evolve in this exciting field.
AC : In the same way, it is the happy chances of life that guided me towards social media. After my studies, I became Web Editor. On a daily basis, I composed articles and published them on the company's website, stopping at natural search engine optimisation (or SEO) – allowing your content to rank higher on search engines.
Of course, any web editor wants to generate traffic to his creations and therefore to the site that hosts them. It is then quite naturally that I started creating content for the first social networks and I got a taste for it. My social media expertise having been perfected over the years, I had the chance to join Allianz, AXA and finally Carmignac.
#2 – Why and for whom would you advise social media?
AC : In my opinion, evolving in social media requires two major qualities. You must both have a creative and analytical mind. Creativity is essential to strategic thinking and content production. Analysis, on the other hand, will allow you to work based on data.
I would add that intellectual curiosity is extremely important to practice this profession, whose codes and uses are constantly changing, in line with new technologies and current events. A social media manager must be comfortable with change!
J.C. : Yes, it's obvious, the social media manager must demonstrateoverflowing creativity.open-mindedness is also crucial. When we witness the emergence of a new social network, responding to new codes, it is important to grope, to dare to be new and to risk failure. It's about standing out, but the recipe for good buzz doesn't exist.
Finally, to become a social media manager, you have to be organized ! Many think, wrongly, that social media is a simple discipline, which boils down to social networks. While in reality, the social media manager is a versatile communicator, who must be able to wear many hats: writing, advertising, influence, programming, etc.
#3 – What excites you most about your job?
J.C. : I find the day before extremely stimulating. Often, I inquire about the social media strategies of other companies, all sectors combined. How does a particular brand choose to position itself? What limits will she dare to exceed? How can I be inspired by it?
In other words, it is stimulating to see to what extent this profession is subject to changes in society. Choosing to work in social media means choosing to join a career with a future, which holds surprises every day.. For example, when I started doing influence, it was all new for me, like for many, I had to adapt and acclimatize myself to this sector little by little. Today, I love building influence strategies.
AC : Our business is fundamentally cross-functional, affecting all departments of a company and must be able to meet all their specific objectives. Also, this leads us to work with a wide variety of profilesOn radically different topics. I would say that it is this diversity that drives me and enriches me on a daily basis.
On a more personal note, I love watching the Feedback in real time, an advantage offered by social networks. When developing a campaign, it is very stimulating to be able to follow its evolution live and measure the interest shown by Internet users: likes, comments, shares, etc. In social media, performance is measured and that's a real plus. It is an extremely fast learning laboratory, which helps us to perform day by day.
#4 – On a daily basis, what are your missions and challenges? Do you have a typical day?
J.C. : On a typical day, you don't even have to think about it, and that's also what I like about social media. Every morning, I start by doing what I have to do, until something happens that turns my whole program upside down. If the publication of a tweet went wrong, for example, you have to react and create elements of language by calling on different teams internally, to respond and try to satisfy everyone.
I like to alternate between times of concentration, where I prefer to be a bit in my bubble, working alone and times of discussion and teamwork. So, truly, the typical day does not exist and that is what makes our job so rich.
Daily, our missions and challenges vary. At Nickel, our main objective is to become a relational brand. We do not sell bank cards to our communities, but we offer them content to bounce on. Also, my daily challenge is to maintain close ties with all of our communities.
AC : I agree with Joanna, in social media there is never a typical day. That's the beauty of the job. It all depends on the objectives and the urgencies of the moment.
In general, I would say thatbeyond strategic meetings and brainstorming, our thinking mainly focuses on content creation. How to adapt this message to such a social network? By creating specific audience segments and targeting our content sponsorship. How to transform our employees into brand ambassadors? By encouraging them to share the content we make available to them. How to convert our salespeople to social selling? By supporting them in this process and introducing them to social networks and data.
Finally, we are the guarantors of our company's e-reputation. We must be able to spot and identify possible weak signals, to detect emerging crises. How to prevent and, if necessary, defuse a crisis situation? Once again, collective reflection is in order. What must be remembered is that social media is a sector in which the days are not alike and where the missions are extremely varied.
#5 – Can you tell us about your pride? Do you have any projects to share with us?
AC : I remember a magnificent campaign in which I had the chance to participate when I was at Allianz. To raise awareness about road safety, we produced a 360° video on Facebook, when this feature was relatively new. Internet users could move their gaze in space using their mouse, throughout a car journey, to detect traffic violations. Very quickly, this campaign has gone viral: more than 20.000 likes, more than 10.000 comments and more than 3.000 shares. All this for a lower budget, requiring only a small shoot. Moreover, for several years, this is the case that Facebook presented to advertisers to promote 360° video.
On the business side, I am also very proud to have been able to work directly with the Facebook teams, to develop a lead generation strategy. In the insurance sector, again at Allianz, Internet users who visited our website provided us with a great deal of information. To reuse them, Allianz called on an agency. By bringing this service back in-house and working with Facebook, we've managed to split the cost of these leads by 10.
Finally, my last great source of pride concerns my experience at AXA, during which I had the opportunity to participate in the development and democratization of the use of a content library platform. The latter aimed to support general agents in social media practices: facilitating content sharing and learning how to animate a community. In less than a year, we have managed to approach more than 200 general agents, professionals who are often uninitiated in social networks.
J.C. : My last pride concerns our advent calendar. At Nickel, we decided to surf on the high point of Christmas, to offer our customers an advent calendar on social networks. The idea was above all to reward them for their loyalty, so we chose to transpose the Christmas spirit to the social media format. Every day, we challenge our customers, for example " who wired Nickel to their best friend this year? ". So, one of our members received the sum of 200 euros. For a campaign, without advertising, the success encountered was incredible and our communities were greatly inflated.
You should know that in social media, budgets can quickly become very impressive. However, the development of this campaign, entirely carried out internally, only cost us the price of the rewards.
The second project, which I will discuss here, predates my arrival at Nickel. It concerns my experience within the online payment company, Lyn, and more specifically the implementation of FinTech Lyf Play. Throughout the pandemic, we have wanted to support our communities, which are sometimes isolated.
In particular, we came to the aid of liberal health actors, those who worked from home in video and did not know how to collect their patients' fees. To do this, in just a few days, we provided them with a Facebook account, detailing all the processes that were necessary for them to open a Lyf Pro account. Social media allows you to stay in touch and above all to help quickly, it is also the duty of brands to fight against isolation by making themselves useful.
#6 – How will brand and social media reports evolve in the years to come?
J.C. : It seems to me that influence is a real subject of the future for brands. How to work with an influencer? What contract to put in place? Many questions arise. Especially since influence was born without regulation, even if it has intensified in recent years: federations are created to regulate the influence market, bills are adopted, etc.
The power of peer-to-peer recommendation is surprising, especially among younger generations. The latter will trust an influencer who praises the merits of a product, even if his partnership is obvious, more than a brand who praises his own products.
This reality is even more true in the banking sector. No one buys new insurance by seeing an ad on Instagram. While if the promotion of this offer goes through an influencer, who uses a tone of his own and adds his little touch of humor, then the Internet user can click.
AC : Like the influence that, as Joanna says, is at the heart of a whole subject of regulation, social networks and their regulations have also undergone a strong and rapid evolution in recent years. From now on, the RGPD (General Regulation For Data) protects your data, a phenomenon which will increase. Which means that, the more time passes, the more complicated it will become for advertisers to collect and analyze data from Internet users. This will invariably impact the work of a social media manager.
Moreover, the fake news proliferate on social networks. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, it may be increasingly difficult to disentangle the true from the false. For brands, one of the major challenges of the years to come will be to find the appropriate solutions to avoid being trapped.
#7 – Do you have any last advice for future communicators?
J.C. : Be curious, don't be afraid to test and even make mistakes. You have to make your own experiences. And besides, do not wait to integrate the world of work to create your experiences. Launch your YouTube channel, make a podcast or something else. On the internet, there will always be someone to listen to you and share your content.
AC : I will end by giving you two pieces of advice. Firstly, choose a school that will offer you the opportunity to carry out internships and work-study programs, a school that will put you in contact with professionals. On the other hand, cultivate your curiosity. Today people document everything, take advantage of it and become a real expert.
Études de cas
