Slate

A social media director said this to me the other day and I can’t get it out of my head: “85% of the battle for social teams is convincing marketing dinosaurs to take us seriously and invest in us.” The job’s hard enough — harder when you have to keep proving and reproving the value of the entire function. 🦖

Don’t expect your social media manager to be a graphic designer. Design still matters on social. A lot. But that doesn’t mean your social team should be in Photoshop all day. They already have too much to manage. And great design takes trained pros. Stock Canva templates won’t cut it for bigger brands (sorry). If you want great content, invest in creative resources. Connect your brand and creative teams with social so they can lift each other up. Your social team has the vision, but they need designers and creators to help bring it to life while they’re busy making a ton of other content themselves. And your brand team has the vision, but they shouldn’t be siloed from social.

Speed matters on social media. Social teams need to quickly: 🏎️ Join relevant conversations 🏎️ Go from idea to post — over and over 🏎️ Engage with their community But that only happens if the right infrastructure is in place. It takes a clear strategy, a defined process, a strong brand identity, and the right resources. Most of all, it takes trust. If every post needs approval, you’re already too slow. 🐢

The best part of working in social media is the community. But there are fewer and fewer good events to actually meet up in person. My favorite conference right now by far is the Gondola Sports Summit, run by Jared Kleinstein and Nick Cicero (last year was their first year doing it). They took what made the old Twitter Sports Summit great and made it even better — more community-driven, more talked with, not talked at. The energy was unlike any conference I’ve been to in a long time. If you work in social for sports, this is a must-attend. If you work in social outside of sports, I still highly recommend it. No one pushes content like sports social teams do, and learning from them will make you better at what you do. I'm on standby if I’ll be going this year depending on paternity leave 🥹 but I had such a good time last year that Slate is an official partner this year. If you're thinking about going, I’ll drop a link in the comments you can use! 📅 Gondola Sports Summit is May 20-21

The AI editing platform built for social teams, by social teams. Turning longform content into social ready clips is time consuming and costly. 🐌 Slow turnaround 😓 Video teams backlogged 💰 Easy to miss valuable content nuggets Introducing Shortcuts: Powered by Slate AI ✨ Unlock shareable moments from longform ✨ Create more video content, with less ✨ Keep every post on-brand and consistent Designed in partnership with leading social content teams. Shortcuts is built directly into Slate's powerful editing suite. You can easily polish your final clips straight in Slate's intuitive web or mobile creation platforms. Check it outtttt 👉 https://lnkd.in/gmwmqHdc

One challenge comes up again and again with social teams: They need to create more video content, with limited resources. The best social teams solve this by taking repurposing seriously. One piece of content can fuel 10+ posts across platforms. But finding and editing the best moments for social from longform video is time-consuming and tedious, especially for already underwater social teams. The AI tools out there today over-automate and miss the mark. They strip creative control from social teams and skip important steps without the human creative touch. So we took all that feedback and built something better. ✨ Introducing Shortcuts, powered by Slate AI ✨ The AI platform built for social teams, by social teams, to turn longform video into branded, social-ready clips effortlessly. We ran a closed beta with some of the best social teams in the world. Their feedback shaped Shortcuts, and we’ll keep co-building with social teams as we roll this out to a broader audience, like we do with all of Slate. Couldn’t be more excited to share this today. If your team is sitting on longform content and needs a better way to repurpose it for social, let’s talk!

If I were a CMO overhauling a brand’s social team, here’s my 9-step playbook to get going. 1. Define the purpose of social for the brand. Before building the team, tools, or processes, I’d get clear on the role social plays for the brand and make sure leadership is fully bought in to the strategy. Social should be the voice of the brand, with a focus on entertaining and educating our target audience and building community as the foundation. 2. Hire a VP of Content: Social touches everything. A VP makes sure social isn’t siloed, fights for budget, and connects the dots across the org. And they need to have done the job, hands on the keyboard, as a social manager in past. 3. Let VP hire a team of content creation specialists: One-person social teams can’t be the norm anymore. There’s too much creative and content output needed for this to work. I’d want a team of diverse content creators with different skills and viewpoints. 4. Break down silos immediately: Social can’t sit in a corner. I’d make sure social is fully integrated with a strong voice in the room across PR, customer service, product, sales — all of it. The best content (and best results) come when social works across the whole org. 5. Prioritize video views over followers: Followers are a vanity metric unless you’re a smaller business. Recognizable brands already have them, and they don’t mean much. They can be bought. Focus on video views first. Business growth often comes from that. 6. Invest in community management: It’s crazy how many brands still don’t do this. There’s so much to be gained from nurturing a community. Engage with your audience, build 1-to-1 relationships. 👉 6a (courtesy of Sarah Whittle): Find your “surprise and delight” lever and how to get packages to consumers fast and often. 7. Maintain brand consistency over native-only content: My job as a CMO is to promote the Brand on every channel. Social media doesn’t get a pass just because everyone wants to look lo-fi on TikTok. I would create a plan that embraces native-feeling social content without sacrificing any brand equity. Consistency is key. 8. Invest in tools built by people who’ve actually done the job: Social moves too fast for bloated, outdated software. The best tools for social teams are being built by people who’ve worked in social themselves. They understand the real challenges. 9. Enforce a strict off-time policy: I don’t want a burnt-out team. Social media management is not a 24/7 job. It’s important, but let's be honest - it’s not THAT important. Everyone needs to take a break. I've learned that if bosses don't require this in social media the SMMs will default to "always-on". BONUS 10. Get executives active on LinkedIn: Still one of the biggest missed opportunities for brands across every category. It’s wild that this is still mostly a B2B thing. Every type of consumer is on LinkedIn now. And it’s easier to create for than any other platform — you just have to write.

What does an ideal social team look like? It’s not the overworked, one or two-person teams most brands are rolling with today. Here’s a better starting place: → VP of Content – Oversees strategy, fights for resources, shields the team → Social Media Lead – Hands-on, executing the strategy day-to-day. → 2+ Content Creators – Short-form specialists, high-output, tapped into trends. → Support from internal brand, design, and video teams – Social can’t operate in a silo. → Freelancers – Fresh content, new perspectives. Along with... 🛠️ Tools for content creation, listening, and analytics. 💰 A budget they actually control. Most social managers reading this will probably laugh because they don’t have anywhere near these resources even at the BIGGEST brands. Content creation takes time, space, and a ton of creativity. It’s time leadership invested in what social teams actually need.

We love to see this!

Calling all social media pros 🗣️ Who should we feature next?? Our new monthly webinars have been a hit. Hundreds of you have been joining in for organic, unfiltered conversations about this truly wild industry we work in. The best part? It’s not just a one-way street. Guests bring the insights, but the audience jumps in too. Asking questions, sharing takes, and keeping the chat very active. A lot of people walk away with new connections and real conversations that continue after. We’ve been speaking with doers, execs, and strategists across the world of social and digital content. So, who should we bring on to speak with next? Drop your recs in the comments 👇