How to Win as a 1-Person Social Team

In case you missed last week’s edition, check it out below.

How to do Social & Community Management on Launch Day

Let’s dive into this week’s edition.

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Running social for a brand by yourself can be exhausting (since you’re stretched so thin across different projects and priorities).

But it can also be super as fun and rewarding.

Especially when you consider the amount of ownership & autonomy you have.

When things go well, you get a ton of praise and visibility.

And when things don’t go as great, you have clear opportunities for improvement without ambiguity.

To help you succeed, I’ve outlined a few essential tips from my personal experience running social as a 1 person team (right now at a16z crypto and also when I was a social lead at LinkedIn)

Decide on the top 2-3 social platforms where you will have an active presence.

Prioritize these above all.

People will say “hey what’s our [insert new social platform] strategy”, and it’s your job to assess whether that platform is in line with your target audience, company goals, marketing goals, and how it lines up with the 2-3 social platforms that you already have running.

It’s usually best to experiment on new social platforms using your personal account instead of starting an account for the brand.

You will often find yourself defending the the fact that you’d rather be great at 2-3 social platforms than mediocre at 4-5.

Just because your competitors are using a social platform doesn’t mean you need to drop everything and be there too.

Since you’re just one person, you need to be extremely disciplined with your time.

I’ve found it helpful to outline my recurring commitments and add them to the calendar as if they were meetings.

Daily community management time blocks.

Daily content creation time blocks.

Weekly social reporting time blocks.

Monthly time blocks to produce recaps on broader campaigns, trends, and analytics.

Being a team of 1 means that there is nobody else to update your team.

How else will they know what the audience sentiment is like?

Or how you’re noticing an odd trend on social (as it relates to the brand) and what your proposal is moving forward?

Or what content is consistently performing great (and how others on the team can try using a similar format for their personal accounts)?

It’s your job to share everything.

You’re the eyes and ears on the ground.

You’re likely the best informed person on the team since you are consuming so much information from the feed on a daily basis.

Let your team know ahead of time and find a method of communication that works best so that you’re not overwhelming them with updates.

For example, you can start a new Slack channel just for updates/trends.

Or maybe you wait till Friday to share a mini report.

It’s up to you and your team but I’ve found that over-communication is usually best — especially in startup environment where things are moving so quickly.

You can’t do it all yourself.

There are other people at the company who are able to contribute to your content strategy in some way shape or form.

You can ask product managers for support on crafting social copy for an upcoming launch.

You can ask your CEO or Founder for a 30 min zoom call where you ask them a bunch of questions that will turn into social content.

You can ask engineers or any non-marketer if your content makes sense to them (sometimes we tend to use jargon or slang that makes sense to marketers but not others).

The quicker you acknowledge that you can’t do it all alone, the quicker you’re able to start being proactive and a much less chance of burning out down the line.

Leverage your online community of supporters, product users, & fans for:

Social should be a 2-way communication tool.

Yes, you have a message that you want to share with your audience.

But you should be regularly leveraging your online community for input, ideas, and support wherever you need them.

If you’ve been doing your job properly for months (or years), then your community will gladly support (since they feel like they’ve gotten value from your content).

This one is pretty obvious but you gotta be using tools to help you be more efficient.

A few areas that I look for support via tools:

Since you’re just 1 person, you’ll need to lean heavily into tools or built-in features that will allow you to maximize your time & energy.

I’m currently using Taplio for LinkedIn and Tweet Hunter for X/Twitter.

The average social media manager spends a TON of time and creative energy trying to come up with great content.

I’d suggest you find a few content prompts that you like and iterate them until you have a handful of recurring series that you can always lean on.

Note: Even though you’re using a prompt, your audience should feel like the content is fresh (since each week the substance will change but over time, will be tied to a specific theme)

Example 1: Every Tuesday you share a different story from a power user of your product, including a testimonial, photo, and how the product helped their situation.

Example 2: Every Friday, you work with your CEO/Founder to produce a recap report that can be published on social. You can include company wins, new hires, things that were accomplished, and any build-in-public style content that your audience would find interesting.

Example 3: Every Sunday you share a post that walks through a specific product feature, how to use it, and why people should use it (aka what problem does it solve).

You can find a list of more content prompts here.

That’s it!

Like I said earlier, running social as a team of 1 is tough but not impossible.

I’ve been there before and I’m currently there now.

Use these tips and you will find yourself less exhausted and more excited to do your job every day.

If you’re finding value in this newsletter, I’d really appreciate a share on social!

It goes a long way for me.

Thank you!

Ish

What I loved this week: