Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager (At Later!)

Alright. Good morning. Welcome to my day in the life. I started off my morning going to a workout, didn't film that because I was still waking up. Got my drink of the morning, Starbucks secured, ready to go, sort of. 

Anyways, I have my first meeting kicking off soon, so gotta rush home, get ready and yeah, take you through my day. Also, I just remembered I forgot to introduce myself, but hi, Christine. I'm the social media manager at Later and here's my day.

8:00 AM: Morning Meetings

All right, so my first meeting of the day starts right at 08:00 AM PST. This is a regular occurrence just because Later does have hubs around the world. One hub is located in Vancouver, which is where I am, the second being in Toronto and then the third in London. So 08:00 AM is that sweet spot where we're all online and can hop on a meeting together.

Social Team Meetings

So, our social team meets up at least once a week. And this is where we go through the content calendar, what's expected on our team this week, deadlines, any go-to-market launches, all of that fun stuff. 

So this is like a quick sneak peek at what our content calendar looks like. We have assigned each other different colors and this just helps in terms of organization and knowing what needs to be scheduled.

And then from there, we will take some time in our weekly meetings to go through our magical Asana board. It is always filled to the brim of things we're working on. And I personally love Asana just because it's been so helpful in just staying organized, being able to communicate with a lot of other teams collaboratively. 

In these meetings, we'll also take the time just to double-check what's been scheduled in Later. This is sort of just an example of what that looks like, making sure the copy is all good to go, there's no spelling errors and that we're all on the same page.

10:00 AM: Weekly Social Media Reporting

All right, so it's 10:00 AM, we just finished up our weekly social media meeting and now I have an hour booked in my calendar to just go through weekly social media reporting for ads and yeah, let me walk you through that.

All right, so welcome to our big old reporting doc. Apologies in advance, we do need to blur out some of our numbers just because they're confidential, but I would just head to the Weekly Paid Reporting tab. And this is where I record all of our weekly spend. Currently, we're advertising on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and also Twitter. We have experimented on other platforms before, but those are just our key channels that we're advertising on from a social team perspective, at least at the moment.

So what I would do is... I just track our weekly spend across each of these different channels. I also record the cost-per-click, monitor if that's going up. If it has, I have to do some digging into why this might be the case. 

I also take a look at cost-per-view for our Facebook videos, our YouTube videos, and across the board, I also track URL clicks and traffic that's coming from Google Analytics sessions.

Google Analytics Reports

So, some data that I can show you. I recently created these boards in GA4, which is in Google Analytics. Our entire company is switching over to GA4 over the next few months. And then so I would just go to the Paid Traffic board I've created and from here I would just need to filter last week's content. (Let's see. There we go.) And this is really helpful in my reporting. So I would just grab and drop these session numbers and put it back into the Social Reporting Doc.

It's really helpful in order to keep track of sessions week-over-week and just to monitor if we see any dips in traffic. Maybe there was something that was happening in the world that affected our traffic. For example, we did have to pause our ads during the Queen's funeral this past week so that will definitely affect our ads next week.

So our social paid ad strategy, it's really focused on boosting the top-performing content that we're seeing organically. So, what I will do on a weekly basis on top of the reporting, I'll go into each of the different ad campaigns and I'll just double check to make sure there's no specific ad that's spending the most amount of money. Or if there is an ad that is an extremely high cost-per-click, then I will go in and pause that.

I will also go and look at the Analytics for our posts from the previous week and anything that is top-performing, I will then add that into the ad campaign and boost that post. But overall, there are a lot of numbers involved. There's a lot of organization and Excel sheets, and this is probably the area in my job where I have to be the most organized and just make sure everything's running smoothly.

One-on-ones with the Social Team

All right, I just topped off that one-on-one with David, who is our video editor on the social team. He is so talented.

But yeah, our one-on-ones happen on a weekly basis. I also make sure to have one-on-ones with every single person on my team weekly and it's just like a nice way to check in, make sure everything's on track, see how people are feeling, making sure I am there to support if needed or help with priorities. So yeah, one-on-ones are super important as a manager. I also have a bunch of one-on-ones with other team members and teammates across the organization.

We are always working on a brand new campaign, it feels like, or launching a new product at Later so my calendar is just, like, filled to the brim from the morning to usually like early afternoon with one-on-ones, syncs, team meetings. And yeah, that just comes with the territory of being a manager, just needing to be aligned with everything that's happening within a company and then making sure that your team is filled in with everything that's happening as well.

12:00: Lunchtime & Early Afternoon

All right, so my one-on-one is just wrapped up, and it's just after 12:00 right there, which means it's lunchtime. I always make sure that I take about half an hour to an hour off during lunch just to just mentally refresh things. Also, Karaage. I need to take her for a walk or else she gets a little restless during the afternoon. And I also feel like treating myself to some sushi today. So gonna go do that.

Okay, what am I going to order for lunch? (To dog: Hey, it's time for your walk and lunch. Woohoo!)

Okay. If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, it would 100% be Udon. You can just do so much with Udon. There's a lot of different varieties. Nabeyaki udon. You can make a yaki udon. You can even do fun combinations like making an udon carbonara. Also, dynamite rolls are 20 times better than California rolls. Sorry, had to say it.

Making a TikTok After Lunch

Now today's TikTok is going to be an educational-focused one. We recently announced a new feature at Later, and it's called Creator and Brand Collabs. And it's where creators, and also brands, can essentially collaborate on different campaigns, partnerships... yeah, it's a really cool new feature. And I'm going to be doing a tutorial on how brands can sign up and start using it. So. 30 minutes. I don't feel like wearing this top. I'm going to quickly change my sweater…

All right, that wasn't too bad. All done. Managed to do that in 20 minutes. I used Green Screen. I also did a lot of filming of my computer to sort of walk people through the tutorial. Next step, I need to schedule that as a Reel and export it from TikTok. So I will explain how to do that.

Scheduling TikToks as Reels

All right, so here's the TikTok I just filmed. I'm going to grab the URL, and I am going to go to Snaptik.app, and then from there going to paste that TikTok URL. And there's a lot of websites that do this. I just personally like Snaptik because it's quite quick and easy, but essentially it just takes off the TikTok watermark.

So then I would just usually head to Later.com. I've already created a Reel cover for this, just took a little snapshot. Our lovely creative team helped design this for us, so wasn't too difficult for me to do anything. I just had to replace this photo in Figma.

Then I'm just going to grab this TikTok video we exported without the watermark. And then once it's loaded, I am going to select the Reel cover and also the video. And I want to schedule that for tomorrow afternoon. So just going to drop that there, change that to Set Notification, and then I'm just going to fill out my caption, add a link in bio, and schedule that for tomorrow. And there we go. Copy is in, and it's set to send me a notification in the app tomorrow.

So with Later, there is Auto Publishing for Reels available. However, I didn't have time today to go in and edit the video and add captions on Instagram, add a transcription, et cetera. So I want to still do that. I just, unfortunately, didn't have the time. So that's why I set it as Send a Notification in Later so that I can then add in my captions once I go to publish this Reel tomorrow. So, little tip or a workaround on how we do things here.

TikTok Trending Sound Tip: Ontrend.AI

Oh, I also really wanted to include in this video a site I use for finding trending sounds on TikTok... So I should have mentioned that before I scheduled the Reel but let me just show you.

I've searched through a lot of trending sound TikTok sites, and this happens to be my favorite one. I think personally, I find it the most up-to-date, but you can find all of today's trending sounds here. Categorizes under "Rising", "What's popular"...

Yeah, I always stick with the Rising one because usually these photos haven't been used too much quite yet. Like this 5.1K one. I would just go in and listen to see what it is, and you can see like, wow, this sound, even though it only has 5.1K uses, it's getting people a ton of views. So that's something I would usually go and explore a bit further. But yeah, the site's called Ontrend.AI.

All right, so we're running a little bit behind schedule, but everything's okay. I can usually pump out this next task quite quickly.

Creating “Later Loves” Instagram Story

So my next task is to work on an Instagram story called Later Loves. And Later Loves is a bi-weekly Instagram Story we create as a team, where we feature some of the things that we're seeing on social that we love. So I will show you a little bit of the behind-the-scenes process for that.

As a social team, we use Figma quite a bit. It's how we request our social assets to be delivered from the creative team. And it's just so that we can go in and edit things ourselves. It's really easy to use once you get a handle of it. So, for example, if I wanted to change this to "Create a background", it'd be really easy for me to do, and then I would just go in and just include all of this week's news that I'm loving and export it from Figma.

Finding Social Media News

Oh, yes. And because I know I'm probably going to get asked, but where do I find social media news? There's quite a few resources. 

• Honestly, I find a lot of it through scrolling through Twitter.

• Some good resources besides Twitter would be the Later blog, of course! 

• We have Social Media Today, that's always pretty up-to-date and helpful. 

• TechCrunch, they cover a lot of social media trending topics. 

• On Twitter specifically, @MattNavarra, always on top of things, so definitely follow him if you're not already. 

• And then Mashable, they have a social media section on their site too, which is quite helpful.

Social Media Engagement Time

Oh, my goodness. Okay, the story is done. This day is going by way too quickly. Now I have some time set aside for engagement purposes. So I will go into Later and this is today's Instagram post. It is getting a ton of comments, so this means that usually the social team will need to help with some of the moderation of the comments and just jumping in, responding, we'll go in and like the comments.

So I do this within Later. It's just really easy to respond to. Seems like a lot of people are relating to this post. Yeah, I'll take a few minutes to go and do that.

TikTok Scrolling

And then afterwards I also use this time for scrolling through TikTok. It's not as fun as it seems. It's not fun. It really is. So I'll take time to just scroll through TikTok to find UGC that we can potentially use and repurpose on our Instagram reels.

So we look for relevant, kind of funny, trending content on TikTok that our audience might relate to on Instagram. And then we reach out to these creators, ask for their permission if we can repurpose their content on our Instagram channel. And once we get permission, then we will go ahead and schedule that into Later.

Tea Time!

All right, it's time for the second tea of the day. This time around we're doing a Jasmine green tea because we're starting to get sleepy. Another perk from working from home that isn't talked about enough is being able to do your laundry in the middle of the workday.

3:00 PM: Video Shoot Location Scouting

Okay, let's see. It is 03:00 PM. And I have time set aside to plan our next YouTube shoot, which is happening on October 6th. So, unfortunately, the location where we usually shoot at it is currently booked. So this means I need to do some additional research into some extra potential shoot locations and then I'll send that off to David, who is our video editor, to make sure he's okay with the lighting and everything fun like that. And once I get his okay, then I'll book the location spot.

I also need to send over a schedule to the team. Usually, we have three people who will be on camera, myself included, for these YouTube shoots, and it's a full-day activity. 09:00 AM to 05:00 PM. This includes setting up the equipment, running through each script, doing that a few times. We all will go for a team lunch, which is quite nice.

Yeah. So in advance to these YouTube shoots, we do these once a month and I will send over a schedule just so the team is aware of what time they need to come into the studio at and just to make sure we're all aligned with what outfits to wear, the location, all that fun stuff.

So first off, I need to find a new location. For video shoots, I use this website called Giggster, and it shows me a ton of available locations that are perfect for videos or photos. So, yeah, lots of options and lots of digging for me to do. All right, I found the perfect YouTube shoot location for October videos, but I'm not going to disclose exactly where it is. You'll have to wait and see and watch our October videos.

So now I get to check things off on my Asana board and I am going to walk you through a creative brief I'm working on. And all done. Woohoo.

4:00 PM: Working on a Creative Brief

All right, so this Creator Lens Social Brief: my next task. Now I already started working on this creative brief earlier in the week, so I don't have too much to do, thank goodness because I have 30 minutes to work on it. We are now at 04:00 PM so closing in on the day. Yeah. So let me just walk you through exactly what we include in our creative briefs.

Now, our creative briefs for larger campaigns are usually combined with all of the other teams that need requests. So that includes email, lead gen, Demand Gen, the blog, of course… So yes, tons of teams. You can see these are pages upon pages of requests. Our poor creative team. Just kidding. They are amazing.

So some of the requests that we will ask for the social team are Instagram grid posts. We'll also add in story requests, Reels covers, just general creative assets that we can't normally create ourselves in either Canva or by creating our own video content.

And I'll also make sure to include some additional ads for our boosted ads, specifically for Twitter, Pinterest. Our Demand Gen team handles all of the other advertising, so I just handle the areas where they are not promoting, which would be Twitter and Pinterest for this specific campaign.

Check Slack Messages

Oh my goodness. I haven't fully touched on this yet today for some reason, but our company communicates mainly through Slack, so we have our own social media Slack channel where people within the company will just pop in and ask us questions throughout the day. And this happens fairly often. So I'm usually checking our Slack channel in general for any updates a few times every hour. Sometimes we get time-sensitive requests and I never want to miss those. So that is also something I'm doing throughout the day.

Optimizing YouTube Content

All right, I'm just wrapping up some last little bits and pieces before the end of the day. I've just submitted that creative brief, that's all done. I scheduled in another Reel for later in the week, just in Later. And now, before I head out, I need to optimize a YouTube video that is scheduled to go out tomorrow. So I can walk you through some of the things we do as a team for optimization.

How Social Media Managers Optimize YouTube Content

So there is definitely a lot of thinking and strategy behind optimizing YouTube video content. Some of the main areas we look at well, first off, have a tool that will come into good use. We use TubeBuddy and we absolutely love it. It is so helpful for finding keywords and just making sure that you are optimizing your videos just to the best of their ability. 

Some major components that you need to look at when optimizing YouTube videos is making sure that your title is SEO-optimized. So make sure to do your research in advance about your title and what other people are searching for.

And then you're going to go into your description. So we always make sure to include some additional CTAs. And then timestamps, we always include those just because it's a lot easier for people or your audience to find out specific areas in your video so that they don't have to just wait and watch the whole video if they don't want to. 

And then we always include some additional resources that are similar to this video that the audience might have just watched. And we also include all of these CTAs. So these just lead back to our newsletter, our social media channels, et cetera. 

And then finally, in the description, we always include some hashtags that are relevant to the video as well. And here, this is probably like the biggest area and TubeBuddy helps us out with this, but we always make sure that we are using the correct tags and keywords. This really helps people find your YouTube video content and it also helps you rank. 

So for example, our goal is to obviously get #1 in terms of searchability for our video content. This one is specifically "How to create a social media report". So that was our very first keyword, "how to create a social media report free template". And then yeah, just make sure that you utilize all of the 500 characters to the best of your abilities.

5:15 PM: Logging off for the Day

All right, it is 05:15 PM. We've made it through another day. Now, some of you watching this might be like, how the heck are you logging off at 5:15? Aren't you a social media manager? Yes, to be quite honest, some days are a lot harder than others, and I will log off later in the evening. I'll do some work after dinner if things aren't wrapped up. 

But for the most part, I do my best to try to log off as close to around 05:00 PM on a regular basis. Just for one, trying to set a good example to my team and making sure that no one ever feels pressured, like they need to make work their life and that they need to just be working into the evenings. 

And number two, I think for me personally, I've been in this industry for close to ten years now, and honestly, it can be really draining at times, especially being on social media. You are just surrounded by a lot of negativity, unfortunately, on the social channels, and it's hard to just separate yourself from that sometimes. So this year in particular, I've made a lot more of an effort to just try to separate my work life and then my outside external life.

So if you can do it, please, please do it. Your mental health is number one. Gotta put yourself first. So thank you so much for taking the time to watch this entire video. I know it's a long one. I hope you were able to just learn a little bit more of what a social media manager's "Day in the Life" actually looks like.

I try to make it as real as possible, but if you have any questions about social media management in general, if you're wanting to get into this industry, feel free to drop your comments in the comment section. I am more than happy to just go in and answer them all myself. I promise it'll be me answering. But yeah, thank you so much for watching. And if you haven't already, subscribe to Later. We provide all of the regular social media updates, tips and tricks, and we are also a pretty cool product.

So follow us, Subscribe, all that fun stuff and I'll see you in the next video.