Kate Winick

Cold outreach around relevant opportunities is expected, and as long as it's polite, timely, and appropriate it's generally welcome--but be reasonable in your expectations! Someone who has never met you may forward your resume, but is unlikely to personally recommend you for a role, and asking them to spend extended time getting to know you in order to refer you is a lot of work you're asking them to do that doesn't benefit them in any way. Similarly, if you're connecting with a hiring manager who's just posted a really exciting job, a lot of other people are doing the same thing, which means that hiring manager does not have time to have a virtual coffee to discuss the job. If they like your profile, they'll move forward and interview you!

This isn't the LinkedIn of 2003, when your network was meant to mirror your actual network. Making contacts digitally is a valuable way to expand your real-life network, but try to send out connection requests in a non-urgent manner when you can, if you have target companies you're trying to break into. The more time you have to actually develop a relationship, the easier it is to draw on later.

The best practice on a channel may be not using any design tool at all. If you're noticing better results with native text or more lo-fi imagery and video, don't ignore that and assume that more polished is automatically better. These tools can smooth out your workflow and lift some of the burden on your creative team to meet social's asset needs without changing your approach or aesthetic.

One factor that's often overlooked in selecting a social listening tool is internal resourcing and capabilities. If you choose a tool that provides you with a massive firehose of data, but have no one to clean and process that data, it's no more useful to you than having no tool at all. If your social media team isn't prepared to dedicate a head to social media data analysis, or you don't have a data/BI team that is interesting in adding social listening to their tool stack, then choosing a tool that is more user-friendly (likely one that is integrated into a publishing tool, like Sprout) will be more useful than a tool like Brandwatch, which really benefits from having a power user to run it.

When you're putting together analytics and reporting, make sure your leadership understands the difference between social analytics and social listening. Some analytics tools do both, but if yours doesn't, your leadership may not be aware that a tool stack is required. If you're getting asked questions that are much more about general opinion/brand sentiment, you can certainly start with your owned analytics--but when those start to pile up, it's time for a social listening tool.

Driving from social media channels to websites is an increasing challenge, but if you're prioritizing search terms that truly resonate with your audience, you should still see a meaningful amount of engagement. Why? Because topics that your audience are organically searching for/interested in on web will also capture their interest on social. The same rules for SEO content and social media content apply: the best stuff is created with an audience-first mindset.