Social Media
Social Media Manager
I’m currently working in digital marketing as a social media manager, working with some top Irish brands. The job covers a huge range of areas, from campaign creation to execution. Some of them are:
• Day-to-day copywriting across all social media channels
• Community management and customer service
• Monitoring and reporting on social media statistics
• Coding for simple Facebook applications
• Photoshop for both posts and web design
All of this is in a very busy agency environment where deadlines are critical.
RTÉ General Election 2011
During the 2011 general election, I was hired as a social media journalist for RTÉ, the national broadcaster. The election campaign was the first time they had stepped up their audience interaction through social media, and were doing so at the most interesting political period in half a decade.
Working in the newsroom, responsibilities included:
• Monitoring all media output for political stories and information.
• Reporting and linking to coverage through Twitter and Facebook
• Interacting with the audience: answering questions and keeping track of feedback
• Comment moderation on RTÉ.ie, including screening for legal implications
• Compiling statistics on followers, tweets and political balance
• Live reporting of results from the RTÉ election centre over the count weekend.
Follower numbers peaked at approximately 13,000 Twitter followers and 3,000 Facebook ‘likes’ for the two primary political accounts, almost doubling during the course of the campaign. The social media team also had access to the primary RTÉ news accounts which reach almost 40,000. I also had the opportunity to work with some excellent people and work right in the centre of the largest media event in the country.
The campaign was well-received by the public and political ‘anoraks’ in Ireland. The screenshot below was taken by another member of the team, Fearghal O’Conor, on the last day of the social media campaign.
