This is a guest blog post by Dane Cobain, a social media specialist for a UK-based creative agency. He’s also a gadget-lover, tech fanatic, and internet addict. Tweet him at @DaneCobain.
7:30 AM. I’m lying in bed with my iPhone, rubbing my eyes and checking e-mails and push notifications like crazy. There’s nothing that can’t wait – no urgent e-mails from a client, no aggressive tweets from an angry customer and no questions on Facebook that require an immediate answer. That’s good, that means I can get dressed and head towards the office.
On the way out, I pick up my HyperJuice in case my phone runs out of battery on the journey.
I get to the office at 8:45, and I immediately log in to my computer and boot up Google Chrome. It takes a good 45 minutes to catch up with all of the non-emergency interactions that have racked up since I left the office the previous evening.
First, I check Facebook, scanning each of my pages for new notifications. We make it a rule to always write back (in fact, we have a mural on our wall to remind us), and so everything other than a ‘like’ gets a response. People with questions or complaints are prompted to send a message to the page with further information so that we can follow up with them.

Up next, it’s time for Twitter.
We use TweetDeck, but Hootsuite is just as good and most third-party Twitter dashboards have similar functionality. I monitor RTs, @mentions, and DMs for each of our client accounts, and I set up bespoke search terms for relevant phrases.
For my own company, for example, I look for people tweeting ‘need creative agency’ or ‘want creative agency’.
I also monitor certain hashtags, like #JournoRequest and #PRRequest, that are used by other professionals and which occasionally generate opportunities. The #JournoRequest hashtag in particular is worth monitoring – I once secured radio spots for two different clients in the same week, simply by responding to journalists’ tweets.
With Twitter and Facebook up-to-date, and with all queries and comments responded to, I can start to check my e-mails.
At any one time, I’m usually in the middle of creating content calendars, providing social recommendations, generating reports and requesting graphics, and that’s just for current clients. I also spend a lot of time conducting audits for potential clients and working on pitches that are designed to help us win business. I also read the Rabbitgram, a daily e-mail from a London agency that gathers together the day’s top social media stories.
Then, I’m ready to work.
I work off an action list – put simply, it’s a Word document that lists my daily tasks so I make sure that everything gets done on time. Broadly speaking, I use it as a multi-client content calendar, ensuring that we remember to tweet when we’re supposed to tweet or to release a YouTube video on a specific day. Further information about what specific post should go out and where it should go out to is included in the client-specific content calendars.

I like to post updates manually, because that way I know exactly when the post goes out and I’m ready to deal with the response.
Pre-set posts cause a problem, because if you’re away from the computer at the time, you can come back to find that it’s been overtaken by negativity or that it’s received much more interaction than you were expecting. If you publish the post by hand, you can be ready for the response – this is particularly important when working on larger clients with a more established following.
We usually duplicate the majority of our content across Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, although as we post the updates by hand, we can ensure that we optimise it for each different social network. Too many people make the mistake of automatically duplicating updates from Facebook to Twitter – unless your entire update is under 140 characters, it will display badly on Twitter, losing link previews, attached images, and truncating the status to make it fit.
Of course, we run network-specific campaigns, too – for example, we might launch a competition on Facebook, provide a discount code through Google+, and live-tweet from an event on Twitter, often on the same day. It’s important to use a certain level of unique content on each of your social media sites, because if you don’t then people have no reason to follow you on more than one of them.

I also work closely with an SEO, PPC, and Google Analytics expert, who helps me to monitor the impact of our social campaigns.
Using conversion tracking, we can see what our clients’ followings are doing when they visit the website. This helps us to optimise and to develop our social media strategy on an on-going basis – if LinkedIn is driving a lot of traffic, or if the visitors that are coming through are converting at a much higher rate than visitors from Twitter, we know to spend less time on Twitter and more time on LinkedIn.
Using analytics has additional benefits – on one e-commerce client, we found that a huge number of people were buying a specific product after clicking on links to it from Facebook. We weren’t doing any activity around it at the time, which meant that people were sharing the page amongst themselves. Because of this, we knew to include a major focus on the product in our content calendar.
We also work with social advertisements, like promoted posts on Facebook, text ads on Facebook and LinkedIn, and video adverts on LinkedIn and YouTube. Using analytics, we can track not only which adverts are driving cheap traffic to the website, but also which adverts are most effective at turning visitors in to paying customers. We recently worked on a huge advertising campaign which included display ads, Google ads and LinkedIn ads – while LinkedIn adverts had the highest CPC (cost per click), they also converted visitors at a much higher rate, meaning that although the clicks were more expensive, the conversions were much, much cheaper.

When it comes to monitoring, it’s easiest to get on top of things in the morning and to spend five minutes of every hour to check again.
At 5:15 PM, when I’m getting ready to shut down and head home, I have one last run through TweetDeck and Facebook to pick up on anything that I missed. Afterwards, I’m on my own.
Social media is a 24/7 job, and so it pays to keep an eye on things in the evenings and weekends, too.
I’m on Facebook most of the time anyway, and so monitoring Facebook pages isn’t a problem. For Twitter, I get push notifications to my phone and use TweetDeck at home for certain clients when a rapid response is not only a priority but a necessity. In these circumstances, we agree upon a crisis protocol in advance so that there’s no need to get sign-off from a client at 10 o’clock on a Saturday evening.

Of course, social media isn’t just a job to me – it’s a way of life.
I’m active on more social networks than I can count, but the ones that I use on a regular basis include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Foursquare, Snapchat, and Soundcloud. I also run two blogs (DaneCobain.com and SocialBookshelves.com), and my computer is generally running and online from the second I wake up until the moment I fall asleep.
When I tell people what I do, they tend to think that I get paid to sit around on Facebook all day. While that’s true to some extent, I’m doing much more than browsing through statuses or cyber-stalking old friends and ex-girlfriends. When I’m not running ads and competitions, I’m writing proposals, strategy documents, and presentations, forging relationships with bloggers or writing articles for people like Ari. Let’s hope I didn’t disappoint him!
Do you work in social media?
What’s your daily routine? Let me know with a comment!
This was an awesome guest post, Ari – A day in life of a real social media professional…
It’s very revealing on what a social media professional does, how they spend their hours in a day, and the amount of solid work that goes into doing work that matters.
So many folks think social media is playing on Facebook and Twitter all day and while in essence there is some truth to that, it completely leaves out the most important part about having a brain, a strategy and activity that builds businesses.
Building relationships can be fun; however, building businesses is serious work.
Love it, Dane – cheers gentlemen! : )
Thanks for your kind words, Mark – it’s certainly true that a lot more work goes in to it than most people appreciate! Love your quote about building relationships, too!
It’s nice to take a peek at the life of a social media specialist. I’ve always wondered what you’re doing (I thought that all you do is create accounts and handle social media accounts). I am also amazed at how organized you are. My life as a work at home VA used to be hard because I cannot seem to organize my sched.
Thanks, Aira! I think I’m so organised because I’m obsessive to a fault – one of the reasons I spend so much time in the evenings responding to clients’ social following is because notifications drive me crazy! The only way to escape is to log off Facebook for the night and to turn my phone off, otherwise I can’t stop checking them!
I spoke to someone on Twitter the other day who read this article and is going to write something similar, as they work in social media too – I’ll come back and drop you the link once it goes live!
Great article.
I can’t help but chuckle when I hear someone being dismissive of the work a community manager does. Being a community manager is _hard_ work. It’s not surfing Facebook or flipping through Twitter; it’s leaning in and being fully engaged, as you say, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep.
At the same time, when young folks approach me about advice for a job in marketing, I tell them to try to get community management work. For as much as it’s a challenging job, it’s also a great job, especially right now. It requires both strategic and tactical thinking, as well as an understanding of marketing, sales, and customer service. And, best of all, you get to engage directly with customers and learn the deep details of a business and what makes it go.
Hi Gabe,
Thanks for the comment – that sounds like good advice! As much as it’s hard work, I’d definitely recommend being a community manager to someone who’s looking to get in to marketing – it’s a growth area at the moment. That said, being a community manager isn’t for everyone – you need great written English skills, a certain amount of technical savvy and a lot of patience!
Hi Dane,
Thank you for taking the time to provide this detailed list. I can easily relate to all of it.
Specifically, I found the hashtags monitoring practice a very useful one. The monitoring tools are becoming more sophisticated almost on weekly basis, and your input as a specialist, identifying the right hashtags to follow is becoming increasingly vital for the success of the social media strategy of the businesses that you support.
As a follow-up on your response to Aira, I will be glad to see more “a day in a life” posts, as more specialists will be ready to share their schedules.
Hi Ron,
Thanks for this, I particularly recommend #JournoRequest and #PRRequest for UK marketers, but I’m not sure if there’s an American equivalent!
The last thing I could ever imagine is the use of the word “play” in reference to managing social channels for a client. This is not playtime; social media never sleeps. Thanks for sharing some of your cool tools and channels where you hang.
Social media never sleeps and neither do I, Joel! Thanks for your comment 🙂
Hey Dane, really a nice post. I learned a lot of things here. It is the real time post you can say. Keep sharing like this 🙂
Thanks Vanessa 🙂
Thanks, Skye! I must admit, it was interesting for me just to write the article, and so I’m glad that other people are finding it interesting too!
Any time Kelsey, thanks for taking the time to read it!