Which Social Media Org Chart is Right for Your Business? 4 Models to Consider

There’s no denying that social media is a vital part of any successful business strategy. In fact, 80% of business executives think it is very important or absolutely essential for their company to invest additional resources into social media marketing.

A critical resource that executives should be particularly focused on is social talent.

Social media managers are like marketing Swiss Army knives because, well, they’ve had to be. But now that businesses increasingly recognize the level of skills, time and strategy it takes to make social a business growth engine, social marketing teams are evolving.

When we surveyed marketers for the latest Sprout Social Index™, Edition XVII: Accelerate, we found that approximately one-third have at least five to 10 people on their social media team.

The need for additional talent might be clear to veteran marketing leaders and managers of small social teams. But open-ended questions persist around which specialized roles to add and how to pave long-term social career paths.

To learn more about marketing organization structures, where social roles fit in and what those roles entail, we spoke to social marketing leaders from Kaplan, Cielo and VMware. They share their team structures, ways they collaborate across departments and their visions for how social teams may look in the future.

Kaplan is one of the world’s largest education providers with a storied history of helping people achieve their educational and professional goals.

Leading the social charge is Melissa Romig, Kaplan’s executive digital marketing director, who oversees Kaplan’s organic social efforts. While many businesses operate social marketing under the master brand, Kaplan builds its social strategies and team structure around three product lines: Test Prep, Professional and Higher Education.

Each brand has a dedicated social media manager who reports to Romig and drives organic content strategy, campaigns and reporting. While the social media managers focus on big picture initiatives and strategic work, they’re supported by a social media specialist, who handles execution including scheduling content and community engagement.

Another layer of support comes from their customer service team. Using Sprout’s Smart Inbox as well as native social inboxes, Kaplan’s customer service team handles any inbound support inquiries, leaving messages that foster one-to-one engagement and personal connections with their communities to the social team.

In the org chart example below, you’ll see how these key functions of the digital marketing team connect to and support one another.

Balanced responsibilities enable more focused work and targeted strategies

Kaplan’s primary goal for organic social is engagement, and given that Kaplan’s audience spans different generational targets, a one-size-fits-all strategy wouldn’t cut it. This is where the benefits of distributing a social team across product or service-level accounts become clear.

“Our audience for Kaplan Professional is a bit older and already in the professional realm so we rely heavily on LinkedIn and Facebook to engage them,” said Eunice Sun, senior manager of social media marketing. “On the Test Prep side of the business, our students range from high school up through more advanced degrees like medical students, and we’ve seen a lot of growth and excitement on Instagram.”

By splitting the brand social accounts by product, Kaplan’s organic team is able to zero in on their customers’ preferred social platforms, create targeted strategies and publish hyper-relevant content that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle of a master brand account.

Looking ahead: Unite paid and organic social for greater alignment to business goals

Like many businesses, Kaplan continues to reassess its own social team structure and think about how they can make a greater impact on their business. One consideration for their future is integrating organic and paid social more closely.

Marketers may think of paid and organic as separate social marketing disciplines but to the consumer, it’s one feed, one channel where they can see the two together. Ultimately, it’s the combination of all those consumer touchpoints that drive conversion.

Cielo is a strategic Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider that helps its clients rethink their approach to talent acquisition, which includes employer branding and recruitment marketing on social.

The Employer Brand, Digital and Social practice at Cielo operate within a functional organizational structure. However, what makes the social media team unique is its flexible nature that allows for specialized and traditional career pathing.

Calli Ensor, Cielo’s digital director, reports to the vice president of brand and digital. She oversees a newly-promoted manager of content and social media, Ashleigh Perissi, who leads the client-facing social media team, as well as two senior social media consultants. “I joined Cielo as one of our most senior consultants on the team, with management being a goal of mine. When my current role opened up, I didn’t hesitate to apply – I was excited for the opportunity to bring my vision for this team to life! My immediate priority is to hire more social media consultants as we continue to grow our team and our business.”

The team also includes three social media consultants and two social media specialists, with work delegated among the team depending on the goals of their individual clients.

The social team hierarchy mirrors client contracts

At any agency, the demands, goals and scope of work for each client will vary. The same is true for Cielo.

Organic may be the primary focus of some social team members; however, everyone has a hand in paid as well with some consultants leading paid-only accounts, depending on their clients’ goals. “For clients that are solely focused on employer brand, the main KPIs are brand awareness, engagements and social sentiment. Clients that come to us for recruitment marketing are focused on click-through rates, lead generation and application completions. In both cases though, the ultimate goal is to attract, onboard and retain the best talent,” said Ensor.

The social org hierarchy intuitively follows the way accounts are assigned. Senior roles lead premium, high-touch accounts that require organic and paid social strategies across social networks, review site and/or community management, design work and more. Junior consultants lead lower-touch accounts where the goal is to generate authentic stories through organic social posts. The social specialists are then pulled in to support where needed.

In the near future, Ensor’s team will include paid social specialists who will report directly to the senior social consultants. This wouldn’t remove all paid aspects from the social media consultant or specialist roles, but rather, relieve them of the high volume of advertising requests they get from their recruitment team.

“In instances where we don’t have a managed service agreement with a client and we’re not doing organic content, we may still support a standalone campaign. For instance, if a company needs to hire 200 nurses in Atlanta in 60 days, a paid social specialist could come in and advise on a paid-only campaign for that,” said Ensor.

Looking ahead: Help your social team navigate their careers by paving a clear path forward

Social media marketing roles haven’t been around that long. In some cases, social career paths have been limited, cyclical and exhausting.

“The people who have been in the game for a long time moved up very quickly, which isn’t typical for most roles. As a result, it’s become an expectation among new hires or people early in their careers that they’ll also be ready for the next step quickly,” said Ensor. “We didn’t want to fall into a place where people were advancing too fast and then feeling like there’s nowhere else to go or burning out from doing the same thing over and over.”

Cielo’s solution to social career burnout is a robust skills matrix. For each social role, the matrix includes five skills aligned with the company’s five core values. This has become an essential resource for Ensor and her team members.

“They can use it as a checklist so that they understand where they are in their role and know when they’re ready for the next level. They can also use it to negotiate a promotion or salary adjustment, so it’s really a tool that empowers them to navigate and own their careers.”

VMware is a massive technology company with over 30,0000 employees, several subsidiaries and an ecosystem of 75,000 partners across the globe. A single team managing the entirety of VMware’s social marketing would be nearly impossible. Instead, the tech enterprise has constructed its marketing organization to divide and conquer.

Vykky Howard is the Head of Social for VMware’s Modern Application Platforms Business Unit (MAPBU), which was created after VMware acquired Pivotal Software. She runs a small but mighty team that sits under the larger communications org. With a single social media associate, an EMEA-based social media lead, freelancers and the support of a digital marketing agency, the team gets a lot done.

Howard breaks down the function of her social team at VMware into five main workstreams:

1. Community management for all VMware Tanzu social networks, the external brand of MAPBU
2. Employee advocacy
3. Paid social for brand awareness, customer storytelling campaigns and amplifying organic content
4. Executive communications with a focus on advising senior leaders on how to manage their personal accounts
5. An influencer marketing program, handled in collaboration with their agency

A niche but clear focus empowers a lean social team and inspires innovation

Howard may head up a lean social team, but her staff operates with efficiency, agility, creativity and authority.

When VMware acquired Pivotal, Howard brought with her a fresh perspective that’s helped the brand creatively evolve. MAPBU is often tapped to help the rest of the business think differently about how they show up on social.

“When Pivotal was acquired we kind of brought the ‘cool factor.’ We have an eagerness to explore new creative formats, activate innovative campaign ideas and take risks with interactive programs like giveaways or our influencer program—things that VMware wasn’t doing before we joined,” said Howard.

One major, creative win for Howard’s team was their role in helping VMware Tanzu’s design team evolve. Prior to the Pivotal acquisition, designers mainly created static images which were frequently recycled, ultimately leading to audience fatigue. Howard’s team examined social data, used it to make a case for rethinking the design playbook for social and—in just a year—went from a team that defaulted to static images, to using animated graphics or GIFs as the baseline.

“Collaboration, education and bringing designers into social performance feedback ultimately helped us build a lot of trust. When something goes live, we make sure to actively share reports from Sprout with designers so they can see the impact and difference reimagined graphics make,” said Howard.

Looking ahead: Use social data to make a case for hiring and more social resources

For businesses looking to add more talent to their social teams, Howard recommends using social data to build your case.

“Social marketers will often think about social data in the traditional sense like impressions, engagements, etc., but we need to also look at data that demonstrates efficiencies or lack thereof on our team,” said Howard. “For example, if I look at the amount of content being created for customer stories, which we know is a top-performing content type, but we’ve only told two or three stories, that’s where I could make the case for more support. If we had another social employee, we could increase the cadence of those stories and capitalize on how well they perform for us.”

Just like social networks themselves, social media marketing as both a business function and a career path is rapidly evolving. In thinking about the future of social teams, each expert we spoke to is excited about the possibility of introducing more specialized social roles.

Some of the roles that would fit into a dream state social organization include:

• A social customer care manager to deliver personable, proactive service and a customer experience tailored to the customer’s network(s) of choice.
• A content curator to collect and publish internal multimedia assets, user-generated content and third-party content to supplement content strategies.
• An influencer marketing specialist to source influencers or creators, nurture relationships and manage contract negotiations.
• A social design specialist to test new creative options, develop innovative social-first content and leverage social data to influence creative decisions.
• A social video specialist to storyboard, film and edit video for the many social video platforms like TikToks, Reels, IGTV, Facebook Live and more.

In addition to specialized roles, we’re also seeing social leadership roles and new marketing career path options emerge, challenging the idea that the social career path is limited.

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