Social Media Interview
I chose to connect with Maggie Pranckus, Assistant Vice President and Social Media Specialist at Baird for my social media interview. I was interested to know how a small team of five could strategically manage the social media channels for a financial services company among five business units. Before I get into the details of my interview with her, here’s a little bit about Maggie.
In 2013, she interned at Baird as a Marquette student doing website design. It was an unfamiliar area to her at first, but she accepted a full time position doing website design in 2016. Later, the Social Media Specialist position was created and Pranckus took the role. She’s been critical in establishing and maintaining social media success for the company, and I got to hear a bit about her role and experiences in doing so.
Pranckus emphasized that every work day is different and insanely busy, but she consistently schedules and creates all content for Baird’s social media channels while working with all the business units. Additionally, she manages complaints and social escalations and uses analytics for certain business units to measure success. When asked what her favorite part of the role is, Pranckus instantly said that the organization of the social media calendar and the ability to freely create what content she deems valuable brings her satisfaction and credibility.
She proudly showed me her social media content calendar on Excel, where she schedules posts about a month in advance through Khoros. The content comes from the various business units, and she chooses how and when to utilize and leverage it through multiple factors. She’s always looking for evergreen content to stay relevant in the financial services industry, and emergency posts often take the place of less timely content. Because of the industry, LinkedIn remains her favorite platform and it receives the highest amount of interaction. Content is typically targeted toward high net worth individuals and clients in a certain age group, though it also depends on the business unit.
If that didn’t seem stressful enough, Pranckus discussed the grey area of paid social media posts and campaigns. The company can spend a certain amount on each platform per year. Each business unit gets a certain amount of money, some with significantly more than others, making it quite difficult to stretch that budget throughout the year while simultaneously posting relevant content for all business units. This is made possible through Khoros and Ads Manager, where all social media is monitored and analyzed. Here, the team reviews mentions and comments, as well as analytics to easily share with clients. Monitoring this content gives Pranckus insight into what is doing the best in order to tailor future content, both paid and organic, according to those interaction rates. All these moving parts require a variety of the types of content being put out. Integration of campaigns with major ad campaigns is a more recent practice at Baird. Before two new branding initiatives in recent years, all campaigns were stand alone. Today, they are 50/50 and coincide with ads, TV and radio.
After discussing the strategies and tactics with Pranckus, I was interested to hear about the future for social media professionals from her perspective. It’s an increasingly difficult position with social media platforms blocking and regulating certain capabilities of organizations. She reiterated that it’s constantly changing in the present and it will only get bigger in the future.
