13 Years as a Social Media Consultant
My freelancing career is 13 today! 13 years ago, I got my first signed contract as a freelancer.
What does that look like?
In the past 13 years, I’ve had 33 clients. 26 of them involved either launching (or relaunching) 63 social channels.
One-third of those clients kept me on as their social media manager until they could internally support their social program (which took an average of 3 years), and another third had me run short-term (less than six months) social campaigns for them, or support them via content creation.
I was curious about what that looked like - what did 13 years amount to in terms of actual day-to-day work. So I did some spreadsheet math with my client archive to see what my output looked like. And if you are a social media manager, or create content, hit me up and I’ll send you my worksheet because wow, it’s eye-opening.
Turns out, I’ve written or edited 29,000 social media messages for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram over the last13 years (not counting my own Twitter account because there is no strategy there, I promise).
I made graphics and videos; I live-tweeted conferences and live-streamed special events.
There were years when I was managing seven clients and writing a whole lot more than 43 messages a week – and there are times (like now) where I’m writing only 15 or 20 posts a week.
The number itself, though, doesn’t really show the work that goes into social, though. It’s just a number. Here’s what that work looks like on a daily basis:
Getting information from clients, then writing the content, editing it, and making graphics and/or editing photos & videos provided by clients.
Engagement with people who follow the client’s social channels – the thank yous, the replies to comments or DMs, and the problem solving with a client when someone has an issue or asked for help.
Creating weekly & monthly reporting to show what social is doing and its impact on an organization.
Working with your clients to ultimately, hand their channels over to them when they can support a program internally.
It also doesn’t show all the messages that were concepted or written that didn’t get posted because they weren’t right for the brand, or we “played the tape to the end” and figured out that hey, maybe we don’t have the resources for something like this yet, or it was “too big” for social and turned into something else, like a training session or a video series, which we then able to recycle as a series of posts.
It’s been a good 13 years, and for my next 13, I’m getting back to my original goal – helping organizations launch or cleanup their social programs, training & empowering them to run their social, and getting the heck out of the way.
I’m also working on my newsletter, called Chaos Freelancer, which takes what I’ve learned from my first 13 years as a freelancer to help me figure out my next steps (and maybe help some others along the way).
If you’ve been a client, a partner, or a friend over the last 13 years, thank you for being there.
