Behind the Post

On this episode of Behind the Post, Alina sat down with not one, but two, brilliant marketing experts from Similarweb – Senior Social Media Manager, Itay Gross, and Content Marketing Manager, Faith Preminger. With double the guests, you bet you’ll walk away with double the expertise. 

They delved into how their content and social media teams work together for success and how marketing processes work at Similarweb.

With a passion for B2B social in common, the trio discussed why social media is so valuable for B2B brands today and the importance of using B2C tactics to create an engaging, fun, and memorable B2B strategy. 

Armed with unique insights their Similarweb product offers, Itay shares how he incorporates data-driven storytelling about trending topics into their strategy to harness the attention of B2B professionals scrolling through LinkedIn. *Spoiler alert* – their audience loved their data insights on Taylor Swift’s impact on the Kansas City Chiefs’ website traffic during the Super Bowl! 

As big enthusiasts of the power of employee advocacy on their wider social media strategy, they unpacked everything a social media manager would want to know when implementing an advocacy program and keeping up its momentum. The duo got candid about the challenges they encountered along the way, and the tips and tricks they learned that resulted in a successful strategy. 

Whether you're a marketer, a social media enthusiast, or simply curious about what goes on behind the post, there's much to learn from the experiences of these two experts.

Sarah Hankins takes the hot seat on this episode of Behind the Post with host Alina Dallal to talk all things employee advocacy at CBIZ. With an impressive cohort of 2,700 advocates, Sarah dives into how she runs their successful advocacy program and how she plans to keep their momentum going throughout 2024.

From finding the right balance of content to the types she creates, Sarah dives all in with the best practices you should implement for any advocacy program. She also shares her top tips for keeping advocates engaged, including quarterly training and gamification ideas to hold their interest in the long-term – she even created her own spin on Spotify Wrapped to create an “Oktopost Wrapped” campaign at the end of 2023 to showcase their results to her team and shoutout there top performing advocates.

Communication is the foreground of any successful employee advocacy program. Sarah candidly shares how she supports her team while also learning from her advocates on ways she can better her program and continue to create more relevant content.

Running the employee advocacy program led Sarah to trade Zoom calls for an incredible tour of CBIZ’s offices across the U.S., which they called the “Oktopost Roadshow”. With pitstops to 12 offices across the country, Sarah met her advocates in person to further encourage participation and provide them with the guidance they needed to become champion advocates.

Even if we aren’t all lucky enough to tour the States on a company budget, Sarah leaves a multitude of practical tips that we can still use to train, support, and coach our advocates for success. 

Hot Topics:

• How to write for different personas in your organization

• Why communication and support is so integral for a successful program

• How you can learn from your advocates to improve your strategy

• Tips and tricks that help her keep her advocates engaged

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Alina welcomes Etien Yanev, the Senior Social Media Manager at Payhawk. As the author of the book “Digital Marketing Compass” (currently only available in Bulgarian), and with 12 years of marketing experience under his belt, Etien shares all the expertise he’s picked up along the way. 

From content creation to video creation, Etien dives into all the use cases AI can provide to help scale social media content as well as help us serve our audiences better. He reveals his favorite tools to use and best practices for using them effectively. 

As well as showing his passion for AI, Etien also shines a light on the importance of leveraging your employees and executives as brand ambassadors to humanize your brand and maximize your impact. 

Hot topics:

• Best practices for using AI to its full potential

• His top AI tools for content creation

• The significance of personal brands to build relationships with your audience

Take it from Adrian Solomone, who is directly involved in building Finastra's employee advocacy program, and it's so successful that their employees are asking to join. 

In this episode, Adrian joined host Alina Dallal to reveal Finastra’s secrets for success and share valuable tips for implementing an advocacy program at a large organization. He also dives into how they capitalize on Oktopost’s AI tools to ensure their advocates are personalizing their content, quickly and efficiently.  

But, when it comes to advocacy, it’s not just the voices of your employees that you should be amplifying. Adrian walks us through how they encouraged their executives to get involved in thought leadership on LinkedIn, and the steps they're taking to guide them along the way.

What results are they seeing? Their advocacy program brought in the highest number of signups for a recent webinar, compared to other marketing strategies.

Hot Topics:

• The impact of implementing a successful advocacy program 

• The importance of building executive thought leadership on LinkedIn 

• How they’re bringing the numbers to leadership to prove the value of social media on ROI and business outcomes

In this episode, host Alina Dallal sits down with Brittany Otting, the Director of Social Media at CBIZ. With Brittany's extensive background spanning eight years in various industries, she brings a unique perspective on social media to the table.

Brittany walks us through CBIZ’s successful social selling program, sharing valuable tips on their best practices for training their revenue teams and advocates, how they are measuring their success, and how they are proving that social media influences revenue.  

As we know, no two days in social media are the same, and Brittany reveals how they approach their corporate strategy to navigate these changes. Given frequent algorithm updates, she shares how they experiment with different content types to stand out on social, and she doesn’t hold back from revealing her tips for a successful strategy. 

Hot Topics:

• How to implement a successful social selling strategy
• Proving the impact of social media on ROI
• How they leverage algorithm changes to experiment with their corporate strategy

Alina Dallal takes the mic in an exciting new season of Behind the Post. Alina is Oktopost's Content Marketing Manager, and is obsessed with all things B2B Social Media.

In this episode, you'll meet Alina and discover everything in store for you this year!

With over 30 years in B2B Sales and Marketing, Alex Abbott joins host Olivia Messina on Behind the Post to discuss one of the most prevalent topics in B2B sales today: social selling.

Alex urges that the traditional prospecting approach is no longer working. Buyers have lost trust in salespeople, and with the nature of cold calling and emailing being predicated on waste– B2B revenue teams need to embrace social selling to help hit their targets.

In this episode, Alex delves into the buyer/seller misalignment and sheds light on how social selling can bridge this gap and empower revenue teams to overcome their major challenges. He explains what social selling actually means and how you can stand out as a trusted advisor to not only initiate meaningful conversations but also create a presence that attracts inbound conversations.

Getting to the heart of social selling, Alex explains how every like and comment is an opportunity to engage in a conversation and how to take that next action. He also discusses how to scale social selling, what to measure, where it should sit within the organization, how to get started, what content to create, and how to meaningfully engage with your network.

Born storyteller Solveig Rundquist, Senior Content Manager at Mentimeter, joins host Olivia Messina to discuss how she incorporates storytelling into her content marketing and the data-driven strategies she's implementing across social to drive results.

In this episode, Solveig breaks down what storytelling means to her, the science of crafting a compelling story, and how to bring it to life through your content and social media marketing. An expert in storytelling, she reveals how you can uncover stories within your organization or shift to "story doing" if the stories aren't explicitly clear.

With an impressive social presence within just a few months of joining Mentimeter, Solveig walks through her data-driven process and the fundamental changes she put in place to uphold a high engagement rate.

Delving into the importance of differentiating and tailoring content per channel, she explains how, with two very different target audiences– she gets the right content to land in front of the right people and how she uses data to make informed decisions.

To close the show, Solveig shares how she encourages key stakeholders to engage on social and why it's critical to make those already building their persona brands your heroes. You won't want to miss Solveig's take on AI in content marketing today– stay until the very end for an insightful take.

Hot Topics:

• How to craft compelling stories on social media even if they aren't explicitly clear
• Tactics to ensure your content lands in front of the right audience
• Solveig's approach to engaging key stakeholders on social media 

Jordan Tennenbaum, Social Media Manager at Celigo, joins host Olivia Messina to discuss his transition from a 7-year sales career to social media and the framework he used to triple nearly every metric at his organization.

He emphasizes consistently publishing engaging, human-focused content to drive long-term growth. As an expert at crafting standout content, he reveals the power of being a little different and using relatable memes to connect with audiences.

From consistency and employee advocacy to creative social challenges and employer branding initiatives that celebrate his colleagues, Jordan unpacks the pillars of building a powerful, human-centric social presence that people want to be a part of.

He explores the ongoing debate around follower count–are they just vanity metrics or valuable indicators? Jordan provides a nuanced take, emphasizing an engaged following matters for social proof.

Jordan concludes the show by sharing how he built his personal brand, his favorite tools for efficiency as a social media marketer, and his perspective on whether brands should maintain a presence on X as many reevaluate their strategy.

Hot Topics: 

• Jordan’s transition from sales to social media
• The strategy that tripped nearly every social metric at Celigo
• How to supercharge your LinkedIn following

In this episode, host Olivia Messina welcomes Elizabeth Hilfrank, Content Marketing Manager at Drift, to the show. Over the past 5 years, Elizabeth has overseen several sectors of content at Drift, from video production to podcast to now their blog, ebook, newsletter, and social media strategy–and now she’s revealing what she’s learned along the way.

Elizabeth shares how to nail a social media video, emphasizing the importance of hooking the audience in the first couple of seconds and always including captions. With human-focused social campaigns, she reveals how her strategy and content are more in line with B2C. She even gives examples of current and past campaigns that have driven results for Drift.

With a proven record of success, she dives deep into her LinkedIn strategy, discussing how often she posts and whether or not you should put the link directly in the post or in the comments. Even though Drift is in B2B, she highlights the importance of showcasing they are human by jumping on trends and regularly engaging with their community.

To wrap up the show, Elizabeth reveals her social workflow process and how she determines what content makes it to the corporate feed. She shares the importance of her calendar and project management tool, her tips for managing content ownership outside of social, and the importance of early involvement of social media managers in content creation discussions.

Hot Topics:

• How to create and promote successful social media videos 

• Proven LinkedIn tips and strategies for engagement 

• Elizabeth’s workflow that allows her to manage their blog, ebook, newsletter, and social strategy

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina sits down with two remarkable experts: Kinga Kusak, the Senior Content Marketing Manager at PlayPlay, and Ale Schlesinger, the Social Media Manager at HiBob.

Together, they take a deep dive into the world of employer branding, stressing the importance of an authentic strategy. Kinga and Ale reveal the best channels to implement your strategy and the optimal functions within your organization in which it should sit to make it shine.

As employer branding experts, Kinga and Ale share valuable tips on genuinely portraying your employer brand. Plus, they provide insights into previous social campaigns and best practices for creating employer branding videos that leave a lasting impact!

Olivia, Kinga, and Danyelle Felchner, Recruitment Marketing Manager–Social Media at CVS Health, are continuing the conversation in PlayPlay’s upcoming webinar, “How to Harness The Power of Employer Branding & Improve ROI.” Register now and don’t miss more tips and actionable insights!

Having an employee advocacy program increases the total social engagement for a brand by 25% to 40% at minimum. (2022 Employee Advocacy Benchmark Report)

Employee advocacy programs bring a wealth of benefits–expanded reach, enhanced trust, and credibility, thought leadership, the list goes on!

When it comes to employee participation, those who lead advocacy initiatives understand that engagement ebbs and flows. So what can be done if advocate shares slow down?

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina sits down for a solo episode to discuss strategies you can implement if advocacy shares start to dip.

She talks through how to get advocate feedback, how to encourage positive sharing behaviors, why it’s so important to have a constant line of communication, how to gamify, and key insights on the best times to launch campaigns and initiatives.

Enter Clare Cavenagh, Communications and Social Media Executive at Singletrack. Clare joins the show to share how she leverages social media and employee advocacy to raise brand awareness, build trust, and position Singletrack as an industry thought leader.

As a writing enthusiast herself, Clare shares her social content strategy that focuses on three main categories: internally generated thought leadership content, curated content from industry news, and more personal content that provides a glimpse into their company culture.

Claire then dives into her winning advocacy strategy. It’s an engaging yet strategic method that aligns with the company's goals and empowers advocates to share content. Her approach involves a monthly meeting and two new goals. The first goal is geared towards employee engagement, and the second is geared towards earning meaningful engagements from their target audience.

Hot Topics:

• How Clare positions Singletrack as an industry thought leader on social
• The content strategy that upholds brand awareness in long buyer cycles
• An employee advocacy gamification strategy that will help you hit your goals and keep employee engagement high

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia welcomes Chloe Stevens, the Senior Content and Social Media Manager at UpSlide. She delves into her approach to social, how she crafts engaging content, and her tips for creating a compelling social media strategy. Chloe even reveals her favorite tech tools to streamline the process.

When it comes to strategy, Chloe emphasizes the importance of reflecting on past performance, setting clear objectives and KPIs, and aligning them with overall business goals. She gives her insights into measuring success beyond vanity metrics to track brand awareness and conversions.

She highlights the significance of understanding your target audience and tailoring content accordingly. Her best tip–join sales calls and directly speak to your customers! To wrap the show, Chloe shares how she’s approaching launching an employee advocacy program and the tactics she's using to get the wider organization’s buy-in!

Hot Topics:

• The key elements to include in a social strategy
• How to craft compelling content in the tech industry
• Tactics for launching an employee advocacy program and getting buy-in

It’s not easy managing a global social media presence of over 7 million followers, but our next guest, Sam Samayoa, makes it looks easy.

Sam is the Senior Social Media at Wipro, and she’s going Behind the Post to reveal how she generates and maintains high engagement on LinkedIn, how she manages writing content on a global scale, and what key indicators she tracks for success.

Especially today, social is often the first touch point with a brand, so Sam speaks on the importance of the 95, 5 rule and a few of the tactics she uses to stay top of mind.

Olivia and Sam even discuss the pressures of working in social media, such as the responsibility of being the voice of the company and the public nature of their work.

Sam even shares where she thinks B2B brands are missing the mark today and why as a social media professional, you have to be comfortable saying no. As a seasoned social media manager, tune in to hear her tricks for writing engaging content, like leading with the problem and always having an eye-catching graphic.

Hot Topics:

• How to write content that appeals to different cultures and demographics
• Balancing content for an audience of over 7 million followers
• The unfiltered truth about working in social media

In this episode of Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina sits down with Kari Anderson, Social Media Manager at Körber Supply Chain. With a wealth of knowledge and expertise in B2B social media, Kari is passionate about the power of brand storytelling and the importance of relatability in connecting with audiences.

Kari shares her experience rolling out a highly effective social selling program and how she strategically targets the right people with her content. She provides valuable insights on refining your social strategy to meet your audience's expectations and offers valuable advice on how to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Kari delves into how much content is too much content and how she’s turning the Körber social pages into more of a destination, and what content she's creating to do this. She even reveals how she creates a halo effect around their social presence to consistently earn high engagement and deepen the brand community and their advocates' networks as well!
Finally, Kari reveals her successful tactics for training teams to build their personal brands and participate in their employee advocacy program. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to enhance their B2B social media strategy and take their brand to the next level.

Hot Topics:

• Why less is more when it comes to LinkedIn content
• Importance of brand storytelling and relatability in B2B social media
• Tactics for training teams to build personal brands and participate in employee advocacy programs

In this episode of Behind the Post, Olivia Messina sits down with Kristina Thomas, Head of Social Media at S&P Global. Kristina leads an award-winning global team and reveals the delicacies and challenges of managing a social strategy in the finance industry.

She shares her secret to creating engaging content, which looks like sharing content that your audience is interested in while sparking conversations. For S&P Global, this is charts and graphs while focusing on the people. Kristina chats about how she educates the wider team on social selling and the importance of executives building their personal brands.

Kristina talks about how she stays timely to ensure she’s posting the right content at the right time and how she utilizes social listening to monitor conversations that could be at risk!

They even dive into the many challenges that a merger can have on a social strategy, like combing social media pages, products sunsetting, and paying attention to the market while still hitting their goal of brand awareness.

Stay until the end to learn why she measures year-over-year and month-over-month improvements and website traffic and why when reporting social media data to stakeholders, less is more!

Hot Topics:

• Managing a global social strategy at a massive organization
• How to make the content in the financial industry more personal
• The impact a merger has on a social strategy and how to navigate it

Here to break it down is Stephanie Melgoza, the Social Media Manager at Vena Solutions. An expert in B2B social, Stephanie’s experience in social spans a variety of industries, including technology, research, and financial services, working on global brand and corporate social teams at IBM and Gartner.

In this episode, she shares her philosophy around social strategy and what it really means to be data-driven. Host Olivia Messina and Stephanie discuss the content types that consistently earn high engagement and why posting more doesn’t guarantee better conversion rates.

When it comes to campaigns and launches, Stephanie believes it’s so important to look at the moving pieces from a higher level and understand how social is contributing to the overall KPIs. When looking at social metrics, she emphasizes the importance of looking at quarterly as well as year-over-year.

They wrap the show discussing one of the most pertinent topics–maintaining mental health in an industry that requires you to always be on. Stephanie reveals how she sets boundaries and the few tactics she uses to maintain her mental health.

• What a data-driven social strategy looks like in action
• The types of content that consistently earn high engagement in B2B
• How to prioritize mental health and set boundaries

Nadine Synett, Director of Social Strategy at ZoecialMedia, knows this all too well, and she’s joining host Olivia Messina to dive deep into the basics. She outlines every aspect to include in your strategy, including her 4 pillars of content: education, validation, company, and product/solution.

The two dive into the importance of creating a presence that keeps your brand top of mind so when your audience is ready to make a purchasing decision, they think of you!

Nadine shares countless engaging content ideas that you can implement right away! Working with countless clients on the daily, she shares the content types that continually earn high engagement.

They finish out the show by discussing how to measure your social media activities. While success looks different for everyone, there are a handful of metrics that should be tracked across the board, including profile visits, impressions, engagements, and clicks. Her biggest tip? zoom out and focus on long-term growth!

Hot Topics:

• What to include in your social media strategy
• How to demonstrate social media success
• Content ideas that consistently earn high engagement

How do you use social to support business growth? How can you get buy-in from internal stakeholders so social doesn't sit in a silo? Meet Alex Taylor Noble– The Head of Social Media at The Bank of London and the next Behind the Post guest.

Alex believes that brands win when they make it about their community, not themselves. So when it comes to social, the content that’s the most engaging is the content your audience wants to see!

In this episode, Olivia and Alex discuss aligning your social strategy with business goals, the importance of getting buy-in from stakeholders from the inception of campaigns, and the secret to creating engaging content in regulated industries, such as banking. Hint–it’s all about making your social channels a destination and giving more than you ask.

• How to create a social strategy that supports business growth
• Tactics to earn buy-in from internal stakeholders
• The most important social media metrics to track

Catharina Sartori Mensak, Content Marketing Manager at Stahl is sharing her playbook on crafting humanlike, engaging content that is the opposite of boring.

Cat unpacks tactical ways to make your content less boring and more authentic, even in highly regulated industries. She believes that the companies that win on social are the ones who dare to be different and think of social media as stories. Olivia and Cat talk about what it really means to put people at the forefront of your strategy and what that content looks like in action.

Stay until the end to hear Cat’s playbook for personal branding–P.S. the first step is being yourself!

• Creating authentic and humanlike content for B2B
• Engaging content strategies for regulated industries
• How to create a personal brand from scratch

In this week’s episode of Behind the Post, Adeline Peters is taking the seat as host to welcome Colin Day, live and in person. During this laid-back discussion, the two dive into what brought Day to Oktopost, where he thinks marketing is headed, and so much more!

In the second half of the show, the two detail what a personal brand means and how it has evolved over the years. Colin explains it is all about being you, whether you’re on stage presenting at a conference or on social media presenting a message. Together they explain why keeping it real and authentic is critical to developing a consistent personal brand.

Hot Topics:

• The key to employee advocacy from an advocate's POV
• How and why you should add developing your personal brand to your to-do list
• Where marketing is headed in 2023

If you’re currently facing this dilemma, you’ve come to the right place. In this episode, Olivia Messina and Addie Peters discuss why doing less can actually be more. The duo shares their experiment, which led to a 32% increase in engagements, all while scaling back on content.

In the second half of the show, Olivia and Addie discuss how you can earn more meaningful engagements, more reach, and customer engagement through employee advocacy. Your brand can’t go it alone–leveraging employee engagement can help you reach new heights your corporate channels could never achieve on their own! Tune in to learn why it’s more authentic than paid social and how one of our customers decreased their cost per click from $5 to $1 within the first 45 days of their program!

• How to decrease your cost per click with employee advocacy
• What content to create when leveraging your employees on social media
• Why cutting back on the volume of social posts can increase your engagement

For seven years, Sarah Noel Block, CEO of Tiny Marketing, was a marketing team of one for five companies simultaneously.

She joins host Olivia Messina to reveal her tried and true systems that enabled her to expand her bandwidth without expanding budget. This includes streamlining and batching content, systemizing through project management tools, and automating everywhere possible.

Sarah shares her journey to becoming CEO and why most small B2B marketers are falling short due to shiny object syndrome – and how you can see results if you’re missing the mark!

Stay until the end to learn her formula for A/B testing social copy and her best growth hacks for authentically growing a brand page on LinkedIn.

• Where today’s B2B marketers are missing the mark
• Creating marketing systems that increase bandwidth
• How to create thought-provoking social media copy

Joining Behind the Post to discuss crisis management and social media for the public sector is Heather Daniels, Senior Social Media Specialist of Tyler Technologies.

Host Olivia Messina is asking all the right questions to uncover what it takes to be engaging and connect with your audience on an emotional level when in a regulated industry such as the public sector.

Heather dives into how she approaches social strategy, and the 5 biggest social media mistakes you don’t want to make! She even shares how she creates social media experiences and value-driven content that reinforce Tyler’s purpose, values, and brand infinity.

Listen until the end to hear what needs to be in your crisis plan, what should be in place before something occurs, and the best practices to live by when in the midst of a crisis.

• Social strategy for the public sector
• The 5 biggest mistakes social media professionals make
• What to include in a social media crisis plan + best practices

Shedding some light on the most asked questions around B2B social are Olivia Messina and Addie Peters. The two tackle a tell-all episode around a broad scope of questions in the social media industry.

Tune in for a conversation on landing a role in social media, the B2B organizations with a noteworthy TikTok presence, how to determine the best time to post, tips for leading an employee advocacy program, writing content for colleagues, and so much more!

And, of course, our social team shares the truth about engagement rate and why it’s not the most meaningful metric to report on, or is it?

• Tips for landing a social media position
• Reporting on engagement rate – is it the golden metric?
• Writing for employee advocacy: navigating creating copy for others to share

How marketers approach B2B social has drastically changed over the years, and our next guest Dani Sayag, Social Media Lead at Syte, has been through it all!

This episode will have you on the edge of your seat while Dani walks through how the B2B social landscape has transformed to become more authentic, humanlike, and in line with our B2C counterparts.

Dani dives deep into the social metrics every B2B Social Media Manager should be tracking, and what social media success means to her. She even reveals the step-by-step process of launching an engaging TikTok presence for B2B organizations. You’ll be taking notes as she gets granular and uncovers the many truths no one tells you before starting a TikTok! Lastly, Dani wraps up the show with her greatest advice for starting a podcast! As a podcast host herself, you’ll definitely want to hear this!

• How to launch a successful B2B TikTok–Dani’s step-by-step recipe
• The key social metrics B2B Social Media Managers should know inside and out
• Dani’s greatest advice for launching a podcast

Stopping by the Behind the Post podcast to discuss the evolution of social media, employer branding, and employee advocacy is the brilliant Ale Schlesinger, Social Media Manager at HiBob.

In this episode, Ale reveals how she approaches social while working for an HR tech organization. As modern HR is all about the well-being of your people, Ale has taken the company motto, “put your people first,” and infused it into their social media strategy. Tune in to hear how she crafts the HiBob social channels to be a conversational, engaging place that will make you stop scrolling!

To close out the show, Ale reveals how she approaches her creative process, the two things your employee advocacy content must do, and why everything, especially employer branding, always comes back to authenticity.

And, of course, Olivia and Ale talk TikTok and give a little insight into all the things that go on behind the post!

• How to create an engaging social media presence that will “stop the scroll”
• Ale’s top priority when it comes to creating content
• Employer branding strategy, tips, and tricks!

In this tell-all episode of Behind the Post, Host Olivia Messina is joined by a social media expert with over a decade of social media experience!

Jessica Kalbarczyk, Senior Social Media Manager at Corel, takes the hot seat to discuss strategy, employee advocacy, and community. She dives deep into her content strategy for corporate social versus employee advocacy and the specific content types she creates for her employees to share.

Jessica gets candid about her time at Sprint and T-Mobile, and how she handled the merger from a social perspective. She details her methods for crisis communication during the Covid-19 shutdown. One of her biggest tips? Have a really close relationship with PR to ensure the tone of voice and messaging is in line with the brand.

And if you’re looking to pursue a career in social – tune in to hear Jessica’s favorite part of working in the industry and a breakdown of what a typical day as a social media manager looks like!

• Golden community building tips for B2B brands
• Crisis communication and the importance of working closely with PR
• Corporate social media content vs. employee advocacy content

According to a study by Deloitte, 77% of professionals have experienced burnout at their current job.

If you are feeling stressed, exhausted, or depleted from the “always on” work pressure – you are not alone! In this episode, Olivia Messina, Social Media and Community Manager at Oktopost is opening up about her experience with social media burnout and sharing her top 6 tips to prevent it. Keep these tips in your tool kit to keep burnout away and creativity top of mind!

• How to work smarter, repurpose content, and never run out of ideas
• Work-life balance, the importance of setting work boundaries, and knowing your limits
• Wellness and self-care tips to regain focus & spark creativity

When it comes to social, Christina Le, Social Media Manager at OpenPhone is the jack of all trades. She joins host Olivia Messina Behind the Post to share her insights on social strategy, personal branding, TikTok, and everything in between!

She shares her approach to social as a seasoned veteran in the industry (and hint: it all comes back to your audience), conveying your company’s values, and tapping into the conversations that are happening.

Christina opens up about her posting strategy per network and hints that if your brand is not on TikTok, you might just miss the boat. Not to worry – Olivia and Christina chat about the ins and outs of TikTok and how it’s the only platform where you don’t need to niche down. Talking about your product isn't going to cut it! Have fun with it, be engaging, and showcase what’s like to work at your company.

To close out the episode, Christina shares her greatest advice for building a personal brand– start writing and don’t overthink it! As humans, we are natural storytellers: be vulnerable, talk about the ups and the downs, and take the time to talk about the things that matter to you. She reminds us that it doesn't need to be overly polished – just be you! LinkedIn is the best place to where your resume on your sleeve and if done right, you’ll never need to apply to another job again!

• Tips for building your personal brand and the key to landing a position in social media
• Content, posting cadence and the importance of value > volume
• How Christina is using TikTok for recruitment and highlighting OpenPhone’s employer brand

This week on Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina asks Caitlin Doyle, Social Media Manager at Demandbase all the right questions.

If you’ve spent anytime scrolling a Demandbase feed, you’ve seen their fun, fresh, and engaging social presence. In this episode, Caitlin describes how often she’s posting, what she’s doing on the post level to pull her audience in, and which content types yield the highest engagement.

One thing is for sure – this episode proves that carousel posts aren't only for Instagram! LinkedIn's carousels might be your one-way ticket to higher engagement!

To wrap up the show, Caitlin and Olivia talk about how keeping a pulse on everything happening internally and managing requests from different departments is one of the most challenging parts of the role – and why flexibility is key!

• Post level tips to increase your engagement
• Why LinkedIn carousel posts are all the hype
• The optimal posting cadence for LinkedIn and Twitter

Most B2B organizations have nailed the lead generation and conversion pieces of the sales cycle. Majority of products and services revolve around your customers but once the sale is closed, how do you keep the customer as the focus of the business?

Enter Customer Advocacy.

Stopping by the Behind the Post podcast is Bev Barnett, Senior Customer Advocacy Manager at Workday. She breaks down step by step the importance of the voice of your customers, the role of community, and best practices for social media managers.

Bev shares that the Nirvana of customer advocacy is finding the intersections between what's important to your customers, the stories they want to tell about their successes, and what the organization is looking to tell about its own path.

Throughout the episode, Bev stresses the importance of meeting your customers and community where they are and letting them facilitate the conversation. She leaves the show with one very important yet overlooked piece of advice–take a step back. Customer advocacy is not about you, it’s about the customer. Customers are people and we have to respect their time, and space and respect their “no.”

• How Customer Advocacy differs from Customer-Based Marketing
• Taking control of the processes, workflows, and documentation around customer advocacy and leveling the importance alike any other marketing activity
• Creating customer facilitated community focused on best practices and relationships

These questions and more answered this week on Behind the Post with Helen Hauck, Global Social Media Engagement Manager at IFS. She joins the show to share her insights, challenges, and lessons learned from her 1st-year full-time in social.

Helen and host, Olivia Messina talk about the importance of humanizing B2B brands and the different tactics she's used on the IFS corporate channels. As an employee advocacy leader, she reveals the challenges she faced when gaining adoption within her organization. With an incredible personal brand on LinkedIn, Helen wraps up the show with her best tips for authentically building a personal brand.

• The biggest barriers Helen faced transitioning from Manufacturing Marketing Manager to Global Social Media Engagement Manager
• Leveraging employee advocacy to increase your engagement and humanize B2B brands
• How to utilize "original content" to authentically build a personal brand

This week on Behind the Post, host Olivia Messina brings a social powerhouse on the show! Melissa Francois, Content, Comms & Social Lead at PlayPlay, gets candid about what she's learned from managing social at some of the largest global brands.

Melissa reveals how to approach every social strategy from a global standpoint, how to manage different time zones, and the importance of using geographical data to speak to customers/ followers where they are.

She wraps up the show, reminding us that everything you do on social needs to tie back to value – down to each holiday. Tune in for an episode full of tips and strategies to optimize your global brand's social strategy!

• Managing timezones, appealing to broad audiences, and respecting cultural differences
• The importance of localizing content when it's going to make a difference in the market
• How to manage and be timely with social engagement to provide a superior customer experience and build communities

Next up on Behind the Post is Whitney Blankenship, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Oktopost, Whitney joins host Olivia Messina to unpack the process in creating and delivering highly valuable and authentic content.

Whitney shares that content is easier to distribute if you start with the end in mind. Getting your content in front of customers is more meaningful when you focus on pain points and add real value to their life and role!

She even walks us through her creative process which includes lo-fi hip hop beats, a cup of mint tea, and a Google doc! Stay until the end of the show to hear her best tips for breaking through the dreaded writer's block.

• The importance of quality content to reach your customers, and how quality will always trump quantity
• Content distribution and how to formulate your content with promotion in mind
• Creative processes: how to turn on that creativity every day and tips to break through writer blocks

As the first dedicated social media marketer at EY Canada, Dylan Doyle shares how he shifted the social function outside of brand and to a go-to-market channel.

In this episode, Dylan explains how taking his initial social media audit from an external perspective and applying it to the internal context of EY was critical to his success. By leading his team with a data-oriented approach with a constant line of communication and real time reporting with his executives, he was able to get buy-in from leadership and 10X their social strategy.

He shares some of the lessons learned from B2C and how he’s applying them to EY. His team is breaking out of the confined perception of management consulting by focusing on business-to-human marketing—not sticking to what's always been done and looking for new ways to innovate. Most of the success they have seen has been from keeping a streamlined simple approach that’s human and authentic.

Dylan shares that getting closer to their brand partners has been an integral part of the success. He caps off the show sharing some of the growth his team has seen since 2020 and what’s ahead for EY in 2023!

It’s essential that your employer brand be rooted in a positive work culture, and you have the means of communicating those values and experiences to candidates. In this episode, Olivia Messina is breaking down how social media managers can build their employer brand in a meaningful and authentic way.

She believes the key to employer branding is highlighting the people behind your business and sharing their experiences from your employee's point of view. She also shares how employee advocacy can strengthen your brand’s reputation as an employer, and caps off the show by giving real examples of campaigns and initiatives she’s started here at Oktopost to fuel your inspiration!

Meet Andrea Fernandez, award-winning Global Social Media Manager at SUSE, where she manages an employee advocacy program that’s 2000 employees strong. In this episode, Andrea chats through her process with host, Olivia Messina, and explains how she:

• Got buy-in from both leadership and the entire team
• Incentivizes more employees joining the program
• Keeps the employee advocacy excitement going

She also highlights what she does to get the rest of the company, even those who aren’t part of the employee advocacy program, interested through company updates, and incorporating it into the process of onboarding new employees.

Enter Haily Moulton, Social Growth Marketer at Biteable, and the face behind Biteable’s YouTube and TikTok strategies. Specializing in video marketing, Haily has earned Biteable’s TikTok over 50 million views and shares across the world. How has she done it?

Instead of focusing on branded product videos, which flopped on the popular social network, she focused instead on humor. She created content around the realities of working from home, poking fun at the corporate world.

Her efforts on TikTok have solidified Biteable’s employer branding, getting tons of comments on whether or not Biteable was hiring. Their careers page went from 60-80 visits per day to over 20,000!

Hot Topics in this episode:

• Time management as a social team of one—how to stay organized and sane.
• Keeping the freedom to test things on new social channels and figuring out which formula works for you.
• Being relatable as an employer branding strategy where traditional B2B sales methods don’t work.

Employee advocacy is probably already on your radar. You know that it’s important, but it’s probably on your “nice-to-have” or “someday” list. It might seem like you don’t have the bandwidth to implement a great employee advocacy program with all the other things you’re doing.

But I’m here to tell you that you can do this. It doesn’t have to be difficult, or time-consuming—and I’m going to show you how.

In today’s episode, I’m going to go over the entire process around launching and maintaining an employee advocacy program (that won’t have you working until midnight).

Meryoli Arias, Social Media Manager at Chili Piper, goes Behind the Post to uncover the truth behind Chili Piper’s massive social success. She explains her process of humanizing each post to ensure Chili Piper’s content never sounds like a walking brochure.

Host, Olivia Messina and Meryoli dive into Instagram Reels and TikTok for B2B. She graciously shares how simple it is to encourage her colleagues to create video content—give them a framework and give them freedom!

She reinforces that there are no shortcuts in social; it’s all about testing, trying new things, finding what works, and being different! Tune in for a spicy, high-energy episode sure to fuel your inspiration!

Milena Farber, Social Media Marketing Manager at Namogoo goes Behind the Post with host Olivia Messina to uncover some of the major challenges that come with transitioning into a new role as a social media manager.

Taking over a company’s social accounts can be intimidating for new and even experienced social media managers. Milena opens up about her top priorities when she first started at Namogoo and how gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience is not always an easy task. She shares her actionable tips for getting any account verified, as she impressively helped Namogoo get the blue badge on Twitter and Instagram just a few months into her role!

Known for her success in growing an authentic following, Milena reveals her secrets for massive growth on any social media account. A must-listen episode for any social enthusiast or anyone transitioning into a new role as a social media manager!