Hallo from Germany! I’m out in Bochum this week on my latest hoops side-quest, playing in a Pro 3×3 Basketball League, and… well, finding out pro athletes are very good.

It’s the final week of my completely-by-accident 6 week trip through Thailand and Germany, andddd I’m very ready for my bed, my desk at home, and working during normal hours (and getting you this newsletter at normal hours). Enough about me, though, let’s talk social things, like:

I’d say Average Post Views.

Anyone can go viral. Anyone can make a content calendar. But can your content consistently perform? Can you routinely get views on your videos and static posts?

If you wanna dig more into the best social media metrics (and more importantly, how to contextualize them together), check out this new report from Caliber—it’s 32 pages of social & creator thinking.

The report includes:

You can download it right over here!

When companies make their first social hires, they throw the good ol’ “social media manager” title up on LinkedIn and expect someone who’s both mechanically sound and strategically strong to just kinda do everything.

I’d rather you hire a Creative Strategist first. You know, someone who’s thinking Strategically, and Creatively, more so than trying to do every little thing on social. That’s gonna make your social really sing.

Let’s talk about what a Creative Strategist is, how it compares to other Social Media job titles, and why I think it’s the most important gig for agencies & brands to hire for.

My no cheating, off-the-top-of-my-head description: creative strategists specialize in forming both campaign and tactical social ideas based on specific platform and/or audience insights. It’s a little social strategist, a little creative director, a little analytics, all blended to create overarching social concepts.

I was a Senior Creative Strategist at Twitch before I launched Future Social—easily one of the most fun jobs I’ve held. I roamed the internet and dug up my position’s job listing. Let’s take a look at the primary bullets:

Basically, I’d receive 3ish requests for proposals (RFPs) from brands each week, then pitch back creative concept bringing the brand’s ask to life through Twitch-specific features and streamers. Take Monster Energy’s partnership with Apex Legends, for instance; I pitched a concept I called Energy Streaks, a combination of Twitch’s Challenge-stream format + chat-spammed flock-to-unlock to get squads playing together (I’d link you, but Twitch is livestreamed, so uh.. it’s gone!)

That’s a lot of jargon, but it’s also kinda the point—they’re platform-specific insights. Things an outside creative team probably couldn’t generate without a Twitch insider.

Instagram Reels, TikTok’s For You Page, even Twitter works on a recommendations algorithm now. That means three of the major social networks have primary feeds operating off interest-graphs—feeds that are less about who you follow, more about what content their respective algorithms think you’ll enjoy.

This is the second coming of organic content. Those who understand the platforms, understand their intended audience, and understand how to make compelling content have the best chance at engagement and virality we’ve seen in years.

Sure, you could hire a social strategist to brief traditional creatives, but I’ve never found it as effective as content led by creative strategists. The mechanicals of great content are too intertwined with creative ideas to fully separate both sides of the brain. It’s about as anti-agency of a perspective as I could offer, but I’ve seen so many multi-million dollar campaigns go out that reallyyy only succeeded on social thanks to huge paid media budgets. Hire someone who can do both.

Listen, we all know social titles have always been ambiguous. The big thing I want you to take away here: you need a socially-minded brain who doesn’t have social media administrative responsibilities.

The traditional social media manager role heavily emphasizes that management word. They’re catch-all positions, usually requiring posting, project management, production, analytics, internal politics, and oh yeah, strategy and creative. If you want to make truly great social media, you’ve gotta allow someone on your team whose primary responsibility is to think about content, not the other bells & whistles.

I like the title Creative Strategist because it implies both campaign-level and tactical-level thinking. I won’t lose sleep if you call them content strategists or even social strategists, though—just make sure they get to think more than do.

I’d love for you to look within first. Look at your current social media manager or social pros. Are they best suited for the mechanical side of social, or have they shown strong aptitude in strategy and/or creative? If it’s the latter, give them the shot at taking on creative strategy full-time (since you’re probably already tasking them with it). Offload their project management responsibilities to more junior talent.

If you don’t think you’ve got that person in-house, consider candidates with current titles like:

You’ll get all sorts of uniquely-experienced candidates coming in. Something I admired about how my old boss formed the Twitch creative strategy team—we all had very different expertise. Some of us were social brains, others were traditional advertising creatives, a few wrote videos for Youtubers, but all were great at the job, bringing an original POV.