My social media job

I started working for Vapor4Life one year ago. I began as an intern and after three months was hired as their social media community manager. I absolutely love my job. I am responsible for engaging our fans, keeping them interested in Vapor4Life, answering their questions, and relaying their concerns and suggestions back to management. During my internship I built the Facebook Page, revived the Twitter account, and learned all I could about social media.

In the past year, I think I've learned more than I have the last four years in my previous positions. I've learned about blogging, messaging, forums, Twitter outreach, social media monitoring, and more. Before applying for the internship, I loved being on Facebook. Like the rest of the world I would spend hours looking at friends' photos, checking out pages of brands I like and catching up with old friends. I never realized that being on Facebook was an actual job that people had. It never occurred to me that all the messages from companies and organizations that showed up in my news feed were written by people in the role of community management.

Having come from a background of Public Relations and customer service, social media and community management was pretty easy to fall into. The job requires both a desire to spread the word about your organization as well as help foster an active community built up of customers, fans, and brand ambassadors.

The world of community management and social media strategy is incredibly fascinating. I take every chance I get to attend an event for the industry. So far, I have been to a Chicago Community Manager Tweetup, a SMCChicago Holiday Party - Sugar & Spice, a Community Manager UNconference, a SMCChicago "Optimize and Socialize" event with author Lee Odden, a Mastering Pinterest, Facebook's New Business Timeline & Google Plus event, a Chicago Tweetup with Mark Schaefer, and a Social Media Day event. There are always interesting topics and friendly, helpful people working in the industry at these events. It's really fun to see people that I've met at other events and get to know them better.

Coming into my second year as a community manager I hope to learn even more and continue to develop relationships with influential and knowledgeable thought leaders!