Job Location: Milton Keynes, Remote/Hybrid
Department: Marketing & Communications
Closing Date: 6 January 2025
Weekly Working Hours: 37
Contract Type: Permanent
Welsh Language: Not Applicable
About the Role
The Senior Social Media Manager has responsibility for creating engaging content that helps the OU deliver its greater reach plan and other key strategic plans.
The Senior Social Media Manager will support a community of communications professionals in generating their own ‘social ready’ content that can be posted on the OU's social accounts. They will do this through sharing best practice and knowledge.
The main content generation of the role will be focused on specialist social media short-form video and the role holder will take an active role in planning what content needs to be created and curated to deliver OU key messages for external campaigns.
You will work in a planned and proactive way across the OU with multiple stakeholders taking a four-nation approach, to provide social media support for our campaigns while being able to spot the reactive opportunities and work collaboratively with colleagues across the OU.
The role requires somebody who can use content management systems and evaluation tools. They will have operational oversight for all our corporate OU social media channels, ensuring that colleagues across the communications team are delivering content for OU social channels that deliver on the OU’s communications objectives.
The role holder will manage the team who maintain oversight of the corporate OU social media accounts, in line with its social media strategy, ensuring that communications colleagues are regularly contributing content that reflects our key audiences.
The role will support the Head of External Communications in the creation, delivery, and planning of external campaigns.
Key Responsibilities
* Deliver creative engaging content for social media to support the delivery of the university’s greater reach and other key strategic plans.
* Work with communications professionals across Marcomms to support and encourage their use of the OU’s social media channels. Provide advice on creating ‘social ready’ content for the wider communications community.
* Work with the Social Media Campaigns Manager in the Brand and Campaigns team to ensure integration and aligned planning between paid and organic social media.
* Manage the Social Media Managers, supporting them in creating and sharing specialist content across core university accounts with a focus on communications objectives including delivering the greater reach plan and other key strategic plans.
* Keep abreast of new and emerging social media advancements, ensuring the wider communications community are appropriately innovative and creative in their delivery.
* Collaborate with other teams, units, and faculties including OpenLearn, Library, Open University Students Association, Nations, Media Relations, Internal Communications, Government and External Affairs, to identify stories, coordinating plans and activities to deliver against communications objectives. Encourage and support these teams and units in creating ‘social ready’ content.
* Continuously improve social media output and performance by capturing and analysing campaign and social media metrics, utilising insights derived to make recommendations and acting on information in a timely manner.
* Contribute creative ideas and latest sector thinking to the Marketing and Communications Unit’s content planning processes and meetings. Recommend the right media, platforms, production, and creative expressions to achieve the required results for a social media brief.
* Manage the delivery of any campaigns and projects to time and budget adhering to team and unit processes and governance structures.
* Work with colleagues in Brand and Campaigns and the wider external communications team to support community management.
* Ensure social media toolkits, policies, and processes remain up to date and reflect trends in social media tools, applications, channels, design, and strategy.
Skills and Experience
Essential
* Proven experience of working extensively within social media channels including, but not limited to, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok and creating multimedia content including short-form video.
* Experience of planning, delivering and evaluating high performing social media campaigns.
* Experience of generating creative social media campaigns from a campaign brief that engages key audiences and delivers key messages to those audiences.
* Understanding of the need for integration across paid and organic social media and the benefits it can bring.
* Prior experience of using social media channels to build engagement with key audiences and develop affiliated communities.
* Prior experience of planning, creating and implementing complex communications projects, across a wide media mix and developing content for integrated campaigns including video assets and live social media events.
* Experience of monitoring social media performance, providing analytics and measures for evaluating campaign performance, working with tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch.
* Advanced skills in Microsoft Office, Adobe PhotoShop/Illustrator or similar, Adobe Premier Pro or similar video editing software, Canva.
* Excellent copywriting skills – a proven ability to write clear, engaging copy for different audiences and platforms.
Essential Requirements
Work location
It is anticipated that a hybrid working pattern can be adopted for this role, where you can work from home and the office. However, as this role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office it is expected that some attendance in the office will be required when necessary and in response to business needs. We’d expect this to be approximately once per week.
How to apply
Unless otherwise stated in the advert, all applications are completed online. Applications submitted via 3rd party websites will not be received.
To apply for this role please submit the following documents;
• CV
• Supporting statement, up to 600 words, you should set out in your statement why you’re interested in this role and provide examples of where your skills and experience meet the required competencies and essential criteria for this role as detailed in the job and person specification.
You will need to have your documents ready ahead of submitting your job application. Please click on the apply now button below to be redirected to our job application page.
Early closing date notification
We may close this job advert earlier than the published closing date where a satisfactory number of applications are received. We would therefore encourage early applications.
If you have any queries or questions about the recruitment process, or regarding your application, please contact: Careers@open.ac.uk.
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