What Working Remotely as a Social Media Strategist Taught Me
1. Calendars Are My Love Language (Even if They’re Chaotic)
It’s the start of the month, a fresh new blank calendar awaits. Crafting a calendar if it’s your first time usually seems like something you’d never think needed that much thought. It has made me appreciate mindless scrolling through people’s Instagram feeds much more, because the effort gone into curating each post, keeping things light and breezy, and also delving into more serious outlooks is hard. There’s no point in masking it. It’s a balance of work posts, aesthetic reels, and the occasional motivational quote. Keeping things interspersed so nobody scrolls through a work-post-work-post-why-so-serious timeline is key.
One piece of advice from my journey into rows of Google Sheets– leave room for flexibility. You should expect at least 2-3 posts to fall through and you want to be prepared.
2. Meetings, But Plan-Altering Ones
It’s also the start of a new week, and now you have to attend your weekly meeting with the team and now you have to explain why you chose to create that reel. Who knew meetings could be both creative and make you want to regret life choices?
Whether it’s brainstorming or dissecting fonts with the design team, the most important tip is specificity. If you want the post to come out exactly how you envisioned it, really nail those details. Pro tip: Always ask for multiple versions of a post design. Options are lifesavers when you realize one shade of beige is slightly off-brand.
3. Content Creation: The Fine Line Between “Casual Cool” and Chaos
Writing content to fit into a brand that’s already been built is probably one of the hardest assignments. They have to represent the brand but also be uniquely you, because otherwise what’s stopping the ultimate reign of AI?
There’s always the sweet-spot, a writing recipe mixture if you will. For me it’s between casual, reflective, and whimsical that I now hit instinctively (after about 10 rewrites). The golden rule is to not sound preachy, but not be rambly either. Taking into account the short attention-span of most social media users, you don’t want to go on and on and lose them half-way. And the last thing you want to do as “writer” is have a typo. Nothing ruins a whimsical caption faster than a rogue apostrophe or a misspelt adjective.
So the final lesson is to re-read everything and not be too beat up about rewriting with edits.
4. Collaboration: A Balancing Act in Patience and Persistence
When you’re working with collaborators, you never know what you’re going to get. From tracking down Instagram handles to gently nudging someone again for their inputs, the trick is early planning and mid-week reminders. At one point it does seem like a train that’s lost its tracks, but rest assured that if you stick to your vision it will come to life (kinda like Frankenstein’s monster).
And the best part is always the end, when you’re done nagging people about edits and the final product is presented. Especially those posts spotlighting people at Moira which feel like little love letters to the team, reminding us all why we do what we do.
At the end of the day, working remotely as a freelancer isn’t about mastering the chaos. It’s about learning to work with it, laughing at the hiccups, and having an endless amount of coffee. And it’s all worth it when the post does well, because well, that’s your job. It’s the little wins that make it all worth it.
Written by: Ishita Ahuja
