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About the Role
The Senior Social Media Manager has responsibility for leading the social media team and creating engaging content that helps the OU deliver its greater reach plan and other key strategic plans.
The role holder leads the planning, creation and delivery of all content across all OU social media channels, ensuring content engages existing audiences and appeals to new audiences – growing the reach of the platforms.
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 OUs social accounts. They will do this through sharing best practice and knowledge.
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 whilst being able to spot the reactive opportunities and work collaboratively with colleagues across the OU.
The role requires somebody strong experience in content creation, management and evaluation. 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 and key messages.
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.
Key Responsibilities
- Deliver creative engaging content for social media to support the delivery of the university’s greater reach and other key strategic plans.
- Working with communications professionals across Marcomms to support and encourage their use of the OU’s social media channels. Providing advice on creating ‘social ready’ content for the wider communications community.
- Working with the Brand and Marketing 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. Encouraging and supporting 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. Recommending 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.
- Working with colleagues in SRF and Student Retention to support community management.
- Ensure social media training, toolkits, policies and processes remain up to date and reflect trends in social media tools, applications, channels, design and strategy.
- Manage a team of student content creators
- Deliver key content for all channels from live events such as Graduation Days and on campus events
About You
Essential
- Proven experience of working extensively within social media channels including, but not limited to, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn , YouTube, X and TikTok and creating multimedia content including short-form video.
- Experience managing a social media team
- 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.
- Strong experience in integration across paid and organic social media and an understanding of different audience and media buying options across platforms
- Strong 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.
- A deep understanding of and experience in creating reactive high performing social content
- Experience of monitoring social media performance, providing analytics and measures for evaluating campaign performance, working with tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch.
- Experience managing third party delivery of content
- Strong understanding of how to grow a YouTube channel with regard to SEO and influencers
- Advanced skills in Adobe PhotoShop/Illustrator or similar, Adobe Premier Pro or similar video editing software, Canva, Capcut, Monday.com
- Excellent copywriting skills – a proven ability to write clear, engaging captions for different audiences and platforms
Support with your application
If you have any questions, or need support or adjustments relating to your application, the recruitment process, or the role, please contact us on 01908 541111 or email careers@open.ac.uk quoting the advert reference number.
What's in it for you?
At The Open University, we offer a range of benefits to recognise and reward great work, alongside policies and flexible working that contribute towards a great work life balance. Get all the details of what benefits we offer by visiting our Staff Benefits page (clicking this link will open a new window).
Flexible working
We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
Work location
The role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office and there is an expectation that the role holder will work on campus at least 2 days per week.
Next steps in the Recruitment process
If shortlisted, we anticipate interviews taking place on either 16th or 17th April.
Early closing date notification
While most roles will remain open until the advertised closing date, applications may be reviewed on an ongoing basis. In some cases, vacancies may close earlier if a sufficient number of suitable applications has been received and equality impacts have been appropriately considered. All roles will remain advertised for a minimum of one week before any early closure is implemented. If you have started an application or were in the process of applying when the advert closed, we encourage you to get in touch. We are committed to understanding individual circumstances and can offer further support where needed, including reasonable adjustments for applicants with protected characteristics.
How to apply
To apply for this role please submit the following document(s):
- CV
- Supporting Statement (Your Supporting Statement should be no more than 2 sides of A4 and should outline how your skills and experience meet the essential criteria listed above)
You can view your progress and application communications when you are logged into our recruitment system. Please check your spam/junk folders if you do not receive associated email updates.
