Marketing careers in focus: social media manager

Anna Slingo, The Met Office

Ahead of a tour of the world-famous Met Office in Exeter  on 24 June with CIM Devon and Cornwall to find out how the organisation uses the power of social media, we ask its Social Media Manager, Anna Slingo, to reveal her career journey.

What are your day to day responsibilities?
My day to day role involves managing the 24/7 monitoring and analysis process of nine social media channels. I work with the weather forecasters and media team on day-to-day proactive engagement, as well as providing social media training and briefings to the customer service team. I am also responsible for writing and implementing the Met Office’s social media strategy and providing extensive analysis of the effectiveness of the Met Office’s social media presence.

Tell us about your career journey
To be honest, I never thought I would get into social media! I started my career in video production having got a degree in Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University and following this up with a Masters in Post Production Editing at Bournemouth University.

I worked as a freelance editor for several years before securing a permanent position at the Met Office as a video editor, a role which was new to the organisation. My job was to create a variety of video content for the office; from ad hoc video content about severe weather to explainers about the weather and how it works. During this period, I was based within the Press Office which was a fascinating place to work, especially during severe weather. This gave me some valuable experience and skills for my current role and I learned a lot from some very experienced colleagues in that area.

What marketing achievement are you most proud of?
I’m very proud of the numerous awards we’ve been shortlisted for over the last year (2014/15) mainly for how we communicate our severe weather warning information through social media.

A career highlight for me from the last year was the way we used social media during the ‘Weather bomb’ in December 2014. This was a term created through the media which trended on Twitter for three days with over 30,000 mentions. During this period there was a lot of confusion as to what a weather bomb was and what it meant for the public and how they could be affected. We were contacted by Twitter as an authoritative figure to explain what was going on. To get our message out to as many people as possible, Twitter promoted our tweets and our hashtag which delivered a 300% increase in impressions in one day. We reached a new audience and saw a dramatic change in followers with a 567% increase in one week with a peak of over 7,000 on one day. We also saw 1300% increase in retweets and 1200% increase in click throughs from social media to our website. To see our work recognised by such a big social media channel as Twitter was a real highlight for me and I was quoted in the Daily Express (I never thought that would happen). 


What career advice would you give to other marketers starting out?
Do a career that you enjoy. I love my job and find it fascinating every day and I’m also always learning something new. Never be afraid to try something different; it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work as you can always change and improve things. Also, get to know excel spreadsheet, it’s a life saver for social media analytics!