Social Media Specialist

Most of the work happens before and after the post. Before: the content plan, sourcing material from live projects, writing captions, editing images and video, and building a calendar that survives a busy month. After: responding to comments and messages, tracking what performed, and feeding that back into the plan. Around both sits the less visible work of keeping profiles complete and accurate, monitoring mentions of the firm, and watching what comparable practices are doing. For an AEC firm the hard part is rarely the posting. It is getting a steady supply of project material out of people who are busy building things. That is a process problem rather than a creative one. A specialist should be solving it with a standing routine rather than complaining about it every month.

LinkedIn and Instagram carry most of it, for different reasons. LinkedIn is where clients, developers, general contractors and referral sources actually are, and where firm news, project milestones and thought leadership belong. Instagram is where the work looks like work: photography, progress, detail, and the craft that makes a practice distinctive. It also reaches future employees, which matters more than most principals expect in a tight hiring market. Facebook still works for residential and local markets. Pinterest matters for interiors and residential design. YouTube and TikTok are real for firms with the appetite to produce video regularly, and painful for firms without it. Two platforms done consistently beat five done occasionally, every time. The second list is unfortunately what most firms currently have, and thinning it out is usually the first recommendation.

From the work you are already doing, captured with a system rather than a request. The material exists: site visits, progress, models, drawings, completed projects, team milestones, and the questions clients keep asking. What is missing is a route from those to a post. The practical version has four parts. A shared folder anyone can drop a photo into. A monthly reminder to project leads. Professional photography on completed projects. And a specialist who turns raw material into finished pieces without needing anything else from you. The rule that makes it work is that nobody inside the firm has to write anything. Ask people for photographs and facts, and let the specialist do everything after that.

By whether the right people see and remember you, which is harder than counting followers. Follower count is the least useful number available and the one most often reported. Better measures are reach among the audience you care about, and engagement from people who could actually hire or refer you. Then profile visits, clicks to the site, and inquiries that mention seeing your work. Recruitment interest counts too. Some of the value is genuinely unmeasurable: a client mentioning a post in a meeting is real and will never appear in a dashboard. Agree at the start what you are actually trying to achieve. Awareness, recruitment and lead generation need different content and different measures. A single account cannot chase all three at once and still do any of them well.

Somebody named, with a rule about what does not need approval. The failure mode is not a bad post, it is a queue of drafts waiting on a principal who is in meetings. The workable setup is a batch review. A month of content approved in one sitting, with a short list of what the specialist can publish without asking. Anything involving a client, a project not yet public, financial information, or a position on something contentious always comes to you. Because the specialist works your hours, a question about a same-day post gets answered the same day. One legal note worth knowing. Does the firm work with anyone who promotes it in exchange for something? Then the FTC endorsement guides set out what has to be disclosed, and by whom.