If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the growing demands of social media management, you’re not alone. Maybe you’re currently juggling multiple property accounts, feeling like you’re spread too thin. Perhaps you’re worried about maintaining quality while keeping up with quantity, or maybe you’re simply wondering if there’s a better way to structure your social media operations.
Jessica Harrington, guest of Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition with Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton, knows exactly how that feels because she’s lived it. As the Corporate Social Media Manager at Springboard Hospitality, Jessica found herself single-handedly managing social media for 25 different properties. But instead of burning out, she transformed her role and built a scalable system that not only improved results but actually saved money. She’s here to share how she did it and, more importantly, how you can, too.
[Listen to the full episode below, or read along for the transcript of the Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Introduction: Springboard Hospitality
Mike Allton: I wonder if you could start by just painting a picture of what your typical day looked like when you were managing those 25 properties by yourself.
Jessica Harrington: Yeah, sure. I think I’m going to paint it more on a monthly basis.
At the beginning of my month, I was doing all the reporting for these 25 different properties. Then the second half of my month was focused on creating those content calendars. And then I feel like every day there was always something else, too. Community management was always happening. There are always designs that need to be created. There’s typically always at least one property that we were onboarding as well. So that was a special project that was happening in the background and then with it being 25 properties, that was 25 different teams.
There was lots of communication, emailing, and meetings. I’m just getting pulled in a lot of different directions, you could say.
Tell me a little bit about those properties. Where are they? What do they look like? What kinds of hotels are we talking about?
Jessica Harrington: At Springboard, we have properties from Hawaii to the East Coast, so we’re in all the U. S. time zones. Each is very different from the next. They’re largely boutique properties, so just one-off. So you have one brand that you know, and then you have each property as its own different branding.
Essentially, it was a lot.
Mike Allton: You mentioned onboarding. So that tells me this group is acquiring these new hotels, these boutique hotels, and bringing on their staff and maybe they’ve got a marketing team, maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ve got social media, maybe they don’t.
Is that the kind of situation you were running into?
Jessica Harrington: Yeah. So we have a marketing team, and each property has its marketing manager, so I work very closely with all of them. With the onboarding, it’s interesting because sometimes there is a social presence and you have to like, take that over. I’m sure most social media managers know the struggle of dealing with Meta and locked accounts and trying to get back into them.
That was a big component. And then in other cases, they might not have had a social media presence at all. So then it’s starting from the ground up and building that.
I think both are equally time-consuming in their own way.
Indicators That a Social Media Team Was Needed
What were some of the things that were going on? [What were] some of the key indicators that told you you couldn’t keep going this way, [that] this model of maintaining all these properties yourself just wasn’t sustainable?
Jessica Harrington: Yeah, there were several things.
A big one for me was that I just didn’t have time to have a true strategy for each of these properties.
I was just creating these calendars to hit my minimum number of posts for the month. And then certain items started to fall to the wayside. For example, Stories were always a manual task. You’d have to actually go into Instagram, post the story, and add in your text and then community management—which is such an important one because you have guests reaching out, wanting to know about a room type or an amenity. If you don’t respond to them fast enough, you can lose them! And that’s dollars lost.
Then I feel like lastly was having to say no to my marketing managers and general managers when they’re like, “Can we do giveaways and host influencers, and when are we going to launch that TikTok account?” I didn’t have the bandwidth to do these things, but I knew they’d be so beneficial for these properties.
As part of organic social, there are so many platforms and it’s definitely, I think, a bigger conversation, like “Which one should she be on?” And then as I mentioned already, Springboard was just continuing to grow. We were bringing on properties. So, this is already unsustainable.
It’s only going to get more unsustainable if we have more properties to handle.
Mike Allton: Yeah, that is a lot. So you decided at that point you needed help.
The Decision-Making Process for a Social Media Team
Walk us through what that looked like, what that decision process was like in the actual process, and maybe some of the concerns that you had or maybe your management had before you were able to actually bring in help like that.
Jessica Harrington: Yeah. So it was timed. We got a new corporate director of marketing, and he came in and also was, “Whoa, this is not sustainable.”
And I was like, “Yes, I need help.”
So he was really great, and we created this together. He’s been very supportive through it. So, that was the first thing: the two of us aligning being like, “What is the best route forward?” We chose to go with hiring local contractors versus expanding the corporate social media team.
The reason we did was because we wanted people who were actually in these destinations where our properties were. I can’t be in all of them. If we expanded our corporate team, they wouldn’t be able to go to all of them all the time. So, we really want people who are familiar with the destination to go to the property on a monthly basis, get to know the property team, stay at the property if they want to, and experience that whole check-in and staying at the property. So that’s why we went that route.
Mike Allton: That is hugely important, that ability to be on site. That’s something we talked about in our very first episode with the social media manager for MGM Grand.
Were these agencies or freelancers or what in each individual city where you had a hotel?
Jessica Harrington: It was a little bit of all of it. Some of it was freelancers, and in some cases, we work with agencies as well. Then in some cases, we decided that a director of experience would be best to take on social media.
This either was maybe a role that already existed at the property or because the property just had a lot of onsite activations, we decided that a director of experience would make sense and then they could also take on that social media. So those were the three main buckets that we were looking at.
But in most cases, we moved forward with local contractors. And some of them have just one property. Some of them have a few properties. For example, we have a handful of Waikiki properties, and we have one contractor managing all of those.
Finding/Vetting Contractors
I’d love if you could explore a little bit further about how you actually found and vetted some of these contractors.
Jessica Harrington: I remember when I started the hiring and onboarding process saying to my friends, I was like, “I’m my own little HR agency.”
I’m really running it from having the job listing go up, then hiring this person and training them. So, that was definitely a scary one to do at first, but what I mostly did was either first reach out to the GM [and] let them know this is happening and see if they had any recommendations. And then if they did not, I put a posting on Indeed, and Indeed is where I found the majority of my contractors.
Just kind of went through the standard interview process. And in that what I was looking for, as we’ve said a few times, was that they were in driving distance from the property and that they also had a good eye for photography.
We wanted to be able to use content that they were going to the property and getting UGC content, too, as is much more of the trend these days. I feel like TikTok initiated that and it spread into Instagram and Facebook.
Those were the two big components that I was looking for when hiring these people.
Managing Your Social Media Team
How did you manage your social media team? What kind of processes did you put into place to ensure that they were being consistent [and] that the work was going out was quality?
Jessica Harrington: Honestly, it was a year ago that this journey all began. So first it was identifying which properties we wanted to hire for first. And with that, which properties would take the most off my plate? Those were the ones that I tried to get out of the way first.
I found pretty quickly that it was a two-month process from putting the job listing up to getting that first onboarding call happening. And I would do two to three properties at a time that I would be actively hiring for.
Initially it was a slight increase in workload because I still was managing these content calendars but also hiring for them. But once I got those first few out of the way, it just started to flow very naturally, and then I already had my job listing set up. I already had the interview questions I wanted to get ready to go. I had my onboarding documents, so it just ebbed and flowed naturally after I got those first two properties out of the way.
Managing Contractors
I’d love it if you could talk a little bit more about how you’re managing all these different contractors. How many actual contractors do you have?
Jessica Harrington: I think we’re somewhere between 10 and 15 right now.
I have monthly calls with all my contractors just to talk about how the last month did and what we’re looking ahead to do for the quarter and the next month. Then also the social media management tool we use, which is Hootsuite, has been really helpful in streamlining, that workflow. Originally we were using Meta, which is not very user-friendly. It can be glitchy, and all the feedback was just living in the emails. So that has been really helpful in having everything live on one platform.
As far as maintaining brand standards, a lot of these properties didn’t have a true brand book. The newer properties that we’ve been onboarding, it’s been a much more common thing for them, if there isn’t a brand book already, that they go through like a brand immersion. A lot of these properties had their brand kit with color, logo, and font.
It’s actually been really cool this past year to have these contractors who are, like I said, getting to go to the property and meet the team, bring these brands to life on organic social, and figure out what that brand standard is. It’s been exciting to see. I feel like they’ve been the ones creating the standard. Now, going into 2025, I feel like we had our trial-and-error phase of what works and what doesn’t work and being able to pool from “Okay, this is working for one of our Hawaii properties. Maybe we test that out for one of our California ones.”
So yeah, it’s just been a great learning experience this past year. And I think in 2025 we’ll continue to hone in on those brand standards.
Challenges of Leading a Social Media Team
What are the kinds of unexpected challenges did you run into, and how did you overcome them?
Jessica Harrington: One of the biggest challenges was the shift in my role and going from being that person in the day-to-day creating the content calendar [and] doing the community management to taking on this leadership role.
I feel like I can be a perfectionist sometimes. Or I’m sometimes in the mindset of “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” which you cannot do when you’re relying on other people to help you do these things.
Becoming a teacher has been something of a learning curve for me this year. I think I have very gracious contractors, and they’re all very amazing at standardizing the process. Like, “Okay, we’re all going to submit our content calendars via Hootsuite, and we’re all going to create our story designs in Canva. And it’s all going to be due on these dates.”
Just so I can maintain some sense of sustainability and not be pulled in multiple different directions.
Continuing to perfect what that process is with them and continuing to be a teacher and show them how to do things so they can get better at it.
That’s something I can hand off and not be on my plate anymore.
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Measuring Impact
How are you measuring the impact of social media when everyone’s got their own channels and their own channels are all feeding into their own booking and reservation systems? How are you getting a hold of how well they’re all doing?
Jessica Harrington: That is the question I get asked all the time. 2024 was actually the first year we set KPIs for organic social media. Previously, it had just been brand awareness as our goal and a big part of that was [that] I didn’t have the bandwidth to have this goal to work towards.
So, that was an exciting thing for 2024. Those KPIs that we were looking at were average reach rate and then average engagement, average engagement rate by reach, and follower growth. The reason that we chose to hone in on those three was that it paints the picture of “How many unique users are we reaching?”
Those who are engaging with our content and ideally choosing to follow us. I’ve been looking at those numbers. I’ve actually been doing my yearly reporting this past week, and it’s looking good. It looks like we’re hitting a lot of our KPIs, which is awesome. Setting those for the first time was interesting of how to land on it.
Organic social can be so volatile, especially when you have smaller followings, which, again, all your properties are so unique. So it really varies from properties that have under 1000 followers to ones that are going to hit 20k this year.
Everyone got a different goal and I kind of chose that based on how they had done previously if there was data to pull from, then what the yearly averages were for the industry, and creating a number based on that.
Having a year under our belt, I think it’ll be a lot easier to set more realistic goals for this year, and then another big one for this year.
A question that’s always being asked is revenue. How much revenue is organic social bringing in?
An exciting program that I’m hoping to roll out—that I actually can’t take credit for, my colleague did this at another property and saw lots of success—is an affiliate code program when we’re working with influencers. Giving them their own unique affiliate code that when they post their stories or their in-feed post or whatever the exchange may be, they can put that code out there for their followers. This will just help us better track the success of that collaboration and then ideally be able to point to revenue that they were able to bring in.
Revenue is a big one for me and thinking about how we can point to revenue for organic social.
What advice would you give them?
Jessica Harrington: Like I said a year ago, we had been talking about it all at the end of 2023. It was time to launch this program. I remember saying to my manager, I was like, “I’m so excited for this, but it’s also so daunting to be creating this new program.”
My fear going into it was having a little bit of imposter syndrome. It was my first time building out a team. I previously managed people, but the onus on hiring was on me [to] create the onboarding and standards we previously talked about. So that was scary.
My advice would be to just get out of your own head because I feel like once I started doing that and just owned the process, it just started to flow so naturally. If I just got out of my own head and just let it happen and knew that there were going to be mistakes along the way … learn from them, that would be my advice.
Your team, they were so supportive, and I think that was amazing.
Feeling comfortable leaning on them for support when I needed it, especially in introducing this new program to the GMs. And then that also would triple to ownership. Having a fully supportive team behind me.
Don’t be afraid to lean on your team members.
Thank all of you for listening and reading the highlights today. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition on Apple, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Agency Edition, and B2B Edition.