Brilliant Agency

Lisa Vetrone has worked in social media since the start of her career, building experience across every facet of the discipline, including customer service, creative briefing, trend analysis and strategy, graphic design, video editing, metrics and reporting, while differentiating for every brand. This ground-up experience has shaped her leadership philosophy, emphasizing the importance of dedicated teams rather than one person managing multiple social accounts across numerous brands, concentrated focus and open communication that enables agility, experimentation and clear expectations around what organic social can and cannot do. Having been in her team's shoes, she advocates for them with a deep understanding that social media is a time-consuming, entirely forwardfacing and often Sisyphean thankless profession requiring total immersion.

Building Strategy before Creating Content

It starts at the outset with every brand. We always deliver a foundational handbook before a single post is created, let alone published, one that codifies everything from overarching messaging down to the emojis we'll use in a comment. During onboarding, we also share profile inspiration and react to trends and posts together, to gauge a brand's comfort level with testing tone and pushing limits. Setting clear, data-driven goals rooted in benchmarks, competitive analysis and profile size helps manage expectations around what organic social can realistically deliver and how it informs and is informed by the rest of the marketing mix.

Aligning on all of this up front (while treating it as a living, evolving document) defines who the brand is and how they show up on social, so we can show up authentically, while setting guardrails for creative ideation and execution. That open dialogue and level-setting is what lets us build a strategy where every pillar, post, comment and follow ladders up to a brand’s larger business objectives.

Leading with Empathy and Flexibility

Having done the job myself, I lead with a person-first approach. I can identify with my team, understand their limits and help them stay realistic about how much they can take on advocating for them so we avoid burnout in a job that's always-on. That ties back to the balance question above: I coach my team to anchor the calendar first around key messages, dates and promotions, then build in flexibility for timely content, pop culture moments and reactive posts. That way they're prepared without the content ever feeling stale.

“Leading with social interaction rather than defaulting to entertainment, education or straight promotion is what drives the most meaningful engagement.”

I also encourage them to immerse themselves in social media to watch what audiences are actually engaging with on brands' FYPs and feeds, and let that shape the execution. Social is one medium that’s truly two-way, and to do it right, there has to be a responsive listening element. There are more tools than ever for tracking trends, data and ideas, but the feedback I give most consistently is simpler: does this make sense for the brand as a concept and are we executing it only the way this brand, specifically, would?

The Future of Social Media Starts with Human Connection

At its core, social media is social. The question is always: what makes someone want to share this with a friend? What resonates with them at a comment or customer-service level? Leading with that social interaction rather than defaulting to entertainment, education or straight promotion is what drives the most meaningful engagement.

Never stop learning. Watch what's trending, but also track the small platform updates. Those incremental changes add up to macro shifts and signal where the industry is headed and what each platform is prioritizing.

That awareness helps you build the case for testing new formats, approaches and trends.

Two skills matter most: writing and curating. Being intentional from word choice to color choice is what makes your content distinct to your brand. Avoiding anything that "feels generic," like it could belong to any brand in the vertical. That starts with being deliberate about every choice.

Finally, don't try to be everything, but do try to learn about everything. Speaking the language of paid campaigns, creative direction, influencer marketing and affiliate integration matters because they all inform what happens on social. But no one excels at every piece of the puzzle. Know your limitations, then go all-in on the parts that inspire you most – focus is what makes the pace sustainable, and its how you can do your best work.