At Travel and Leisure, Erika Owen combines her knack for writing and love of social media
Like many magazine journalism students before her, Erika Owen started her career as a fact-checker and worked her way up to an editorial assistant. A little boredom led to a social media position at Martha Stewart Living, where she had the opportunity to hone her social media skills and experiment with various social platforms.
However, Owen soon found that she really missed writing. Eventually she landed the role of audience engagement editor at Travel and Leisure, where she oversees the magazine’s social strategy, combined with producing compelling digital content based on what is trending on social platforms. It was a journey that took “a little bit of time”, but Owen has finally found her “happy medium between social media and writing” and a job that she absolutely loves.
I spoke to Owen recently, by telephone, to find out more about what her day-to-day role entails, as well as her personal views on social media and how she thinks it will evolve.
On her responsibilities as audience engagement editor: I’m responsible for developing our overall social strategy, including our bigger campaign ideas. I also come up with a “big hitter” list so that if one day our traffic is down, I can post something quickly from the list to push up our traffic for the rest of the day. I also write articles for the website based on what’s trending on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Recently, for example, there was a big trend on the “Star Wars plane.” We quickly wrote up something for that so that if people search “Star Wars plane” on social media, our content would be the first to come up.
On who she works with to run Travel and Leisure’s social media accounts: I work with Lindsey Campbell, who is our associate editor for audience engagement. Lindsey writes the day-to-day copy and has free reign over what stories we are promoting and at what time. She has a lot of experience writing copy for social media and is great at what she does, which is important because there is only two of us working in social media.
On catering to Travel and Leisure’s different audiences: There is a big distinction between our digital and print audience, as well as our audiences who follow us across the different social platforms.
Our print publication is geared towards individuals with a large expendable income, whereas our digital audience tend to be younger and don’t necessarily fall into that income bracket. The reason why we focus on pushing our digital content through social media is that we want to nurture our younger readers into becoming consumers of our print publication as they move into a higher income bracket.
In terms of our social audiences, we found that the average age of our Facebook followers are from 24 to 30. They’re a little older on Twitter, although still within similar age bracket. Pinterest is really interesting, because it tends to attract older females over the age of 40.
On the role of Travel + Leisure contributors and social media: At the moment, they put a lot of trust on how we promote their content and it’s been pretty good. Our digital editor, Amy Schellenbaum, has a really good eye for social and will jump on to make suggestions from time to time.
Our digital travel editor, Corina Quinn, is currently working on building a global network of writers so she is slowly integrating them into social media. For example, she has a writer in Los Angeles so that writer will probably handle the Los Angeles Pinterest account. As we look more into platforms like Vine, Snapchat and Periscope, we will probably look to have people on the ground that are posting to those platforms. So we do envision a greater role for contributors with respect to social media activities and we are working slowly to integrate them.
On what Travel and Leisure does well on social media: I think our Instagram account is really unique. Instead of blasting our account with our own content, we curate content from our travel community and that’s been one of the ways that we’ve really been able to make Travel and Leisure’s account our own.
In terms of what drives traffic, I would say it is Facebook. You wouldn’t know it from the front-end but on the back-end we’re consistently exceeding our competitors’ reach, particularly around the stories that are trending that day.
On what Travel and Leisure hopes to do better: We really want to build our Pinterest account, because there is so much potential there with partnerships that we can take advantage of. Twitter is also a little bit tough to crack because the travel community can be a little quirky. You think that they’ll really love something and then it goes totally unnoticed, and something that’s small and not even written with social media in mind will take off.
On using social media personally: I personally really love it, I think it’s a fantastic way to connect with people and also to show the world who you are as a person.
On the role of social media in journalism: I think that the role of social media in journalism will definitely evolve. We’re very lucky in that much of the growth has been organic, but eventually I think we will have to begin paying for some of that growth. For example, Pinterest is now filled with pins that are handpicked for you. Eventually I think brands and publications will have to pay for those spots, which is going to make it difficult for smaller brands to stand out if they don’t have the money.
On getting into social media as a career: The most important thing is honing your writing skills. Having an understanding of print media also really helped me gain respect amongst the more traditional journalists who may not understand the digital space. You’re a step ahead if you work on social media and you have a strong understanding of traditional print media, because you can explain why something that might work in print won’t work on the web.
In terms of social presence, the common sense on not posting your drunk pictures applies, but I would say that it’s important to be active and not be scared to develop your own voice. Even when you’re writing copy that adopt the brand’s tone and voice, it’s still going to be you writing it. So have a personality and don’t be afraid to push it. And keep it up!
(Note: this interview has been condensed and edited for content.)
