Senior Director, Social Media

Northwestern Mutual; Milwaukee (WI); On-site; USD 131,000 - 196,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwestern Mutual is seeking a Senior Director of Social Media to build and lead the enterprise social brand. You will shape the long-term social strategy, oversee content across platforms, and collaborate with legal, communications, and field teams to drive awareness and recruitment.

You will manage crisis and reputation programs, mentor a team of social professionals, and partner with influencers to strengthen brand relevance across corporate and field audiences.

Qualifications

• Strong strategic vision to lead social media at scale across multiple audiences.
• Proven ability to influence stakeholders and cross-functional teams.
• Experience managing social media strategy, crisis protocols, and reputation management.

Responsibilities

• Social Strategy: Leads long term strategy and daily management of NM Enterprise social media go-to-market across all audiences.
• Community Management: Oversees engagement to build proactive brand conversations.
• Reputation Management: Guides brand reputation with proactive monitoring and timely responses.
• Crisis Management: Manages social crisis protocols with internal and external partners.
• Influencer Strategy: Leads enterprise influencer partnerships and team execution.
• Field Social: Supports social media best practices for financial professionals nationwide.
• Social Content: Oversees content strategy and asset creation aligned with brand voice.
• Budget Management: Oversees budgets and reporting for social investments.
• Reporting: Analyzes and reports on social media efforts and brand health benchmarks.

Skills

Strategic Vision & Planning

Customer, Market & Ecosystem Knowledge

Business Influence

Adaptive Communication

Analytical Thinking

Talent Development & Planning

Customer Centricity

Leadership / People Management

Job description

Senior Director, Social Media

About the Job

This role is responsible for building NM’s social brand and presence. A proven thought leader with the ability to lead social media programming across multiple platforms, supporting both field and enterprise social channels. This role will play a critical role in the ongoing transformation of the company’s business, with a continued focus on the power of social media to drive ongoing awareness, recruitment, and increased brand relevance.

What You’ll Do

• Social Strategy - Leads long term strategy and daily management of NM Enterprise social media go-to-market approach across all audiences (corporate, consumer, field) and social media platforms. Lead social media activation for all integrated marketing campaigns and initiatives, managing strategy through execution.
• Community Management - Oversees community management strategy, looking at ways to build proactive engagement around the brand, both as part of campaigns as well as in day-to-day culturally relevant conversations that build deeper consumer connection with our brand.
• Reputation Management – Leads the brand’s reputation strategy on Reddit, establishing a credible and transparent presence through proactive community participation, issue monitoring, and timely engagement. Partners with communications, legal, compliance, customer service and other internal teams to identify emerging reputation risks, guide appropriate responses and use community insights to strengthen trust in the brand.
• Crisis Management – Key member of internal crisis escalation team, represents social crisis programs. This includes driving protocols required, as well as managing response with internal partners as well as managing external crisis response partner team and messaging.
• Influencer Strategy – Leadership of ongoing influencer strategy for the enterprise brand, working with multiple tiers of influencer partners. Manages team executing influencer strategy and plan.
• Field Social – Supports delivering best-in-class approach to using social media for NM’s field force – financial advisors across the country. Build and nurture strong relationships across the field, establishing credibility as a trusted social media subject matter expert and thought leader.
• Social Content - Leads team delivering social content strategy and asset creation; including integration with internal teams necessary to deliver content and programming built for social feeds, while ensuring all work aligns with the brand’s visual aesthetic and tone of voice.
• Budget Management – Oversees budgets and manages reporting to enable social channel investment decisions.
• Reporting – Drives analysis and reporting on all social media efforts, on a campaign basis as well as inputting broader brand health-related measurement. Sets benchmarks for measurement of brand social.

What You’ll Bring to the Role

Bachelor’s degree in a related field Minimum of 12 years of relevant experience, agency or client side. Experience working with clients in financial services, or a regulated industry a plus. Deep working knowledge of social media channels, beyond just a passion for the space; knowledge that translates into the ability to deliver strategic understanding of user and enterprise-level strategy. Understanding of the ever-changing digital landscape and an eye for emerging channels, trends and examples. Calm under pressure with experience in crisis management protocols. Exceptional presentation skills both verbal and written, formal, and informal. Highly organized, proactive and a critical, creative thinker under pressure. Experience leading people with ability to manage and cultivate junior staff and effectively collaborate with agency partners and contractors. Demonstrated experience developing direct reports and influence-managing matrixed teams is required. Exceptional organizational skills leading to flawless execution of tactical plans is required. A culture watcher with the ability to translate all that is happening in the world in the right way for the Northwestern Mutual brand.

Skills You Have

• Strategic Vision & Planning: Develops, defines, and executes strategic vision for the team and business function they manage with an understanding of the enterprise’s goals as a people manager; defines business planning, strategy formulation, and management engine to support strategic vision.
• Customer, Market & Ecosystem Knowledge: Understanding of market or customer-specific product use-cases, ecosystem dependencies, and competitor offerings. Ability to conduct or interpret competitive analysis of features with key competitive products.
• Business Influence: Collaborates, communicates and influences direct reports, stakeholders, and other business functions based on understanding of the marketplace, organizational needs, and the client as a people manager.
• Adaptive Communication: Formulates strategies to be used to convey complex information about services, products, systems, or processes to targeted audiences; communicates and liaises between technical and non-technical audiences.
• Analytical Thinking: Organizes and compares various aspects of a situation to comprehend and identify key or underlying complex issues through the use of quantitative data and analysis; leverages strong business acumen, problem solving, and interpersonal skills to think critically about situations from multiple perspectives and consistently seeks ways to improve processes.
• Talent Development & Planning: Develops direct reports’ skills based on organizational objectives, evaluates skill gaps, and manages succession planning to develop more capable direct reports, diverse, strong teams and better organizational performance in an equitable and inclusive manner.
• Customer Centricity: Applies a customer first mindset to design and continuously improve solutions, systems, processes, and services that support enterprise strategy, impact critical business outcomes, and drive organizational success.
• #LI-Hybrid

Compensation Range

• Pay Range - Start: $130,800.00 Pay Range - End: $196,200.00
• Geographic Specific Pay Structure: Structure 110: $143,920.00 USD - $215,880.00 USD Structure 115: $150,400.00 USD - $225,600.00 USD

We believe in fairness and transparency. It’s why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process.

The standard pay structure is listed but if you’re living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable,

Grow your career with a best-in-class company that puts our clients' interests at the center of all we do.

Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes talented individuals of all backgrounds.

We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.

At Northwestern Mutual, we believe relationships are built on trust. That our lives and our work matter. These beliefs launched our company over 160 years ago. Today, they're just a few of the reasons why people choose to build careers at Northwestern Mutual. What started in Milwaukee, WI has grown into 7,000+ home office professionals split across 3 campuses: New York City, Franklin and downtown Milwaukee (HQ) - each one bringing with it its own unique talent and culture.

In a company with such a long and storied history, this may be the most exciting and important time to be a part of Northwestern Mutual as we are growing our digital and tech capabilities and are always on the lookout for bright, tech-savvy candidates.

Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes talented individuals of all backgrounds.

We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.