Meet Shanna Cook, Picsart’s director of social media and influencer marketing

If you want to have a career in social media, Shanna Cook might be the person to talk to. Cook, now director of social media and influencer marketing at photo and video editing platform Picsart, has held several social roles over the past 12 years—arguably longer than many of her contemporaries.

Over that time, she’s learned a thing or two at companies like Too Faced Cosmetics, Intel, Nokia, and more.

Marketing Brew sat down with her to glean some words of wisdom about working in social media at brands for a decade plus.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Marketing Brew: What does a typical day look like for you in this role?

Shanna Cook: The mornings always start in meetings for me. Picsart is a global company; we have offices worldwide, so half of my team is actually 11 hours away from me—during winter it becomes 12 hours—so mornings are meetings, Slack, catching up on what happened overnight…Then, I usually will spend the afternoon doing reports, any strategy work like creative sessions, any brainstorms with my team that’s US-based, just to make sure that everyone gets some of my dedicated time.

MB: How many people report to you, and what do they do?

SC: I have five direct reports. Three of them oversee social channels—so they’re creating content for their channels and for each other, posting on their channels, and doing community management. One of them does social reporting, so we’re able to aggregate our learnings every month. But that’s three of them—social media managers/content producers in your typical sense. The fourth oversees our influencer marketing program. The fifth report is our editor of content marketing [who] oversees the editorial blog side.

MB: Who do you report to?

SC: I report to our SVP of marketing—he’s the most senior person in marketing and reports to our CEO and founder.

MB: If you think about the previous jobs that you’ve had in your career, which one do you think best prepared you for being a head of social today?

SC: We’re all kind of a mosaic of our past. But you learn something at every job—and, if not, you should be learning something at every job. I think the interesting thing about social is that it’s constantly changing. So what I learned are best tips and practices from one, you can’t necessarily apply to the other. My last role was two and a half years ago at another company—all of that social data is old. But I think the overall strategy, the thought process, the creative techniques—and the management and leadership style—are what you take forward.

From that perspective, I think the role I had when I was working in beauty—I had the same title at Too Faced Cosmetics—prepared me really well for what I do now, because it was my first foray into deep influencer marketing at a very pay-to-play, tactical level. That really taught me a lot about what we do here, because when I started at Picsart, we had only done one influencer campaign before. Our influencer program was very nascent, and now it’s a flourishing program that we activate upon every single day.

MB: Can you name the social media platforms that you consistently use at Picsart?

SC: We are big on Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter…If you look at Venn diagrams of social platforms, most people are on multiple [platforms], not just one. As a brand, you don’t need to be on every single platform to reach your audience. If anything, they’re probably not going to be following you on every single platform they’re on. That’s kind of been our approach. But our claim to fame is that we have more followers on Pinterest than Pinterest has on Pinterest.

MB: Do you think that, if you want to make it to the C-suite as a marketer, you have to diversify your skillset beyond social media?

SC: When I was very junior—I had been working for maybe four years—I was looking to leave the company I was at because I felt like I needed something new. And I asked someone, “Should I look for product marketing or demand gen marketing-adjacent roles?” And she said, “Shanna, you can either go wide or you can go deep, and you’re so young in your career, but social media is so nascent, and very few people have this many years of experience already. Your competitive advantage is going deep in your vertical and just really owning it and being the person that really knows it, because you breathe it every single day.” And I was like, “Damn, you’re right, I can’t compete with somebody [at] VP or director level that has 20 years of experience.” So I went deep, which I still appreciate, and I think was the right move.