Anushka R.
Social Media Strategist
SUMMARY OF EXPERIENCE
• 5+ years of marketing experience across content, campaigns and social media, with the last 3+ years focused on D2C brand building at Made with Spin (furniture) and Meau (skincare), where she led social strategy, influencer marketing and Meta ad campaigns end-to-end.
• At Made with Spin, she conceptualised and executed 12+ campaigns, built a creator bench of 100+ KOLs, and optimised Meta ad campaigns to deliver conversion rates of 0.55–0.76% – while also leading a cross-functional team and managing external PR and creative agencies.
• Prior to her in-house roles, she built two YouTube channels independently to 78k+ and 33k+ subscribers, scripting, filming and editing 100+ videos, founding a virtual book club that hit 1,200+ members in 24 hours, and launching a podcast – all of which point to strong organic community-building instincts
👍 What we loved about them
• Cares about the why behind things: When she joined her current company, she noticed that their reach was strong but conversions were flat, and instead of just continuing to post, she stopped and asked why. She figured out that customers were seeing the products but didn't have enough context to actually buy – so she restructured the entire campaign, led with feature-driven carousels first, followed by lifestyle video content, and conversions went from around 6 per carousel to 96. It's encouraging to see that she thinks about what content is supposed to do rather than just producing it.
• Doesn't crumble under pressure: Every crisis scenario we threw at her in the technical interview (the viral Twitter thread, the angry Facebook comment, the coordinated Reddit pile-on) she handled with the same calm, measured approach. Her instinct was always to empathise first, get the facts straight, say what the brand needs to say once, and then not keep feeding the fire. She also made the point that responding to every negative comment actually diminishes brand value, which we felt was a nuanced and appropriate read on how public scrutiny works online.
• Multi-skilled and a self-starter: She built a YouTube channel to 78k subscribers entirely on her own – scripting, filming, editing, SEO, which has clearly given her a depth of understanding around video storytelling that most people in coordinator roles simply don't have. She knows how to hold an audience's attention over a longer format, how to structure a narrative, and how to make something feel authentic rather than produced.
• Strong ownership and collaboration skills: She's currently managing a small team (two designers and a social media executive) while also being the main point of contact with the company director for approvals and strategy sign-off. She writes briefs, runs the feedback loop with stakeholders, coordinates with external agencies, and takes ownership of the end-to-end process. She didn't come across as someone who waits to be told what to do next. If the role requires her to work fairly independently and manage relationships with a client she's never met in person, we believe she's proactive and self-sufficient in her approach.
ℹ️ Things to be aware of
• TL'DR: Anushka is a capable, commercially aware, and genuinely creative social media marketer who punches above her title in several areas. She's particularly strong on content strategy, campaign thinking, and brand voice, and she brings a level of creative confidence that's hard to teach. The gaps – mainly Reddit mechanics and X depth – are learnable, and they're not central to her core value. If you're looking for someone who can hit the ground running on content, campaigns, and community management, she's a strong candidate worth progressing.
• She has a notice period of 30 days.
• She needs to feel trusted with her ideas; she was fairly open about this in the discovery call – for e.g., if she brings a data-backed idea to the table and it keeps getting shot down without real reason, that's a red flag for her and she'll eventually disengage. That's a healthy thing in any candidate, and it means you're getting someone who actually cares about the work rather than just going through the motions.
💁♀️ Where he may need support
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Although he lacks extensive experience with LinkedIn and Bing ads, his proficiency in Google ads suggests a high adaptability to new platforms.
👩💻 Technical interview performance
Objective
This candidate was invited to a 60-minute follow-up interview to assess their technical capabilities in more detail. During this interview, we assessed their critical-thinking skills, technical expertise, and overall conversational skills.
Technical abilities
• Content strategy and planning [8.5/10]: Anushka's campaign thinking is probably her strongest suit. The furniture brand example she walked through during the interview shows she understands how to diagnose a problem (e.g. good reach but poor conversions) and restructure content around it, separating feature-led carousels from lifestyle video formats across different funnel stages. She has clearly picked up real commercial intuition from working in fast-moving D2C environments. Her calendar management is also solid – planning three to four weeks ahead for regular months and well over a month for sale periods, with room to adapt based on performance. The 60/40 split she described between conversion and brand campaigns also reflects a realistic understanding of how social media budgets tend to be allocated in most brand environments. Where she's a bit thinner is on long-term strategic planning; she thinks well in monthly cycles, but there's less evidence of how she thinks across quarters or maps content to broader brand objectives.
• Community engagement and crisis management [7.5/10]: She handles the crisis scenarios thoughtfully and with a calm head. Her instinct to empathise first, state the brand's position clearly once, and then step back from the back-and-forth is the right approach, particularly for a brand in a sensitive industry like pork farming. On the Facebook comment scenario, she correctly identified it as a personal story and suggested responding with updated facts and policy information rather than getting defensive. Her approach to coordinated attacks is also practical: block specific words, pin a brand response rather than engaging comment by comment, and escalate when things are beyond her control. We also liked that she brought up the idea of proactively publishing brand-side content as a counter-narrative, rather than just playing defence.
• Platform knowledge and audience understanding [7/10]: Her Instagram and Meta knowledge is the most developed of the four platforms. She understands the emotional and aesthetic expectations of Instagram audiences well, and her thinking around using video to humanise a brand like NCPC (i.e. specifically building on the "Meet the Farmer" campaign with day-in-the-life content) is a good fit for the brief. Her read on Facebook as a mass-awareness platform versus Instagram as a more niche, polished environment is accurate, even if it's a fairly standard distinction. Regarding Reddit – she understands it's community-first and not brand-led, but doesn't really get into the mechanics of how to build presence there, things like subreddit norms, karma, or native content formats. Her X thinking is also fairly surface-level; she defaults to it as a quicker, brand-facing alternative to Reddit but doesn't really explore what makes X content work – reactive timing, threading, or tapping into trending conversations, for example.
• Writing ability and tone adaptability [6.5/10]: The Instagram caption has some decent instincts – it's conversational, locally resonant with the "true North Carolinian" line, and it has a clear CTA. But, we felt that it reads a bit flat in places and doesn't really lean into storytelling or emotion, which is what Instagram audiences tend to respond to. Something like opening with a farmer's story or a specific community moment would have given it more texture. The X post is also functional but not particularly compelling – it asks a question, answers it, and points to the blog. It does the job, but it doesn't really use the platform's strengths. And the Reddit comment being a direct copy-paste of the X post is the most telling gap here – she acknowledged it herself, and it confirms that she doesn't yet have a strong instinct for what native Reddit writing sounds like. Reddit audiences are sharp and they spot promotional or off-platform copy very quickly.
Areas of growth
• Her writing improves significantly when she's speaking out loud and thinking through scenarios, so it's worth her working on translating that natural, conversational voice into written copy. Reading and analysing brand copy across platforms she's less familiar with – particularly Reddit – would help her develop a more distinct voice for each.