This social media manager's secret weapon? Her team

“We're working 40 hours a week,” says Enara Roy. “Might as well add some fun into it.”

Roy is someone who puts emojis in her emails, takes dance classes on weeknights, and is building a career around convincing brands to loosen their grip. She’s also a native New Yorker — Queens raised, Brooklyn for high school, Manhattan for college — who recently traded New York’s chaotic comfort for Austin’s small but mighty promise.

Roy spent a year and a half at Sweet Loren’s, the number one natural cookie dough brand in the U.S., where she helped the brand rack up 65 million organic impressions, built relationships with 350+ creators, and launched limited-edition collabs with Barbie and Hello Kitty. The work earned her an Inc. Magazine Best of Social Media 2025 award.

A few months ago, Roy made what she calls her most adventurous professional leap yet: She went freelance. “I think after a while, I had this calling to diversify what I was working on,” she says.

For Roy, the world of social media will always be evolving, and that’s the beauty of it.

Here’s what she’s gleaned along the way.

Embrace the Mistakes

Right before Roy was about to leave for vacation, her intern sent a panicked text: She had accidentally changed the brand’s TikTok name to her own. Roy’s first instinct was to embrace it.

“I really wasn‘t that concerned,” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s actually funny.’” Her intern, Ryan, on the other hand, was stressing out. “I needed to put my manager hat on and tell her, ‘Don’t worry. Everything in life is solvable.’”

They landed on a game plan: To lean in and make content around it.

Ryan spent the weekend grinding out TikToks; the moment reached 3 million people on TikTok alone. And that’s before Roy herself shared the experience on her own buzzing LinkedIn. When she eventually did, sharing screenshots of their text exchange, it generated another 1.5 million impressions.

“Neither of us expected this was going to happen,” says Roy. “We were just rolling with it.”

Key takeaway: Crisis can actually be content. Sometimes, the best direction a brand can take is to show what happens behind the scenes when things don’t go to plan.

Your team is your best asset

The viral moment landed so well because of something Roy had already been seeding.

“Employee-generated content is so, so special and so important, especially in 2026,” says Roy.

“Brands are finding it hard to feel relatable and stay top of mind. But when you're able to do it through the lens of your team, it just makes it so much more impactful. People want to be part of the story.”

Building this kind of culture is the mark of a social media leader who knows the role goes far deeper than going viral, despite popular belief. “You’re getting your audience’s feedback in real time — do they like it, do they not, was this post picked up by the algorithm? And then also internally, you have to make sure that retail is happy, sales is happy,” says Roy.

The mission is to create content that’s fun and surprising and maybe a little out there, she says, without losing sight of what the brand actually stands for.

Roy’s results speak for themselves: She helped lead one of the first LinkedIn creator campaigns by a D2C brand, ultimately generating over 4 million impressions through employee-generated content alone.

Key takeaway: Your team can be your brand’s most compelling storytellers.

Brief with breathing room

One of Roy’s favorite campaigns to date was a partnership with Jersey Joe, a TikTok dancer known for his spontaneous, high-energy videos. The idea was to have him dance through the cookie dough aisle at Wegmans and fill his cart with Sweet Loren’s treats. But Roy didn’t give a super specific brief.

That left room for moments like the very end, when the cashier’s reaction was captured at checkout — true confusion watching a man dance through the line with 30 packs of cookie dough.

That moment became the most-commented part of the video — a video that hit 1 million views on TikTok and another 600k on Instagram.

“Had we told him exactly what to do, we would have missed it,” says Roy, shouting out a fellow LinkedIn creator Gabriel Gomez, who recently spoke on a panel highlighting exactly what this is: the art of co-creating.

“When you let people create, the best outcomes will happen,” she adds. “It’s coming straight from their mind and their heart and their soul.”

Key takeaway: The best content brief leaves room for the unexpected. Trust your creators to find the moments you never could have planned.