Social Media Manager - Foodies of SA

About Engage Video Group

Engage Video Group is a technology-driven social media video business combining data and creativity to create content people really care about. We have worked with global corporations such as Unilever and NESTLÉ to produce the most engaging, shareable content for some of the world’s largest brands, and have built and own the largest food and recipe social media platform in Africa, Foodies of SA.

At the end of 2022, we embarked on a new journey exploring the possibilities outside of food. We wanted to see if we could utilise our unique tech stack for brands in different categories - and yes, we absolutely can! This business unit is called Optimised Creators, focusing on unlocking the power of the creator economy on TikTok to drive high-impact brand messaging. To date, we have worked with clients like Philips, Simba, Vaseline, HomeChoice, Takealot, and Mr D - with plenty more on the horizon.

Our Purpose

We believe the advertising industry has a problem: people hate ads. This is why ad-centric content is polluting our social feeds and leading to customer mistrust. By tapping into audience data and testing our content against this audience in real-time, we’re able to create optimised content around topics customers really care about in the format they love to watch.

Our Culture

You’ve probably picked up that we’re pretty passionate about what we do. While we operate

globally and have grown fast, we’re a startup at heart, driving real change in the industry through a group of A-players and creatives who are continuously looking to do things differently. Because we prioritise team care over ego, we also happen to have a lot of fun in what we do, too.

About the role

You own the Foodies of SA pages day to day: the calendar, the captions, a good chunk of the content itself, and what happens in the comments afterwards.

Mid-weight means you don’t need the strategy handed to you post by post. You take a theme or brand collab brief, build the plan, make or brief the assets, publish on time, and come back with a read on what worked.

You’re a maker, not just a manager, food content is the whole job, and community is half of it.

Core responsibilities

1. Content calendar and publishing

Build and own the monthly Foodies calendar across all owned platforms  Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Whatsapp  and YouTube Shorts, from agreed themes, series and brand-collab briefs

- Balance the mix deliberately: recipe content, series episodes, trend-led reactive posts, community mechanics and partnership content.

- Write captions, hooks and on-platform copy in the Foodies voice, including discoverability basics (hashtags, keywords, alt text)

- Brief Design and Production for the assets you need

- Schedule and publish everything, own posting times and frequency, and keep the calendar accurate as the single source of truth

- Repurpose creator and campaign content for the Foodies pages (cutdowns, reformats, carousels) without losing the original intent

- Own seasonal and occasion-led moments on the pages: Heritage, festive, braai season, back-to-school etc.

2. Content creation

- Build social assets off existing templates (carousels, statics, story frames, covers, thumbnails) and brief Design when something needs to be built from scratch

- Protect the Foodies identity on-platform

- Keep the asset library and template set in good shape so the pages never go quiet for want of something to post

On design: hands-on design skill is a bonus, not a requirement. You need enough craft to work confidently inside our templates and judge          whether something is on-brand; Design handles the rest. If you can design from scratch, you’ll get to.

3. Community management

- Run Foodies comments and DMs to the community SOP: response windows, tone, escalation path for complaints and brand-risk moments

- Seed and sustain engagement deliberately: replies that earn replies, saves, shares and conversation, not just acknowledgement

- Spot and surface community insight (recurring recipe requests, questions, sentiment shifts) to Strategy, and into brand pitches where it’s useful evidence

- Run community mechanics: polls, recipe requests, UGC call-outs, comment-led content ideas

4. Performance and reporting

Track and report Foodies performance monthly: reach, watch time and retention, saves, shares, follower growth, engagement rate

- Report on brand-collab content separately, in a form that can go straight into a client wrap report

- Run the test-and-learn loop: form hypotheses on format, hook, length and posting time, test them, and write up what you learned

- Turn the numbers into a short, honest narrative (what worked, what didn’t, what we’re changing), not a screenshot dump

- Feed learnings into the next calendar or campaign, into creator briefs, and into EVG’s point of view on what performs in food content

5. Trends and platform fluency

- Stay genuinely current on platform changes, formats and trends, and judge which ones fit the brand and which don’t

- Move fast on reactive and trend-led content when the window is real, with a clear sense of brand fit

- Keep the social toolkit tidy: templates, caption banks, asset libraries, tagging conventions

- Document how you work in ClickUp so the channel can be covered when you’re on leave

Must-haves

- 3-5 years running social media channels in-house or agency-side, with real ownership of a calendar and its results

- Content creation ability: can shoot and edit short-form video and stills yourself (phone-first is fine) in CapCut, Premiere or equivalent, including captions, overlays, pacing and sound

- Comfortable working inside existing design templates (Canva or similar) and a good eye for what’s on-brand

- Strong caption and short-form copywriting, and the ability to hold a consistent brand voice post after post

- Hands-on fluency across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest  and YouTube Shorts: formats, native tools, publishing and analytics

- Community management experience, including handling negative sentiment and knowing when to escalate

- Comfortable with numbers: can pull, read and explain platform analytics without help

- Organised enough to hold a high-volume calendar across four platforms without things slipping

- Real interest in food and drink content and the South African food and social landscape, with a view on what’s working right now

Nice-to-haves

- Design skill: can build social-native assets from scratch (Canva, Figma or Adobe) with a real eye for layout, type and hierarchy. A strong bonus, and it’ll shape how much you get to make

- Food media background: food publisher, recipe brand, restaurant group, or your own food content

- Experience with creator and influencer content, or briefing creators directly

- Paid social exposure: boosting, audience basics, and how organic and paid feed each other

- On-camera or content-creator instinct of your own

Please only submit your CV if you meet the below requirements:

Completed tertiary education

Education or experience in digital marketing

Strong organisational and problem-solving skills

Other important details:

Location: Cape Town

Type: Full-time

Job level: Mid-weight

Start date: As soon as possible