About &Accelerate

Halpern and &Accelerate have come together to create a connected agency offering across PR, influencer, social, owned content and paid media - helping ambitious brands earn attention, participate meaningfully in culture and build lasting connections with their audiences.

Together, we’re building a more agile model for modern communications: a lean, high-performing team of multi-skilled experts bringing strong ideas, deep audience and platform understanding, cultural fluency, and exceptional creative and design craft to every brief.

We use AI and emerging technologies intelligently to support the creative process, accelerating exploration, production and optimisation without compromising human judgement, originality or quality.

Our clients include The Body Shop, RoC, Medik8, E45, John Frieda, Hawkstone, Five Guys, Pets At Home, Mars

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Social Strategist to join our Beauty team on a six-month fixed-term contract, with the potential for a permanent role.

This is a senior social strategy role with genuine breadth, working across our beauty portfolio, including clients such as The Body Shop, Curel, E45 and Roc.

Social is no longer a single channel or a last-mile distribution function. It is where culture, community, creativity, media and commerce meet. We are looking for a platform expert who understands that ecosystem and can translate it into meaningful, effective strategies for our clients.

You will help shape social strategy across the full funnel - from awareness and discovery through to consideration, conversion, retention and advocacy. You will understand the distinct role each platform plays, how audiences behave within them, and how brands can create content and experiences that earn attention, build consideration and drive action.

This is a hands-on role. You will be responsible for:

• Leading social strategies for beauty clients, connecting business and brand objectives to audience insight, cultural intelligence, creative opportunity and measurable outcomes.

• Defining the role of social within wider communications and media strategies, across organic, paid, creator, influencer, partnership and commerce activity.

• Building platform and channel strategies across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit and emerging channels, with a clear understanding of their different audiences, behaviours, formats, algorithms, communities and commercial opportunities.

• Developing full-funnel social ecosystems, including channel roles, content territories, audience journeys, campaign architecture, publishing principles and measurement frameworks.

• Identifying cultural trends, conversations and emerging behaviours that can create opportunities for our beauty clients.

• Turning insights and trends into compelling, platform-native creative briefs, ideas and content systems.

• Shaping social-first campaigns, creator strategies, always-on content and product launches from initial brief through to execution.

• Developing social commerce strategies, including shoppable content, creator commerce, affiliate opportunities, retail journeys and conversion-focused experiences.

• Working closely with creative, account, media, production, influencer, analytics and client teams to ensure social thinking is embedded from the start.

• Reviewing and challenging work before it reaches the client, ensuring every piece of content is relevant, distinctive, culturally aware and native to its platform.

• Using data, performance reporting, social listening and audience signals to optimise activity and inform future strategy.

• Being front-and-centre in client calls and presentations, offering senior counsel and presenting strategies and ideas with clarity and conviction.

• Managing client relationships confidently, navigating feedback and helping clients make smart, effective decisions in a fast-moving media environment.

Key Responsibilities

1. Creative Leadership, Craft and Quality

• Set and maintain a high creative standard across the agency and client portfolio.

• Turn strategic and communications briefs into distinctive, relevant and creatively ambitious ideas.

• Elevate the quality of creative and design output from initial concept through to final delivery.

• Provide clear creative direction across copy, design, art direction, motion, video, content and production.

• Be hands-on in developing, refining and finishing work rather than simply signing it off.

• Establish clear creative feedback and review processes that help colleagues across the agency produce their best work.

• Ensure brand identity, tone of voice and visual consistency are protected across all touchpoints.

2. Earned, Owned and Paid Media Integration

• Demonstrate a clear understanding of the distinct roles of Earned, Owned and Paid Media and how they work together.

• Develop ideas that can generate attention and conversation through earned media, live naturally across owned channels and be extended or optimised through paid media.

• Understand how the same creative platform may need to evolve across different audiences, formats and media environments.

• Work closely with PR, influencer, social, digital, paid media, strategy and account teams to deliver joined-up creative thinking.

• Ensure creative solutions are appropriate to the client objective, audience, platform, budget and stage of the customer journey.

3. Social, Culture and Conversation

• Be a leading voice on social across the agency, with a deep understanding of how key platforms work and evolve.

• Develop genuinely platform native ideas and content for channels such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and emerging platforms.

• Understand platform behaviours, formats, algorithms, creators, communities, comment culture and the relationship between organic and paid activity.

• Stay on the pulse of culture, digital behaviour and real-time conversation, identifying relevant opportunities for clients.

• Develop reactive and timely creative work that is strategically sound, brand appropriate and well executed.

• Use social listening, audience insight and performance data to sharpen ideas and improve output.

Skills and Experience

• Significant proven experience in a social strategy role and evidence of creating platform-native strategies

• A deep understanding of social platforms, content formats, creator culture, communities and evolving audience behaviours.

• Strong cultural intelligence and the ability to identify relevant moments, conversations and behaviours that brands can respond to credibly.

• Comfortable working at pace, managing multiple priorities and operating collaboratively in an agile agency environment.

• Social-Obsessed and Culturally Fluent

Always close to the conversation, curious about how culture is changing and genuinely interested in how people use social platforms.