Group Director, Connections Strategist

Job Description

Blue Hour Studios is a social-first agency that makes brands magnetic through work that gets shared, remixed, and talked about. We create at the intersection of culture, content, creators, and commerce to help brands turn distinct cultural relevance into demand.   

Headquartered in New York and Los Angeles and backed by Horizon Media, we connect creativity and media to drive real business impact. 

We’re seeking a Group Director, Social Strategy & Connections to help shape how social, creators, creative, and paid media work together as one connected system. This is a senior, client-embedded role for a social strategist with the strategic rigor of a communications planner. You'll partner closely with social, influencer, creative, and media teams to connect business priorities to platform behavior, audience strategy, content development, influencer activation, and paid amplification.

You'll serve as a strategic bridge between Blue Hour, Horizon Media, and our client teams, ensuring social-first thinking influences not only what gets made, but how ideas are distributed, optimized, and scaled for impact.

• Serve as senior strategic partner and connective tissue across Blue Hour, Horizon Media, and client teams to build stronger connections across social, influencer, creative and media workstreams, while identifying opportunities for stronger integration, faster decisions, and greater impact. 

• Bring audience insights, platform intelligence, creator learnings, social trends, and cultural signals into planning conversations to shape stronger strategies and uncover new opportunities for growth.

• Collaborate with media leads to bring social audience insights, platform behaviors, content signals, and creator learnings into audience development and media planning.

• Contribute social-first thought starters, audience opportunities, and strategic provocations that help clients stay ahead of emerging platform behaviors and cultural shifts.

• Partner with social, influencer, creative, and media teams to ensure media considerations are incorporated into content planning from the beginning.

• Help shape content strategies, social & influencer briefs, and production plans to ensure assets are developed with both organic engagement and paid amplification in mind.

• Identify opportunities to maximize the value of media activation by ensuring the right formats, creator deliverables, messaging approaches, and creative variations are captured during shoots and creator activations.

• Act as a strategic partner to creative and content teams, helping bridge the gap between content that earns attention organically and content that drives business results when amplified.

• Ensure influencer and creator strategies are integrated into broader social and media plans, not treated as standalone activations.

• Lead the evolution of social real-time boosting and amplification strategies across platforms.

• Partner with media teams and leverage creative strategy tools to identify opportunities for optimization across creative, creators, audiences, placements, and platform investments.

• Translate performance data, platform insights, and behavioral signals into actionable recommendations that improve content effectiveness and campaign performance.

• Champion a culture of testing and learning by helping teams understand not only what is working, but why it is working.

• A social strategist with 8-12+ years of experience across social strategy, connections planning, or content strategy.

• Deeply fluent in social media, creators, content ecosystems, platform behaviors, and community dynamics. You understand paid social and media strategy, but your strategic instincts start with organic social, content, culture, and audience behavior.

• Experienced developing social-first strategies and working across social, influencer, creative, social listening, and media disciplines, with a strong understanding of how those functions connect to drive business outcomes.

• Comfortable operating at both the strategic and executional level. You can influence senior stakeholders while also rolling up your sleeves to build frameworks, recommendations, briefs, and plans.

• Strong understanding of audience strategy, content planning, creative effectiveness, testing frameworks, and performance optimization.

• A strong strategic storyteller who can simplify complex challenges into clear recommendations and inspire action across teams.

• Naturally collaborative and energized by cross-functional environments where success depends on bringing different disciplines together.

• Curious, culturally plugged in, and excited by how ideas move through platforms, communities, creators, and culture.

• Proven experience – with examples to share – of developing social-first strategies that connect content, creators, media, and business objectives.

• Strong command of social audience insights, cultural analysis, platform intelligence, and social listening.

• Comfortable working in extremely fast-moving, highly collaborative environments where strategy needs to be both rigorous and practical.

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Horizon Media is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.  We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

Salary Range

A successful applicant’s actual base salary may vary based on factors such as individual’s skill sets, experience, training, education,  licensure/certifications, and qualifications for the role.  As an organization, we take an aptitude and competency-based hiring approach.  We provide a competitive total rewards package including a discretionary bonus and a variety of benefits including health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance, retirement savings plans, company paid holidays and unlimited paid time off (PTO), mental health and wellness resources, pet insurance, childcare resources, identity theft insurance, fertility assistance programs, and fitness reimbursement.