There is a question that comes up constantly in our conversations with senior social media professionals. Not about algorithms, not about tools, not about AI. It is this: how did you actually get here?
Because the official answer, work hard, get promoted, repeat, does not hold up when you look at the careers of people who have made it into CMO, VP or Director roles from a social media background. The path is rarely straight. It involves moves that felt sideways at the time. It involves skills that never appear in a job description. And it involves doing a very specific kind of work that most social media managers are not doing, because nobody told them they should be.
At SocialDay, we are building the definitive Social Media Career Ladder, a research-backed framework that maps what progression actually looks like at every level. We have already started talking to some of the most experienced people in the industry, and some things are coming through clearly, even this early.
This article is a first look at what that research is surfacing. The full report lands in May 2026 at Social Media Fest. But there is too much useful here to sit on until then.
The problem with the ladder as most people climb it
The five-rung Social Media Career Ladder, from getting into social, through running channels, owning strategy, leading the function, and into the beyond social tier of directors and VPs, gives you a map. What it cannot show you, at least not yet, is the gap between what the rungs look like on paper and what they actually require in practice.
Luan Wise, consultant, trainer and author, put it clearly in one of our early research conversations: the problem is not that people lack skills. It is that nobody is explaining what the next level actually expects. Junior practitioners learn from what they see on social media, not from what the job actually demands. And by the time they realise the gap, they have often spent years doing work that was not building the right foundations.
Laura Chamberlain, senior marketing academic, adds another layer. Social media careers have a structural problem at every level: the people who know what progression looks like are often not visible enough for others to learn from. There are not enough senior social media professionals in the room for junior and mid-level practitioners to understand what the top of the ladder actually looks like, or how people got there.
So what does actually get people from social media manager to the C-suite?
Move 1: Stop being the person who does the posts
This sounds obvious. It is not.
The biggest career-stalling trap in social media is being brilliant at execution and invisible everywhere else. You can run flawless campaigns, hit every deadline, grow a community to a million followers, and still be invisible to the people making leadership decisions, because all they see is output.
The shift from practitioner to leader is not about doing the work better. It is about changing what work you are seen doing. That means showing up in commercial conversations. Presenting in rooms where social media is a budget line item rather than a delivery task. Connecting what you do to what the business cares about, revenue, reputation, risk.
Luan Wise makes the commercial point sharply. Social media professionals who progress are the ones who can answer why. Not just "we posted three times this week" but "we generated this outcome, it cost the business this much resource, and here is what it means for next quarter." That is the language of every other function in the building. It is still a foreign language in too many social media teams.
The move is not complicated. Find the commercial metrics your work touches. Learn what a P&L looks like. Start attending, or requesting to attend, budget conversations. Ask your finance team what they care about. None of this requires a course. It requires curiosity and a willingness to step into slightly uncomfortable rooms.
Move 2: Build internal influence before you need it
The jump from social media manager to head of social is where most careers stall. And when you talk to people who have made it, the reason they got through is almost never the strongest portfolio.
It is relationships.
Not networking in the performative sense. Actual internal influence, being the person that other departments come to when they want to understand what social can do for them. Being known across the organisation, not just within your team.
This matters for a reason that goes beyond politics. Senior social media roles require you to lead without always having authority. You are working with PR, with product, with customer service, with the CEO's comms team. You need people to want to involve you before decisions are made, not after. And that only happens if you have spent time building trust when there was no immediate need.
Laura Chamberlain describes this as a meta-skill that never appears in job descriptions: the ability to operate across functions, to translate social media's value into whatever language the other person speaks. Empathy as a marketer means understanding your audience. Empathy as a leader means understanding what your colleagues need from you and giving it to them in a way that works for them.
The practical version: identify two or three other functions that social media touches in your organisation. Make regular, useful contact with those teams, not to promote yourself, but to be genuinely helpful. Share what you are seeing. Ask what they are working on. Offer to contribute before you are asked.
Move 3: Make the strategic thinking visible
One of the clearest patterns in how social media professionals get overlooked for leadership is this: they do the strategic thinking but keep it inside the execution. The strategy lives in their head, in the briefing document, in the campaign rationale. But it is never made explicit in a way that the people above them can see.
If you are at the owning strategy or leading the function stage of the career ladder, the work you need to show is not the content. It is the thinking behind the content. It is the decisions you made and why. The risks you identified. The alternatives you considered. The commercial logic that shaped the creative.
This is the material that gets you promoted to the next level. Not because it demonstrates technical skill, but because it shows that you can operate at the level above your current role, which is, in every organisation, the actual requirement for promotion.
Luan Wise talks about this in the context of the toolkit question: who in the organisation decides which social media tools to use? Most teams have it backwards, the budget decision gets made by someone who does not use the tools, and the person doing the work every day has no voice. The practitioners who move up are the ones who have documented their thinking well enough to have that conversation with authority. They can walk into a budget meeting, explain the rationale for a platform decision, and be taken seriously.
The practical version: start writing down the thinking behind your decisions, even if nobody reads it yet. Build the habit of articulating strategy, not just delivering it. When you do your reporting, spend as much time on what you learned and what you would do differently as on what you delivered.
Move 4: Get out of the building
This is the one that consistently surprises people when they talk to those who have made it to senior leadership from a social media background.
The in-house social media role has a structural problem that Luan Wise describes well. You are often the only social media professional in the room. You are surrounded by people who do not really understand what you do. And over time, you start to calibrate your standards, your ambition, and your sense of what is possible to the room you are in, which is too small.
Agency experience changes this. Not because agencies are better employers, the burnout data from our salary research suggests they are often harder on people, but because agency work forces you to see how many different types of business think about social media. You develop pattern recognition across industries. You build commercial instincts fast because every hour is billable and the consequences of being slow or unclear are immediate.
But you do not have to go to an agency to get this. You can pursue it deliberately, through industry events, through communities like The Sauce, through advisory work, through seeking out peers in different sectors. The point is not agency versus in-house. The point is to deliberately expand your frame of reference beyond your current organisation.
Laura Chamberlain makes a related observation: social media as a field skews heavily female at the practitioner level, but that representation thins out sharply at senior leadership. Part of the problem is visibility, there are not enough visible senior women in social for junior practitioners to see themselves in those roles. But part of it is also the isolation of the role: social media managers, more than almost any other marketing function, often do their most formative career years without peers at their level or mentors above them.
Getting out of the building, literally and figuratively, is how you break that.
Move 5: Own a business outcome, not just a channel
The single clearest differentiator between social media professionals who move into CMO or VP Marketing roles and those who plateau at head of social is this: at some point, they stopped owning channels and started owning outcomes.
This is different from being "strategic." Plenty of heads of social are strategic. What moves people into the C-suite is accountability for something the business cares about independently of whether social media is involved. Demand generation. Brand reputation. Community growth that translates to retention. Customer acquisition cost.
This often requires a deliberate push into territory that is not officially yours. Volunteering to work on a project that has a commercial deliverable attached to it. Taking on responsibility for a metric that your function only partially controls. Being willing to be accountable for something you cannot fully manage, which is, by the way, what every CMO job looks like, all day, every day.
What the research is already telling us
We are still early in the research behind the State of Social Media Careers 2026 report, but a few things are already clear from the conversations we have had.
The skills that get people promoted are almost never purely technical. Craft skills, content, platforms, campaigns, get you in the door and keep you employed. They do not get you to the top. What moves people is the combination of commercial acumen, internal influence, and the ability to communicate social media's value in terms the rest of the business understands.
The ladder is not linear for most people who reach the top. Almost everyone who ends up in VP or CMO roles from a social media background has had at least one move that felt sideways or even backwards at the time: going to a smaller company to own more, taking a role with "less status" to gain different experience, moving from in-house to agency or back.
The gap between manager and senior is where most careers stall, and it is almost always about the shift from doing to leading, which nobody prepares you for. You can be a brilliant social media manager and have no idea how to be a people manager. Those are completely different skill sets, and the industry largely leaves you to figure it out on your own.
This is just the beginning
The Social Media Career Ladder research will publish in full in May 2026, timed with Social Media Fest in London. It will include interviews with 15-20 senior practitioners, consultants and academics, alongside survey data from 200+ social media professionals at every level.
If you want to shape what it says, the community survey is live now, it takes around five minutes and everything you share will directly influence the framework. You can find it at socialday.live/career-ladder.
If you are a senior practitioner, consultant, educator, or hiring leader and you want to be part of the research conversations, get in touch at lydia@socialday.co.uk We still have space for a small number of contributors.
The full report is going to be the most comprehensive, practitioner-led framework for social media careers that has ever been produced. This article is a first signal of what it will contain.
SocialDay is co-creating the definitive career framework for social media marketing. The State of Social Media Careers 2026 report publishes in May, timed with Social Media Fest London. Take the community survey →