The answer, according to almost every senior practitioner I've spoken to as part of SocialDay's Social Media Career Ladder research, is something more fundamental: commercial acumen. The ability to understand what a business is actually trying to achieve. To link content decisions to revenue goals. To walk into a board meeting and speak the language of the people in the room.
We're building the most comprehensive piece of research ever done on the social media profession, speaking to practitioners, consultants, hiring managers, and academics across the industry. And this theme keeps coming up over and over again. It's not just a skills gap. It's a structural gap, and it's holding an entire generation of talented social media professionals back.
Katy Howell, CEO of Immediate Future, is emphatic on this. The purpose of social media in a business isn't gaining followers. It never was. It's about understanding audiences, culture, and commercial context, and fitting all of that into a coherent business goal. Without that foundation, practitioners get stuck. Not because they lack talent, but because they're operating without the mental model that would let them progress.
Luan Wise, marketing strategist and author, sees it play out at the agency level too. Many freelancers chronically undervalue themselves, and in doing so they undercut the entire market. That's not a confidence problem. It's a commerciality problem. When you don't understand how business value is calculated, you can't argue for your own.
Carolina Barbosa identifies the strategic layer as where this gap becomes most damaging. Social media managers are often handed strategy responsibility without ever having been in a strategic conversation before. Nobody showed them how KPIs actually get set. Nobody walked them through how to link a content plan to a business outcome. So they do what they can. They rely on intuition, benchmarks, and vibes. And then they get asked to justify their work to a CFO.
The frustrating part, as Laura Chamberlain points out, is that this isn't a talent problem at all. Social media practitioners have highly transferable skills: analytics, creative production, audience understanding, multi-channel thinking. They're "boxed in" by perception, not by ability. But without the commercial language to translate their value, that box is really hard to escape.
What this means if you're a practitioner
Start learning the language of the business you work in. That means understanding your company's revenue model, knowing how marketing contributes to it, and being able to talk about your work in those terms. If you're setting KPIs based on follower count or impressions alone, that's where to start. What do those numbers actually mean for the business? What happens downstream when your content performs well? The people who can answer those questions are the ones who progress.
If commercial marketing skills aren't something you picked up in your training or education (and for most people in social media, they weren't) look at CIM qualifications, marketing strategy courses, or even just reading more widely about how businesses grow. It's not as daunting as it sounds once you start.
What this means if you're a hiring manager
Build commercial thinking into your hiring process and your onboarding. Ask candidates not just what content they've created but what it achieved and how they know. If you're promoting someone into a strategy role, make sure they've had exposure to strategic conversations before you hand them that responsibility. The gap doesn't close itself.
This is one of the core things the Social Media Career Ladder report will tackle head-on: what skills are actually needed at each stage of the career ladder, where the gaps are, and what the industry needs to do about it. Universities, employers, and practitioners themselves.
Tell us what skills you wish you'd had earlier and what nobody taught you. Fill in the survey here: socialday.live/career-survey