Our midway report on the Social Media Career Ladder is out today. One in ten practitioners can see a clear path, the entry rung has quietly stopped being an entry rung, and the top of the ladder is emptying at the same time as the bottom.
We published the Social Media Career Ladder earlier this year as a working model rather than a finished framework, and then we set out to prove it wrong. Today we are publishing what that has turned up so far.
The midway report from the Social Media Career Ladder Research 2026 draws on an industry wide survey of social media professionals at every level, alongside recorded interviews with practitioners, consultants, educators, agency leaders and the people who hire into these roles. It is free, and you can read it now.
Here is what is in it, and why we decided not to wait until the research was finished before saying any of it out loud.
Almost nobody can see the ladder they are on
Around one in ten people describe their career path in social as very clear. Roughly two in five say it is not very clear or not clear at all, and the rest settle on somewhat clear, which in the written answers usually turns out to mean they have worked out their own next step with no help from their employer.
What surprised me is that this does not resolve with seniority. People leading the function are almost as uncertain as the people running channels. Clarity only really improves among those who have moved beyond social altogether, which tells you something uncomfortable about where the visible ladder actually ends.
We have made it look like sixty different roles, when most of those names describe the same responsibility.
Omobolaji Ajibare, consultant, known online as The Social Media Oga
Luan Wise, the marketing strategist and author, put the same problem in the language of the market rather than the individual, calling it a wild west. Omobolaji Ajibare was blunter about what the proliferation of job titles has done to it.
The first rung is not an entry rung any more
This is the finding that has changed the framework most, and it came at us from every direction at once.
The description of the entry rung is accurate. The rung is not. Livi Arnold, now a freelance social media and communications consultant, looked at it and told me that what we had written down is what should be the entry level role, and that it is not always in practice what an entry level role is. Her own first job had her running social for a major university while carrying two rungs of work at once, in an organisation with hundreds of marketing staff.
Carolina Barbosa, a social media consultant, argues that the lowest rung is increasingly being skipped altogether, because the market moves people almost straight into executive roles while asking for experience nobody leaving university can have. Laura Chamberlain, the marketing academic, sees social as the most accessible route into marketing for early talent, and describes the decision that puts them there as rarely being a considered choice about the function at all.
Put those together and the conclusion is not that the first rung is too small. It is that the first rung is being asked to carry strategic responsibility while being described, and paid, as support.
The pay problem is a definition problem
When we ask what is holding people back, the most common answer is not pay. It is that the organisation does not understand the value of social. Pay not matching responsibility comes second, and the absence of a clear path comes third.
Those first two are the same answer arriving from different directions. If an organisation believes the job is posting, replying to comments and designing, then it will pay what it pays for an administrative role. The pay is not lagging behind the perception. The pay is an accurate expression of it.
Everyone is a social media manager on salaries running from nineteen thousand to eighty thousand with the same titles attached, which makes it almost impossible to know what you are applying for.
Erica Perazza, head of social, Biffa
The most requested structural fix in our survey follows directly from that, which is standardised salary ranges tied to a defined list of job titles.
Promotion runs on work nobody agreed to pay for
Among people who have been promoted, the most commonly named driver is not strong performance in the role they were in. It is taking on responsibilities outside their job description.
So the reliable route up is to absorb work you are not being paid for until somebody notices, which is a progression model running on goodwill, and it explains a great deal of the burnout in these responses.
The behaviours people say actually decide promotions are almost entirely ones that never appear in a job specification.
- Judgement
- Taste
- Owning outcomes rather than tasks
- Dealing with ambiguity
- Managing up
- Having opinions and backing them
Making those explicit at every rung is the single most requested change to our framework.
Leading the function often means being the function
Stage four of our ladder is called leading the function, and the language turns out to be optimistic, because it assumes there is a function to lead.
Erica has been a team of one throughout her time as head of social. As she put it, even though she works as a head of social, there is no team to lead. She is the head, the executive and the junior at the same time, which means the mentoring that ought to flow down to the next generation never happens, and the seniority she is being measured against is impossible to practise. That structure then reads the absence of demonstrated seniority as a reason to reduce the role.
People are entering the market thinking it is an easy route while the people above them are burnt out and leaving, so there are not many left at the top.
Luan Wise, marketing strategist and author
Set that against an entry rung being automated and you get a profession with a hollow middle and no obvious way in.
The job is becoming orchestration rather than execution
The most useful thing anybody said to me about where this is heading came from inside a large organisation rather than from the freelance or agency world. Alexandre Rizos, head of external communications at AXA XL, does not describe his social media manager as a writer at all. She is not there to write copy, he told me, she is there to organise the content and make sure it goes out at the right time, while regional colleagues draft their own posts and the social team reviews, adjusts and sets the standard.
Set that against what AI is already doing to the drafting, and the shape of the problem changes. The task being automated is writing the post. The task replacing it is orchestrating across a distributed organisation, briefing other people, and holding the strategic thread, which is a considerably more senior skill set than the rung it is landing on. The doing everything model that is currently burning people out is not only unsustainable, it is increasingly the wrong thing to be measuring people against.
He also named the misunderstanding that sits underneath almost every complaint in this research, and he named it more precisely than anybody. Social still tends to arrive at the end of a project rather than in its design, so the work gets made and then somebody asks what can be done with it on social. His team reversed that for their global thought leadership content this year, choosing topics and formats to land on social first, and the results were strong enough to make the argument internally with data rather than with frustration.
What we are changing, and what we still need
Six changes are going into the next version of the framework, and the biggest of them is not about any individual rung. It is about the line drawn between them. The rungs stay, because the distinction between making content happen, owning strategy and leading a function is real and people use it to place themselves. The straight line goes, because not a single career story we have collected travelled through those rungs in order.
Strategy moves down to the entry rung. The invisible skills get written down. Titles get tied to scope, and scope gets tied to pay. Stage four splits in two. Specialist routes get named as destinations rather than deviations.
The report is also honest about where this research is thin, because the conversations so far have concentrated on the bottom of the ladder. We need considerably more from the people who do the hiring, more from outside the United Kingdom, and more from the public and non-profit sectors. The survey is still open and every response shapes what the full report says.
Around eleven thousand words on what social media professionals are actually climbing, rung by rung, with the survey data and the interviews set side by side.
If you work in social media at any level, in any kind of organisation, anywhere in the world, you can add your voice to the data at socialday.live/career-survey. It takes less than five minutes.
And if you would rather talk than type, we are still interviewing. We are particularly looking for people who have moved from head of social into wider leadership, and for the people who write the job specifications and set the bands.
The Social Media Career Ladder Research 2026 is a SocialDay project, published on The Sauce. It combines an industry wide survey with a programme of recorded practitioner interviews, and it will be updated annually.