I've wanted to do this research for a long time.
For over a decade at SocialDay, I've been in rooms with social media professionals at every level of their careers. I've watched brilliant, talented people burn out. I've seen entry-level practitioners taking on the workload of three people because nobody defined the role properly. I've sat across from senior practitioners who are genuinely excellent at what they do but still can't get their CEO to take them seriously. And I've thought, over and over again: someone needs to put this on paper. Someone needs to map this properly.
So this year, we decided to do it ourselves.
The Social Media Career Ladder is the most comprehensive piece of research ever undertaken into the social media profession. We're interviewing senior practitioners, consultants, hiring managers, and academics from across the industry. We're surveying hundreds of people working in social media right now. And we're using all of it to build the first definitive career framework for our profession: a resource that practitioners can use to understand where they are, where they're going, and what they need to get there.
I'm publishing this piece because what I've heard so far is too important to sit on. We're not done. The survey is still open and I want as many voices in this research as possible. But the themes coming through from our expert conversations are consistent, urgent, and in some cases genuinely alarming. Here's what we've learned so far.
The Profession Has Been Running Without a Map
The starting point for all of this is simple. Social media as a profession has grown from nothing to enormous in about fifteen years, and it's done that without any of the infrastructure that other professions take for granted. No agreed career progression. No standard job titles. No salary benchmarks. No established route from entry-level to leadership.
Luan Wise, marketing strategist and author, described it to me as a sector full of confusion. "There's so much confusion," she said. "It is a wild west." And she's right. Sixty different job titles for what is essentially the same role. Entry-level people doing the work of senior managers. Senior managers doing the work of an entire department. Hiring managers with no framework for what they're actually looking for. Universities teaching social media skills that are already outdated before students graduate.
Alison Battersby, founder of Avocado Social, added something that took the confusion a layer deeper: in a huge number of organisations, the role doesn't even carry a social media title at all. It's wrapped inside a broader marketing or communications job, particularly in small to medium-sized businesses where a single generalist is handling press, podcasts, and social alongside each other. The person doing the social media work often doesn't describe themselves as a social media professional. They're a "digital marketer," a "comms manager," or just someone who does the social "as well." Which means the profession is even bigger, and even less mapped, than any job title data would suggest.
This is what the career ladder is designed to fix. Five stages, from getting into social media all the way through to leadership and beyond, with clear role definitions, required skills, and salary expectations at each level. The goal is to give the profession the structure it's never had.
But the more conversations I have, the clearer it becomes that the structural gap isn't the only problem. It's the root problem that everything else grows out of.
It All Starts With How We're Perceived
Every single person I've spoken to has brought up the perception problem, and they've all brought it up unprompted. Social media is still seen, by too many people in too many organisations, as a soft skill. A young person's job. Something you put an intern on.
Laura Chamberlain, marketing academic and educator, put it in a way that I keep coming back to: "Social media marketing has a perception problem. What social media can actually do for an organisation strategically, there's a gap between that reality and how it's perceived. And that gap exacerbates every other problem in the industry."
She's right that it exacerbates everything. Because when the role isn't taken seriously, the pay reflects that. Laura flagged a recruiter's post she'd seen: a junior marketing role paying £22,000 for a 35-hour week, which works out at £12.36 an hour. National Living Wage from April 2026 is £12.71. "We've got people being invited into our profession," she told me, "who aren't even being paid the minimum wage."
When the pay is wrong, the talent pipeline is damaged. When the talent pipeline is damaged, the wrong people end up in the wrong roles, without the right support. And that's when burnout kicks in.
Sheeza Anjum, senior social media strategist, makes a point I find really important: the perception problem is specifically gendered. Social media has been framed as inherently female work, and that framing has made it easier for organisations to pay less and expect more. "Social Director roles now command six-figure salaries," she says, "but you'd never know that from how entry-level practitioners are talked about."
And part of the problem, as Carolina Barbosa pointed out to me, is the industry's own content. The hustle culture. The aesthetic reels. The "marketing girlie" persona that glamorises the role without ever showing what it actually involves. "The glamour gets perpetuated on social media for attention," she told me. "It creates expectations that are completely at odds with the reality of working in a tech business."
We are, to some extent, doing this to ourselves. And we need to stop.
The Career Ladder Is Breaking at Both Ends
One of the clearest patterns in my conversations is that the career ladder is under pressure from two directions at once.
At the bottom, Stage 1 is disappearing. Companies are bypassing the Social Media Assistant or Content Assistant role entirely, moving new hires straight into coordinator or executive positions without the foundational experience those junior roles were supposed to build. Carolina Barbosa calls this out as a major structural flaw: "Companies post coordinator roles and ask for experience that someone straight out of university simply doesn't have."
Alison Battisby sees this play out differently in smaller organisations, where Stage 1 often never formally existed in the first place. In small businesses, social media responsibilities frequently get bolted onto someone else's role rather than creating a dedicated position. The person who ends up doing it is expected to just figure it out, often through self-directed learning and online resources, without formal training, mentorship, or a clear sense of what good looks like. It's not that companies are cutting entry-level jobs so much as they never created them properly to begin with.
At the same time, AI is accelerating that process. Katy Howell, CEO of Immediate Future, was direct about this: the first rung of the career ladder is either already being replaced by AI or will be very soon. In her agency, the analyst role (one that previously took days to process unstructured data) has already become obsolete because AI handles it in minutes. Scheduling, first-pass drafts, basic reporting: all going the same way.
At the top, the Social Media Manager title itself is fracturing. Sheeza told me she doesn't think the title will exist by 2026. Luan Wise made a similar point: "Social media manager isn't the only job title in this industry sector anymore, and we don't want to advocate that one person can do everything." The role is splitting into platform specialists, influencer directors, creative directors, community strategists, and more. One person is not supposed to do all of that, but in most organisations, one person still is.
The result is a ladder that's losing its bottom rung and its middle title simultaneously, while the expectations on the people in between keep climbing.
Nobody Is Teaching Commercial Thinking
If there's one skills gap that came up more than any other across all my conversations, it's commercial acumen. The ability to understand what a business is actually trying to achieve and to connect social media work to those goals.
Katy Howell was emphatic on this: the purpose of social media in a business has never been gaining followers. It's 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 they need to progress.
Carolina Barbosa is particularly clear about where this becomes most damaging. Social media managers are regularly handed strategy responsibility without having ever been in a strategic conversation. Nobody showed them how KPIs 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, as she put it, "vibes." And then they get asked to justify their work to a CFO.
Laura Chamberlain's perspective on this is really interesting. She points out that this isn't a talent problem. Social media practitioners have highly transferable skills: analytics, creative production, audience understanding, multi-channel thinking. They get "boxed in" by perception, not by ability. But without the commercial language to translate their value, that box is very hard to escape.
The commercial skills gap isn't just about individual practitioners either. It's about how social media education works, or more accurately, doesn't work. Universities are not consistently teaching the business fundamentals that practitioners need. The industry is not providing structured pathways that build commercial thinking over time. And so people arrive at a stage where they need to own strategy without ever having been shown how strategy connects to commercial outcomes.
Burnout Is Structural, Not Personal
Over 70% of mid-to-senior social media professionals report feeling burnt out. I shared that number with Luan Wise and her response was immediate: "Something is fundamentally wrong in the industry."
Through these conversations, I think I understand what it is. It's not that social media is uniquely stressful. It's that the structural failures stack up on one person.
Stage 1 roles are disappearing, but the work that those roles would have done doesn't disappear with them. It gets absorbed upward. The Social Media Manager becomes the person doing the content, running the channels, building the strategy, managing upwards, responding to comments, briefing agencies, and educating the board about why follower count isn't a metric worth optimising for. All at once. Without defined processes. Without realistic expectations.
Carolina Barbosa identifies companies with no defined workflows, unclear sign-off processes, and no coherent sense of what one person can actually deliver as the specific environment where burnout peaks. Add in the C-suite misalignment she regularly encounters (executives who've adopted the language of "community building" without connecting it to any actual business goal) and you have a Social Media Manager holding abstract briefs, inadequate resources, and full accountability for outcomes they have no real authority over.
Katy Howell adds the invisible labour that compounds all of it: the work of educating upward. Explaining that a campaign needs six weeks, not six days. Justifying why a shoot cost what it did. Making the case, over and over again, for why the role deserves the budget it's asking for. That advocacy work is exhausting. When it goes unrecognised, it breaks people.
The answer isn't resilience training or better self-care. It's better structures. Clearer roles. Realistic briefs. And a profession-wide framework that gives practitioners something concrete to point to when they're making the case for what they need.
Remote Work Is Creating a Hidden Gap
One theme I didn't expect to hear so consistently is the impact of remote work on how early-career professionals learn.
Luan Wise described it as learning by osmosis: the knowledge you absorb by being in a room with senior people, overhearing how they handle a difficult client, watching how a Head of Social presents to the board, noticing the questions that get asked in a strategy session that nobody told you to pay attention to. "In-person connection is vital," she told me, "for developing rapport, sparking ideas, and for younger people learning workplace skills in real-time."
Carolina Barbosa is particularly urgent on this point. Junior practitioners need to be in the room: in board meetings, in brainstorms, in planning sessions. Not as passengers, but because they're the ones executing the campaigns. They need the context to do that well. Remote work, even with the best intentions, often cuts them out of exactly those conversations.
Alison Battisby was emphatic about this too, and she put it in a way I thought was really practical: bringing junior staff into client meetings and giving them real visibility and autonomy isn't a nice-to-have, it's how people actually develop. She noted a stark difference between smaller agencies, where juniors were regularly in the room with clients from early on, and larger organisations, where they were often kept separate and isolated from the work that matters. That early exposure to how decisions get made, how clients think, how a senior practitioner reads a room, is formative. Without it, people can spend years in the profession and still feel unprepared the first time they're asked to present to a board or navigate a difficult stakeholder conversation.
The result is a generation of early-career professionals who are technically capable but missing the professional fluency that used to arrive through proximity. They know the tools. They don't always know how organisations work. And that gap shows up later, when they need to progress into roles that require them to understand and navigate the business around them.
What We're Doing About It
These conversations are just the beginning. The survey is still open and I want to reach at least a thousand people working in social media before we close it. The more data we have, the stronger the research, and the harder it is for anyone to ignore.
The final report will include salary benchmarking by role and level, a validated five-stage career framework, data on skills gaps at each stage, and practical recommendations for practitioners, hiring managers, and universities alike. It will be the resource I wish had existed when I started in this industry.
But right now, the most important thing is getting your voice into it.
If you work in social media, at any level, in any type of organisation, as a freelancer or in-house, junior or senior, I want to hear from you. The survey takes less than 5 minutes. And everything you tell us goes directly into shaping a piece of research that is genuinely going to change how this profession is understood.
Fill in the survey here: socialday.live/career-survey
And if you know someone who works in social media, please share it with them. The bigger this gets, the more it matters.
The Social Media Career Ladder is SocialDay's landmark research into the social media profession. Expert contributors include Katy Howell (Immediate Future), Luan Wise (marketing strategist and author), Sheeza Anjum (senior social media strategist), Laura Chamberlain (marketing academic and educator), Carolina Barbosa (social media consultant), and Alison Battisby (Avocado Social). The full report will be published later in 2026.