One of the things I've loved most about the Social Media Career Ladder research is that the conversations keep surprising me.
I expected to hear about burnout, about AI, about perception problems. And I have. What I didn't expect was how many people working inside large, established organisations would describe a social media function that looks almost nothing like the career ladder frameworks we've been building. Not because the frameworks are wrong, but because the reality on the ground in enterprise is genuinely more complex, and in some ways more interesting, than any single model can capture.
Alexandre Rizos is Head of External Communications (including social media) at AXA XL, the global B2B re/insurance arm of AXA. His team is small. The organisation is enormous. And the way he's built and managed social within that context gave me more to think about than almost any conversation I've had on this project so far.
When Social Sits in Comms, Not Marketing
The first thing that strikes you when you talk to Alexandre is that social at AXA XL doesn't sit in the marketing function. It sits in comms and brand. And that's a deliberate choice. "We use social primarily as top of funnel activity," he told me, "For us that means prioritising thought leadership, education and brand-building."
That doesn't mean marketing isn't involved. In practice, it's a shared effort: communications leads on strategy, editorial direction and reputation, while working in close partnership with marketing, particularly on amplification and campaigns.
That's a setup I'm hearing more of in B2B. The social team isn't owned by the people running campaigns and demand generation. It's owned by the people managing brand and reputation. The implications for career progression are real: the skills you need to develop, the stakeholders you're managing, and the metrics you're held to are all different. If you're building a career in social and you're inside a B2B organisation, it's worth knowing which function owns the channel, because that will shape almost everything about how you grow.
For a Lot of Organisations, Social Is Still a Tick-Box
Alexandre was direct about how social is often approached inside large organisations. "From leadership to comms and marketing, social still tends to come in towards the end of a project," he said. "Once something is ready to be shared, the question becomes: how do we bring this to social?"
Sound familiar? It should. I've heard this from almost every single person I've spoken to in this research. The project gets made, the assets get produced, and then someone turns to the social media team and says, right, what are we doing with this? Instead of building social into the design of the project from the start.
Alexandre is actively working against that default. This year his team piloted a completely reversed process for their global thought leadership content: picking topics, tone of voice, and expert voices specifically to make them land on social first, then creating carousel formats designed to be consumed on platform before you click through. The results? Those articles drove significantly more traffic and performed better across the board. He's using that data to make the case internally for doing it differently. "We're going to scale that the rest of this year and into next," he told me. That's exactly the kind of evidence-led internal advocacy that gets social taken seriously, slowly but surely.
The Conductor Model
Here's the part of the conversation I keep coming back to. Alexandre described his social media manager not as a content creator or a copywriter, but as a conductor. "She's not here to write copy," he said. "She's here to organise our social media content, to make sure everything runs smoothly and things go out at the right time." The expectation is that regional communications and marketing people draft their own posts. The social team reviews, tweaks, and quality-controls. They set the strategy. They don't do all the execution.
That model has big implications for what skills matter at different levels. The entry-level copywriting function, the person who drafts every post from scratch, is becoming less central. What's becoming more central is the ability to orchestrate across a distributed organisation, set standards, brief others, and hold the strategic thread. That's a much more senior skillset, and it means the "doing it all" model that's currently burning out social media managers across the industry isn't just unsustainable, it's increasingly the wrong model altogether.
And AI is accelerating this. Alexandre told me his team is increasingly using AI to support the drafting of straightforward social copy, based on brand tone of voice and post type. "Very soon, we won't need to spend thirty minutes drafting a simple post from scratch," he said.
But this isn't about replacing human input; AI speeds up execution, while people remain essential to ensure quality and relevance, especially as platforms continue to prioritise authentic, well-crafted content. The role isn't disappearing; it's moving up the value chain.
The Biggest Gap Nobody Is Filling: Social-First Video
If there's one skills gap Alexandre flagged that I haven't heard quite so sharply from anyone else, it's this: most large organisations don't have anyone who can produce genuine social-first video. Not brand video. Not a polished case study film. Video made for the format, the platform, the scroll, the way people actually watch in 2026.
"Across our industry, a lot of senior comms and marketing people brief videographers to produce brand videos for social," he told me. "But that doesn't work. You need a social video for social. It's very different." He's hiring for it right now and describing a hybrid profile that doesn't sit neatly anywhere: part strategic planner, part content creator, part journalist. Someone who understands what's emotionally resonant, what a platform wants to see, and what message needs to come through. "I don't know what we'll get," he said. "Because yes, it's journalism, but then you also need someone who understands strategy."
That role doesn't exist cleanly on the career ladder yet. But it's going to.
Social Media in B2B Is an Underrated Career Move
Alexandre said something near the end of our conversation that I thought was genuinely useful career advice, and I don't think it gets said enough. Going into a B2B organisation, particularly one in a regulated or complex industry, can actually be a faster route to seniority than going into a consumer brand where competition for social media roles is fierce and everyone already thinks they understand the function.
"I think it's probably easier in those industries to grow fast in a career," he told me. "If you go into industries that are still building their understanding of social, you have less competition and probably more opportunity to make an impact." In industries where social is still misunderstood, the person who understands it properly has outsized influence and the strategic latitude is often higher.
What This Means for You
If you're a practitioner: The conductor model is the direction of travel. Start thinking about how you can move from doing all the execution to orchestrating it. That means building your stakeholder skills, your ability to brief others, and your capacity to make the case for social upstream in project planning, not at the end of it.
If you're a hiring manager: The pure copywriting role in social is being automated. What you actually need is someone who can run a distributed social function, set quality standards, and work closely with comms and marketing colleagues. And if you're in B2B, hiring a content creator who understands social-first video formats is probably your most urgent skills gap right now.
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Alexandre Rizos is Head of External Communications at AXA XL. This article is based on an interview conducted as part of SocialDay's Social Media Career Ladder research. All quotes have been reviewed and approved by the contributor prior to publication.