When you first get into social media, the rules feel simple. Do good work, learn the platforms, show that the numbers are going in the right direction. If you keep doing that, you will move up.
Then you hit three to five years in and everything gets murkier. You know what you are doing. You might be the person everyone turns to when anything "social" lands on the table. Yet the promotions slow down. Titles change without the money or the authority changing with them. People with less experience seem to skip ahead because they understand something you do not.
This is the stage the Social Media Career Ladder is really about. Not the first job, not the dream CMO role at the end, but the messy middle where you go from practitioner to something more. It is also where most of the rules are unwritten.
Being good at the work is only the starting point
The first thing nobody tells you is that being good at social is no longer the whole story. Early on, your work is visible by default. Colleagues see you posting, replying, filming, editing. They see the impact directly.
As you step into manager or specialist roles, the connection between what you do and what people notice starts to break. You can spend weeks on strategy, stakeholder wrangling and measurement, and all anyone remembers is whether the last post did well.
That is when visibility starts to matter just as much as output. Not fake, loud visibility, but the basic discipline of making your work legible:
- sending a short, clear summary of what social delivered that month in language non‑social colleagues understand
- taking a few minutes in a meeting to explain what you learned, not just what went out
- putting your name to projects that obviously matter to the wider business, not just the "can you just post this" requests
If the people who make decisions do not know what you are doing, they cannot build you into the plans for what happens next. It is not fair, but it is true in most organisations.
Politics is just "how this place works"
Most social media people hate the word politics. It sounds like back‑stabbing and whispering in corridors. In reality, politics is often nothing more than the informal way a company runs itself. Who gets consulted. Who gets listened to. Whose opinion means the work moves faster.
You do not have to become someone you dislike. You do need to understand the basics of how your own organisation behaves. Who actually signs off budgets. Which teams are seen as strategic and which are seen as support. Whose name carries weight in a meeting. What your leadership team is under pressure about this quarter.
Once you understand that landscape, you can make better choices. You know who to bring into a project early. You know which update to send to which person. You stop putting your best ideas in front of people who cannot say yes, and start building relationships with the ones who can.
Ignoring this side of work does not keep you "pure". It just leaves you out of the conversations that decide where social sits and who leads it.
Sideways can take you further than straight up
Another rule that rarely gets said out loud: sometimes the quickest way up is sideways.
If every new job you look at is basically "social media manager somewhere else", your experience grows but your context does not. You know more and more about channels and content, but you are still treated as "the social person" rather than someone who understands the wider picture.
People who end up running bigger teams or stepping into director roles often have at least one move on their CV that looks odd at first glance. A year in product marketing. A spell in customer experience or community. A role that blended social with CRM or brand.
Those moves give you something you cannot get inside the social bubble: a feel for the whole customer journey, a closer look at how products are launched and priced, a sense of how sales targets, service pressures and brand promises collide. They also introduce you to different leaders and alternative ways of thinking.
You do not have to throw away everything you have built and start again. You can begin by partnering more closely with those teams, asking to sit in on planning sessions or offering to help with one project that sits between you. Over time, that kind of sideways curiosity can be the thing that sets you apart when a senior role opens up.
You have to get closer to money and decision‑making
If you want to move beyond running channels into leading the function, you cannot ignore the money. Not just budget lines for paid campaigns, but the basic story of how your organisation earns and spends.
You do not need to become an accountant. You do need to know how revenue comes in, what it costs to get a customer, what it costs to keep one, where social is supposed to make a difference, and where the big risks sit. Once you can talk about your work in those terms, you stop sounding like "the social person who wants more content" and start sounding like someone who understands the same pressures as the rest of the leadership team.
Access to rooms matters as well. Many social managers are involved in strategy discussions about channels and campaigns; far fewer are present when wider marketing or business strategy is hammered out. Sometimes that is because the structure is wrong. Sometimes it is because nobody has ever heard you ask to be there.
You can start by offering something useful. A short segment in a marketing meeting where you share what you are seeing from customers. A single slide for your manager to take into a leadership session. A request to listen in on a planning meeting so you can line social up with everything else, not work in isolation.
Little by little, you go from "person who runs the accounts" to "person who brings valuable insight into important rooms". That is the ground promotions are built on.
Your manager cannot read your mind
Another very human detail: your manager often has no idea what you want next.
They may assume you are content where you are. You may assume they will tap you on the shoulder when it is time to move. Put those assumptions together and you can lose a couple of years without anyone realising.
It is uncomfortable, but there is no substitute for a clear conversation. Tell them you would like to talk seriously about progression. Ask what the next level would actually involve in your organisation, and what they would need to see from you to feel confident recommending you for it. Ask which projects you could own over the next six to twelve months that would prove you are ready.
You will not always get a perfect plan. You will get a clearer sense of whether there is a path where you are, or whether you might eventually need to look elsewhere. Either way, you have information you can act on.
The ladder is not only your responsibility
It is easy to hear all of this and turn it into another list of things you "should" be doing: be more visible, understand politics, take sideways moves, learn the numbers, ask for more. And yes, some of that sits with you.
But the bigger truth is that social media roles are still young. In many organisations they grew from "someone junior who knows Instagram" to "essential part of the business" without proper job architecture in between. That is why pay bands are inconsistent, job descriptions are chaotic and the jump from manager to head of social can feel like leaping a canyon.
You cannot fix that on your own. What you can do is add your experience to a bigger effort to make things clearer.
That is what we are trying to do with the Social Media Career Ladder research. We are collecting stories from practitioners, hiring managers, consultants and academics. We are looking at where people get stuck, what skills actually matter, and how organisations need to adjust if they want to keep senior talent in social rather than watching them walk away.
If you have been in social for a while and any of this rings true, I would love to hear from you. I am especially keen to speak to people who manage teams, make hiring decisions, train social pros or study careers and digital work.
You can email me at lucy@socialday.live with a line about your role and what you are seeing. Your insight will help shape the next stage of the ladder, so that the people coming up behind you do not have to learn every unwritten rule the hard way.