Some social-media veterans have been at their jobs for 15 years at this point and have unprecedented sway

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Social-Media Manager, the Most Millennial Job, Comes of Age
Some social-media veterans have been at their jobs for 15 years at
this point and have unprecedented sway
Wall Street Journal
July 24, 2021

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Rachel Karten got started in social media in 2013 as an intern
and now works independently.
Photo: Chelsea Kyle
Ms. Karten, now 30 and based in Santa Monica, Calif., started
running social media for Plated, a meal-kit startup, in 2013, and
persuaded the company to turn her internship into a full-time role.
There were few mentors in the still-new field at the time, so she got
better at her job by seeking out meetings with people behind the
accounts of companies she admired, like Warby Parker and
Birchbox.

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After more than seven years running social media for Plated and
the food magazine Bon Appétit, she felt there was enough work
available that she could become an independent consultant. Last
December, she also launched a newsletter for industry
professionals to discuss topics like mental health.
“There are enough of us now that people don’t need to start from
scratch like I did each time,” she says. And there are so many full-
time jobs that she even started posting some listings on her
newsletter—a far cry from her one-woman campaign to create a
position for herself eight years ago.
Some 15 years after Facebook and Twitter opened their platforms
to the public, social media is an established, mainstream career
field. There are academic programs dedicated to its practice.
Workers say it’s sometimes still treated as a job for rookies, both
through pay grades and interpersonal dynamics from those who
think it’s just not that serious. But that’s changing: Those in the
field see more bargaining power and more full-time roles than ever
before.
Many social-media specific jobs still offer lower salaries than
comparable fields like marketing. The average annual salary for
marketing managers is $102,496 and $109,607 for marketing
directors on Glassdoor, according to a spokesperson for the jobs
website. Meanwhile, the average annual salary is $67,892 for
social-media directors and $47,908 for social-media assistants.
“There’s still this idea that everyone uses social media, so it must
be easy,” says 30-year-old Alana Visconti, a brand social account
lead at Verizon.

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Alana Visconti says social media wasn’t seen as a full-time job
when she graduated college but now is a viable career path.
Photo: Alana Visconti
But Ms. Visconti notes that the field has become more
professionalized in recent years. When she got her undergraduate
degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2015, she says, “It
definitely wasn’t seen as a career path.” Today, following work for
clients including Hyatt and Puma, she believes she can dedicate her
whole career to social media. “What I love about it is that it’s the
way to connect most directly with consumers,” she says.

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The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
launched a master’s degree in digital social media in 2018 in
response to the growing number of jobs in the field, says Daniela
Baroffio, who oversees the program. The school aimed to meet
executives’ demand for social-media experts who have a handle
both on hard skills, like data analytics, and storytelling, she says.
“These jobs are way beyond entry-level positions now,” she says.
She also believes that social media’s maturation as a field has had
social benefits: Online organizing and activism around movements
like Stop Asian Hate are linked to the more sophisticated ways in
which people use these platforms today. “That’s also a product of
this new social-media talent,” she says.
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Mike Stelzner has been organizing Social Media Marketing World,
an annual conference for industry professionals, since 2013. Its
attendance nearly quadrupled from 2013 to 2020, from about
1,100 to over 4,000 people, he says. During that time, attendees
changed from primarily community managers—workers reacting
to customers on brands’ social-media accounts—to more full-time
social-media marketers who actively create content.
The stakes of making a gaffe on an institutional social-media
account, and the ability of nearly anyone to express displeasure or
outrage over controversial content through social media, mean
that nearly any public-facing body, from startups to the CIA, now
has professionals behind its accounts.

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That’s partly why even companies in fields not traditionally
associated with a voice-y online presence, like financial services,
have full-time employees in that space. Hannah Atiyeh runs social
media at Yotta, a New York fintech startup launched in 2020.
Before that, she was half of a two-person team running the social
accounts of Marcus, the digital banking unit of Goldman Sachs.
Though the 28-year-old has several years of experience now, she
notes that much of her job remains self-taught. She learned Figma,
a graphic-design tool, on her own, and keeps abreast of TikTok
trends by maintaining a personal account in her spare time for her
dog. “I never sign off,” she admits.
The fact that brand-new platforms like TikTok emerge every few
years means that younger workers can have an edge in the field
over veterans.
David Meerman Scott, a 60-year-old marketing strategist in Boston
whose 2006 book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” about
using social media for business purposes, is on its seventh edition,
says that aspects of the industry are now beyond his grasp.
“In the beginning, it was all about the need for businesses to create
content specifically for social media, which was an insight that I
had somewhat early,” he says. “Now it’s much more about
understanding how algorithms work, and I just don’t understand
things like what time of day to publish a TikTok video on a deep
level.”

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Amya Zhanelle, who runs her own firm, says even many older
clients understand that social media is hard work and worth
paying for.
Photo: Christine Templeton
Some young people entering the field today are finding more
bargaining power than their predecessors.
Amya Zhanelle, a 22-year-old in Montclair, N.J., who runs her own
social-media and marketing firm, says that clients seem more
receptive to the notion that social media is hard work today than

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when she did part-time marketing work in college. Her one-off
packages for new clients start at $2,500. Ongoing content
management starts at $700 a month, for which she requires a
binding, minimum six-month commitment.
“Even if some of my older clients don’t completely understand the
process, they’ve seen how things can go wrong when brands mess
up on social media, so they understand that it’s worth the
investment,” she says.
—Write to Krithika Varagur at krithika.varagur@wsj.com.