Social Media Confidential: Burnout Stats, Multiple Hats, Killing AI Stacks—and The Power of No
Keeping up and always on.
With AI's public advent looming over the event, something sinister was in the air. Despite the gloom, burnout and wellness were what captivated the common anxiety, and they were mantric to every speaker during my visit to the 2025 Ragan Social Media Conference in Orlando. Of what little I knew compared to the effete hipsters I was awash in, I knew that for sure. Me? I was dressed like I worked for Homeland Security amid an eclectic crush of trendy and fashionable kids in a hive where nothing ages you like technology. I wore button-ups and blazers like it was my job to worry, and in a sense, I suppose it was.
More than ever, social media is coalescing as a standalone job description versus the garnish it was seen as in years past. Companies that unscrupulously ignore this reality can wring the life and creativity out of writers, designers, and marketers—many of whom likely took it on like real troopers. Worldwide, social media is heading for both a reckoning and a mass exodus.
☢️ The "Hurry Up and Wait" whiplash: Social media managers are frequently pressured to script, shoot, and edit content immediately to catch a trend, only for that content to sit in an executive's inbox for days.
Be careful what you say yes to.
If you're a social media manager, it takes all your hours and then some. If you're more of a marketing factotum like myself and social media is but one prong among many tasks you own, know that I've seen it devour 64% of my weekly hours to the cost of everything else.
After speaking with the CEO of a content networking association I'm part of, he and I devised a list of red flags to consider when taking a social media role or "taking one for the team" to handle social media as a ride-along to your actual beat.
Look sharp for early signs of trouble:
🚩 Lack of vital social collaboration tools (like Sprout Social), leading to spreadsheets and long and confusing email threads with contradictory feedback from stakeholders.
🚩 An older generation of executives unable to appreciate the intensity of juggling social media with other marketing duties.
🚩 A lopsided editorial policy that demands "first-draft perfection" for all non-social output, yet simultaneously demands a firing squad of reviewers for social content. Trust me or not?
🚩 Posting is encouraged to "look busy."
🚩 Obscenely long review chains with massive stakeholder bloat. I've seen up to 9-10 approvers for a measly new hire post.
🚩 A policy that leans heavily on globetrotting executives for sign-off.
🚩 A department-wide perception of social media as yet another marketing channel in a world where it's increasingly becoming a dedicated role.
🚩 A policy that demands hyper-originality for each social post—yet recycles templates, copy, fonts, colors, and imagery across entire ad campaigns, billboard locations, inter alia.
🚩 In-house graphic design is assigned other projects prioritized far above your requests.
🚩 Anything less than open access to agency graphic designers.
🚩 Entrenched interests within the organization staunchly opposed to learning or adopting social media best practices of any kind.
🚩 IT Department leaders hostile to internal AI tools that speed your workflow, or IT leaders who narrow said tools to sub-par "safe" options. Killing internal AI is a non-starter.
🚩 Rife feelings between marketing and whatever departments you'll have to liaise with. You risk becoming a scapegoat passed between them in the approvals conga line. Seeking approval shouldn't look like steering though an asteroid belt of brittle egos.
🚩 If you begin such a role and the tension between completing your social post approvals and "bothering people" starts to intensify, you've just seen the end. Pull out. They might have asked you to be a shakedown artist, but it doesn't mean they like when you show up.
If enough of these red flags present in a prospective social media role, know you've been teed up to fail. Take a hard pass and thank me later. I like premium imported matchas.
Or test it. What began as "filling the breach" will end in your asphyxiating approvers wondering why you're not a daily trend-chaser. When you find yourself drowning, the same brass that assigned you the role will shrug and wonder what the big deal is. To your higher-ups who breeze past gatekeepers and act freely, your work seems easy. What's easier for them still is to lay the collapse at your feet when it comes.
I'm a relic from working with journos and music promoters in a boiler room studio in Athens, GA. We joked, cussed, red-eyed midnight projects, and partied like Caligula afterwards. By now, you’ve probably guessed that I’m not a corporate creature at heart, captured too late to fully domesticate. From my gig-life vantage, we live in a world where some people have careers, while most people have jobs. Whatever's true for you, your requests will languish in the inboxes of golf-club careerists. Take from that what you will.
Ultimately, mental health leave and stress rooms with bean bag chairs mean zilch if pleas to mend failed processes fall on deaf ears. More often than not, it's you who reaps the whirlwind while your replacement interviews in the wings, still with that innocuous proviso that he/she "helps out" with social media. And so it goes.
Be your own advocate. Know the power of refusal. Take care of yourself.
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