If I asked you “what job leads to the most public scrutiny?” you’d probably say politicians and elected officials. You might say lawyers, spokespeople for organisations, journalists. Or high-profile actors, musicians, dancers, authors.
You’re unlikely to say social media managers.
But you should.
It’s largely anonymous, but the scrutiny is there.
If you’re not in social media, I want you to imagine something for a second. Think of the last report or spreadsheet or similar that you sent to your boss. Think about the feedback they gave you, good or bad.
Now imagine that members of the public get to look at that report/spreadsheet/similar. And that then, in a public setting, they’re able to give you feedback on it. It could be reasonable feedback, irrelevant commentary, or unhinged ranting. And you have to read it and decide what action to take, in a completely fair minded approach.
It’s a weird job. A job that’s relatively new and therefore is not hugely understood. It’s a job that can be disrespected because social media is something a lot of people do for fun. But it’s a multi-faceted role that isn’t what it first appears.
You have to build resilience for a job few believe is stressful
Try explaining to someone outside the industry that you spent your morning fielding abuse from a stranger about a font choice, or defending your organisation from a comment that has nothing to do with the actual post. Watch their face. Most people assume social media is scrolling and posting selfies, so the idea that it comes with genuine emotional weight doesn’t land.
That disbelief is its own kind of pressure.
You’re not just managing the public feedback, you’re managing the fact that almost nobody around you understands why it’s hard. So, you build resilience quietly, without much acknowledgement, because there’s no established language yet for what this job actually asks of you.
You invent etiquette rules you’re convinced nobody else has
When you spend your working life watching people interact online, you start building a private rulebook about caps lock, aggressive question marks, flippant hyperbole, etc.
Nobody taught you these rules. You built them from years of watching the worst version of public behaviour play out in real time, and refining your response until it stopped making things worse. The strange part is you carry these rules into your personal life too, silently judging a group chat message for its tone, or hesitating before you send a text with an exclamation mark. You’ve become fluent in a language most people never had to learn, and you can’t switch it off.
You become the unofficial translator between your organisation and the public
Every comment, message and review that lands in your inbox is a signal, and it’s your job to work out what it actually means. A complaint about a photo might really be about something the organisation did two years ago. A joke in the comments might be testing the water before a real question. You end up reading tone, history and intent all day, then translating that back into something your leadership team can act on.
It’s a strange, invisible kind of expertise. Nobody sees the decoding work, only the finished post or the calm reply. If a study was done into the psychiatric makeup of social media managers and the weird quirks in common, the words ‘hypervigilant’ might appear.
A job worth taking seriously
None of this is written to complain. Most social media managers love the work, and would tell you the same weirdness is part of what makes it interesting. But it is worth naming, because a job this public, this scrutinised and this misunderstood deserves a bit more recognition than “someone who posts on Instagram.”