In 2019 I wrote a blog called “How to become a freelance social media manager” which gathered much attention and many back links. At the time (about 6 years ago), digital marketing was very male dominated and not many people specialised in social media. It was tricky for me to find people to pass work onto and I wanted to encourage more young people into the space.

(I still recommend reading the blog if you’re starting out as I go into some detail there about building up your business, free courses and working with agencies that I won’t here.)

But I couldn’t have predicted how much this job would blow up, and how much confusion there would be about industry norms.

With world events making the job market unstable, it wasn’t long before digital marketing in general was completely flooded with low skilled people with very high salary expectations. Compounded by mass unemployment (and people starting side hustles) due to the pandemic.

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen social media in general get a pay rise due to the upskilling that people in this job have had to do quickly (content creation, video editing and influencer management added to the roster). But we’ve also seen many skills get replaced entirely by ai, we can expect more of this.

Ai has affected the marketing world by creating efficiency for senior people. Which means many of the tasks you would have needed a junior for historically, can be done by one senior with a chat-gpt account. Good news for seniors (for now), but terrible if you’re trying to break into the industry.

Artificial intelligence can now write captions, schedule posts, analyse performance and even generate images, videos and graphics. For the average social media manager, this is bad news. For someone who actually understands strategy branding and human connection, it’s a multiplier.

This isn’t another “AI is coming for your job” doom post. It’s a reality check about how drastically the role has changed. I believe in allowing people to make informed choices. So if you’re deciding which career to invest in in 2025, have a read.

Why it’s over for most people

The flood of social media managers 2020-2025

Marketing has no barrier to entry. You don’t need a degree and you can get to the top simply based on talent. This means however, that there have always been low quality marketers flooding the market. From PPC managers to writers.

In the pandemic many people saw digital marketing as an easy way to supplement their income after being made redundant or losing their 0 hour contract jobs. This wasn’t helped by influencers making money off these people by selling courses that packaged social media businesses as a career and vastly underrepresented the skill and talent required, whilst over representing the ease and financial gain.

There was much talk of side hustles and passive income. Being a social media manager is neither. It’s actually very time consuming and requires so much thought, you may find that you cant switch off from it easily.

Like many predatory business models, mothers were also targeted. There were mainstream (expensive!) courses targeting mums who were desperate not not go back to work after their maternity leave. Selling social media as a career they could earn as much as their day job with, but also stay at home with their baby. Many of these women were shocked that as they were new to the industry with no experience, they could only garner junior wages, if any. And it’s certainly not a job you can do with a toddler beside you (I have to arrange childcare for my kids when working the same as anyone else).

The general widespread selling of social media as a career also meant that there were many young people, mainly girls, wanting to be social media managers because it offered proximity to influencers. For many it was a plan B to being an influencer. Whilst social media is sold as a glamorous career by the media savvy people who work in it (and indeed, by the Netflix show Emily in Paris), it’s really stressful and high pressure. Having worked with some of these types of social media managers, most are very interested in social media but don’t have any interest in business, marketing and would never read a book on such topics. So it can be hard to train them on things such as brand guidelines or personas. Notably, many lack the grit you may find in an average business student. It’s well known that to succeed in business, you need at least a small level of pschopathy.

Poor quality social media managers arriving in droves to the industry created a secondary problem…

The flood of poor quality social media content

For a few years now, the top brands have adopted an approach of: find trend —-> force product into trend even if it’s totally off brand —-> post.

Is this algoritm friendly? Yes. Is it brand friendly? No. Is it destroying internet culture by turning every internet joke into an advertisement? Yes.

And then at a small business level, we have the Canva template-o-holics where the entire social media strategy will basically be an completely off brand canva template that would give the graphic designer who created the brand an anxiety attack.

Yes social media content should ideally be lower quality content than the stuff on your website, it needs to look home made and socially native, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about posts that do nothing to fuel the story or personality of the actual brand. Nothing to showcase it’s products or position it well. Stuff that’s aimed at getting engagement because the people working on the account understand social, but not brand. Or, more cynically, they understand neither and just wanted a fun/easy job.

In between all this, there is some excellent social media content and brand management on socials. But it sits between a lot of junk. And it’s harder than ever for business owners and marketing managers to find decent people to run their social accounts.

This leads us onto the next issue….

The flood of AI

Why spend time micro managing an under performing social media manager who has limited skills and over uses Canva, when you could just hire…. ChatGpt.

We’re seeing more marketing managers free up time with AI and then use their marketing budget for more concentrated areas. These people may have used juniors or interns for cheap content help. But now AI can generate passable captions, basic plan calendars and even mock up graphics, cutting the need for a human.

Social media is a big expense for small businesses, so they won’t pay for inexperience unless it delivers more than AI can.

For a few years AI could do the caption writing and create some images or video (although it has to be said many people don’t have the tech skills to implement this), but it couldn’t do the reporting or social scheduling. So there were a lot of agencies that hired juniors just to manage the accounts and post. However, AI agents can now be created to do this. You can even create agents to research TikTok trends, and generate new ideas. Jobs that used to be perfect to pass onto new starters.

There’s been so much argument that AI can’t compete with real people, but the truth is that AI has already replaced writers who don’t understand advertising and brand, as well as generally poor quality or even mid-tier ones. Most small businesses can’t high quality brand expert copywriters, so Ai is a natural solution.

Right now, AI can’t compete with higher level management. Such as managing influencers, deciding which strategy to implement, keeping taste levels high and content cohesive and on-brand. But realisticly, it may be able to one day. I’m at this level now, but it’s taken me over a decade to get to that position where I can organise and implement projects and make decisions on behalf of a client. How long will it take you to get there, VS how much time before AI can manage that? I’m not sure. I can’t predict how long I have left in this career. But realistically, the bottom end of workers will be completely gone next year — as is the case with the copywriting industry (the seniors are still getting booked as normal, mid tier people have had their work dry up completely).

Is social media management a stable career?

Social media has always been a career where you need to constantly upskill and evolve. There are so many jobs you can coast in, this is a job where you have to wake up each day and have the drive to be one of the best. It’s why many people burn out fast in marketing careers.

There’s been a few pivotal points in my career where I’ve had to learn uncomfortably fast and well, so that I don’t lose my business.

It’s a career where you will get fired if you aren’t generating results or progressing the brand forward. There’s no loyalty in who you are as a person, or getting along well with the team. If you don’t want to work in a job where you will be unceremoniously kicked out and replaced with someone better if you underperform, then it’s not a job for you. However, if you are so inclined, you’ll love being the best and the opportunities you’ll have to win. Social media is perfect for hyper competitive people with no chill.

Like all jobs where it only matters how good you are (sports, sales) it’s not stable. But if you’re the right type of person for the job, you won’t care.

Being self employed though, is never really stable. That’s all part of the fun.

What qualifications do you need to be a social media manager in 2025?

In marketing you’ve never really needed the degree as you can learn on the job, but you will need either a degree or experience to get started. Changing career from something like a teacher and buying a ‘how to be a social media manager’ course, so that you can “create a life you don’t have to escape” and expecting well paid work from this is ludicrous.

Here’s what you really need:

Multi platform strategy skills

Data interpretation and analytics literacy

AI tool mastery

Brand story telling and creative direction

Campaign orchestration (leadership, management)

Client communication and consultancy skills

Video editing, writing and basic graphic design skills if you’re working for small or medium sized businesses

Without these, you’re competing with a free AI tool. And you will lose.

You can get those skills the same way I did: fucking around on the internet practice and experience. Also it wont kill you to ask an avertising agency if you can go do an unpaid internship there for at least a week or two and see how professionals organise their projects and conduct themselves.

Untilmately, the 2025 job economy for this type of work is portfolio first. And like, real portfolio not ‘I made this social media feed for Coca Cola’. If you have to do it for free, do it for free – but work to a real brief with a real client. Managing the client is as an important a part of your portfolio than the actual creative.

Should you “nice” as a social media manager?

There is advice in business circles that specialising or developing a “niche” will help you establish yourself as a more highly paid expert. This may be true but it relies on something that is fundamentally overlooked – to specialise in something you actually need really specific and specialist experience in that thing. Say you want to specialise in “wellness”, you would need a portfolio of results in this industry to call yourself a specialist. However, what inexperienced “specialists” tend to be is a person who would most like to work in that industry and is marketing themselves as someone who would like experience in that field. And you know, it wouldn’t be that tricky for most marketers to grasp most wellness markets as it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) an extremely complex field. In fact the very selection of specialisms tends to showcase lack of experience. There are plenty of “specialists” who “niche down” into fields like fashion, beauty, or I’ve seen – pets. However you rarely see specialists in things like B2B equipment, or infrastructure. This is largely because people who work in those fields, such as myself, will work in any field. Because, quite frankly, once you understand B2B SaaS, you can understand any market. As somewhat of a generalist, I feel like I have a good oevrview of general markets and am not replicating ideas between clients too much. But, each to their own.

The money question: how much do social media managers make in the UK now?

Generic execution roles are shrinking and pay less than ever. Strategic, brand-first managers are charging more now than they did pre-AI because they’re rarer and more valuable. AI means they can execute more for their hourly rate. They’re high-level strategists, sped up x10.

Forget the influencers on social media selling courses and their 6 figure months. Social media is an okay paid job. The UK average is £35,599 per year (Glassdoor). The top 75th percentile is £44,916. Top earners reach around £56,259 anually.

This generally matches up with average wages for different kinds of marketing managers and corporate jobs in general. So it’s neither well paid, or underpaid.

What about rates/ salary for freelance or self employed social media managers? And how much should you charge if you are a social media freelancer?

Experience Level	Daily Rate	Estimated Annual Income
Entry-Level	£200–£300/day	£28,100–£31,000/year (Talent / Glassdoor)
Mid-Level	£300–£375/day	£40,000/year (average from Talent.com)
Senior / Expert	£350–£600/day	Up to £60,000/year (Salary.com range)

Is social media a future job?

The role hasn’t died. It’s evolved into something harder and more competitive. There are plenty of talented people who are thriving in this industry. But I recommend going into it only if it’s the natural next step for your skill set, and your competitive and fiery. It helps to love and be excited by advertising and business, rather than be excited by proximity to stuff (products you like) and influencers.

If you’re doing it because you think you’ll have a better lifestyle, more social status, or more money, then I’d suggest something else….

If you’ve been quietly reading, Hi I’m Katie Barber. I’m a social media specialist with 16+ years experience (I’ve been running this freelance consultancy business for over 10). If you’d like to have a little look at my portfolio knock yourself out and by all means take a look at the social media services I provide.