Increasing Demand For Social Media Managers

Last Friday I was in heaven; my friends Kiki L'Italien and Maddie Grant devoted a sizeable chunk of time on that day's episode of Delcor's Social Media Sweetspot to my favorite topic: social media salaries. The conversation starts about 14:50 in the video below, in case you missed it:



Of course you should not only watch that whole episode but catch the show every Friday because it's always great--not just when they're talking about me and my pet issue!

At any rate, I know I'm not the only one interested in the topic of social media salaries because the bulk of the traffic to this blog comes from Google searches for "social media manager salary" or something similar. Community and social media manager jobs are becoming more popular--as evidenced by more and more mainstream news coverage of the role(s):

• Business Week's article "Twitter, Twitter, Little Stars"
• Harvard Business Review's "Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire a Community Manager"
• The Washington Post's article about Pepco's social media manager

The Business Week article does mention salary:

Business strategists capable of identifying a company's needs and solving them using social media tools—can command $120,000 a year and up. Further down the ladder are community managers, who oversee a company's day-to-day social media operations and earn $60,000 to $80,000. Below them are cub Twitter managers, essentially copywriters with little business experience, who typically earn $30,000 to $50,000.

Not for nothing, but from what little salary data I know about association social media jobs, most are wanting someone to do the business strategist level job for the cub Twitter manager salary. If they want to attract and retain qualified candidates who are able to successfully align social media into the association's existing communications and marketing strategies, they're going to have to do better than that.