The demand for social media jobs is great …
… but don’t go celebrating the end of the recession just yet.
US News and World Report and the Demand for Social Media Jobs
US News and World Report states that there were about three times as many jobs with “social media” in their titles in November of 2010 than in the same time period in 2009 – at least on the Indeed job search aggregator site.
This trebling occurred over the course of all of 2010 – November is no fluke.
Except…
Um, okay. So, that’s one website and one kind of title. What about other kinds of job titles, such as “New Media Marketer”, “Community Manager” and “Facebook FanPage [sic] Marketer” or “Content Strategist“? The US News study hardly seems comprehensive.
A quick search just now, and just for Boston yields over 1200 jobs with the word “social media” somewhere in their descriptions. When the search is narrowed to just the job title, the number of job postings plummets to 57.
So are there more jobs out there, or fewer, or what?
More, maybe. A savvy job seeker should certainly conduct as thorough a search as possible. And, that same job seeker should load up his or her resume with as many key words as possible, in order to match as many openings as possible (this is what a job seeker should be doing, no matter what the sought job is).
But it’s a bit tricky knowing what an employer wants, and is going to emphasize. Some want a community built from scratch.
Others want to grow a Facebook page from a few dozen fans into the hundreds of thousands. Still others want a blog to take off, or for Twitter to be mastered and monitored. And a lot don’t know – they just know they have to get out there. Somehow.
But what about…?
Many of these openings seem, to me, to indicate that a lot of companies may have one very specific idea in mind. Perhaps they are looking to clone one beloved employee who is suddenly retiring or otherwise moving on, or maybe they are attempting to follow just one vision. And that vision might not be as broad as it should be.
Social media is going to continue to be a source of employment openings. And some lucky few will get to fill these openings.
My crystal ball continues to be cloudy but I strongly suspect that 2011 will see some tightening up of requirements and wish lists. I think that companies will look to places like HubSpot for more standardization and certification. I feel that it will continue to become less and less of a free for all. As always, your comments are welcome.
More Information on the Demand for Social Media Jobs
For more information, see the December 30, 2010 edition of Brain Track.
Thirteen Years Later, There is Even MORE Demand for Social Media Jobs
As we continue to crawl out the Covid nightmare, working from home got big. And then companies decided they wanted people to come back. To justify their investment in pricey downtown real estate (or at least leases), yes. But it was also to watch them, to be certain they were working.
But production should be the metric, yes? If the goal is, say, 40 blog posts per month, then why should it matter if those posts are delivered on the fifth or the thirtieth day of the month? All that should really matter is producing the deliverables. And, of course, if they perform, and do what we want—bring in qualified leads.
Forty lousy blog posts are probably not as good as one excellent one. So, maybe the metric should be different. Maybe it should only be about SEO and getting leads. Except that ties compensation, bonuses, and perhaps continuing employment, to factors which aren’t always in the employee’s control. Why should someone lose their job if Google changes their algorithm?
But sift through it all, and you can still see the tsunami of demand.
On February 5, 2023, a down and dirty LinkedIn search just for Boston (not Greater Boston) and just with the term social media yielded over 18,000 openings. Even limiting to exactly within Boston and jobs posted in the past week yielded over 4200 openings.
The demand for social media jobs is not going away, possibly ever.