Callie Goodwin had about 24 hours’ notice to plan. Her employer, Columbia College, in South Carolina, had been a women’s college since its inception, but it was about to announce that it would admit men to its undergraduate day classes for the first time.
Goodwin, herself a Columbia graduate, knew that alumnae would take the news hard. As the college’s lone social-media strategist, she also knew she’d be on the receiving end of the inevitable criticism that would follow.
Columbia’s co-ed announcement came out on a Friday afternoon in January 2020, and the complaints flooded the college’s accounts. Soon they reached Goodwin’s personal ones, too, after upset alumnae began circulating her personal Facebook account, email address, and phone number. Even though Goodwin had no role in the decision, or a chance to weigh in on the Board of Trustees’ official statement, the small and close-knit nature of the campus meant her role was far from anonymous; the vitriol was directed right at her. People she knew, people she had taken classes with, labeled her a traitor. If Goodwin were truly a loyal alumna, they wrote, she’d quit her job in solidarity. One suggested she drink bleach and die.
Goodwin’s experience — responding to stakeholders’ heated but hyperbolic criticism, being faced with questions she couldn’t answer, and representing the college amid a controversy she had little power to control — encapsulates many of the pressures of being a social-media manager in higher ed. It’s a crucial but easily misunderstood position, one that helps dictate how a university’s brand is perceived by everyone from prospective students to potential donors. At many institutions, it’s a solitary job, and everywhere, it comes with long hours and high stress. To manage an institution’s social-media accounts is to act as its voice to hundreds of thousands of people, and to take in those people’s thoughts, questions, and complaints in real time.
“Everybody just assumes that the Twitter accounts are run by an intern,” says Kasandrea Sereno, the founder of a professional network for social-media managers in higher ed. “It’s like, ‘No, you can get a master’s degree in this, doctorates in this.’ It’s not just an 18-year-old playing on Twitter. This is the keys to your brand.”
Surprisingly often, those keys are held by a single person.
A survey in the fall of 2022 by Allie Kuenzi, director of social media at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, found that 48 percent of respondents were the sole individual responsible for social media, and 35 percent were on teams of two. (The 184 professionals who filled out the survey managed institutional social-media accounts, including for divisions, colleges, and departments, as at least 50 percent of their job.)
When you read comments on social media enough times that say ‘you,’ it’s human nature to start reading them as ‘me.’
The rigors of the position are easy to underestimate. Because many people operate personal Facebook or Instagram accounts, higher-ed administrators often think social-media management is a simple, or purely fun, job. But the social-media managers who responded to Kuenzi’s survey are fairly seasoned at managing institutional brands: One in five respondents had worked in higher-ed social media for eight years or more.
The job’s isolation, and the attendant lack of guidance from colleagues or supervisors, is why Sereno, then an academic adviser in the University of South Florida’s communications department, founded a Facebook group for social-media staff members in 2015. The #HigherEdSocial community has attracted more than 18,000 members in 80 countries since. The group, which Sereno has expanded into a professional society, is part resource-sharing and crowdsourcing central, part support group. For many, including Goodwin — now working on her doctoral dissertation about social-media managers’ mental health, and hosting a podcast called Confessions of a Higher Education Social Media Manager — it’s been a lifeline.
For many of the group’s members, Sereno, now dean of retention and engagement at Tulsa Community College, says, “there is no one else on campus who gets what they do, that they can commiserate with, have lunch with, share wins with.” So they’ve created community online; members share their work as inspiration for their peers, remind one another about upcoming holidays their institutions might want to acknowledge online, and ask for technical advice about navigating platforms and algorithms. They’ve even been known to DoorDash snacks — and wine — to one another after a tough day. (Goodwin received flowers, gift cards, and encouraging notes from fellow group members for weeks after Columbia College announced it was going co-ed.)
The ability to swap tips with peers at other institutions comes in handy given the wide variety of tasks social-media managers tackle. They’re the Swiss Army knives of a college’s public-outreach apparatus, often incorporating copywriting, photography and videography, graphic design, marketing, and public relations into a day’s work. For example, Kuenzi said an average day might begin with designing graphics for one of the university’s colleges to use online and planning for an upcoming fund-raising campaign. Then she might spend an hour answering direct messages sent to the university’s social-media accounts, followed by editing a video or researching the latest changes in a platform’s algorithm or policies. She also has to monitor the newest trends and national and international news — so that the university can either tap into the zeitgeist or avoid posting anything that could appear insensitive or ignorant of something happening in the world. This year, a lighthearted Valentine’s Day video was ready to go but had to be canned at the last moment because of the mass shooting at Michigan State University on February 13; instead, UNC-Charlotte paused all social-media posting for the day out of respect.
Besides needing to tailor content to each social-media platform and its algorithms — an event announcement might be presented completely differently on Facebook than on TikTok, for example — social-media managers are also expected to cater to range of audiences. Matthew Gerrish, who worked in social media for Weber State and Utah State Universities before leaving the industry in February, ticks them off: prospective students, current students, families, potential donors, community members, alumni. “If you work at a state institution, you’re also trying to make sure that you’re pleasing your state lawmakers,” he said, “because funding can be dependent on perception of the things that your institution is doing well or maybe isn’t doing so well.”
And so the job can feel like a high-wire act. “All of your work, and I mean all of it, is literally at the highest level of public visibility and scrutiny. If you screw up, someone’s going to call you on it, because it’s out there for the whole world to see,” Gerrish says. “But at the same time, you can turn around and you’re subject to a high level of internal appraisal and micromanagement from faculty and upper-level administration. It leaves us in an incredibly vulnerable position.”
Because social media never turns off, neither does a social-media manager’s need to stay connected.
At the end of the day on a Friday, Goodwin says, “you don’t get to close your laptop and forget about it until Monday morning. There has to be a level of keeping in touch with what’s happening online with your community,” lest she miss an important notification or news event. She’s purchased an internet package while on a cruise vacation with her family to ensure that didn’t happen; another social-media leader recalls interrupting a Christmas Eve dinner to respond to a disparaging post someone had made about her institution’s administration. And more than three-quarters of respondents to Kuenzi’s survey said they checked social media at night and on weekends.
The combination of pressure and workload has had an adverse impact on social-media managers’ mental health. On average, participants in Kuenzi’s study reported experiencing 10 of 18 symptoms associated with mental-health disorders, which were listed in the survey. At least 90 percent reported being easily fatigued or experiencing low energy and “feeling keyed up or on edge.” Other top symptoms, all experienced by approximately three-quarters of respondents, included irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance.
Evidence suggests that those stresses worsened during the pandemic. A survey conducted in 2020 by West Virginia University found that, on a 1-10 scale, where 10 indicates maximum stress, respondents rated their overall mental health on a typical day an average of 6.35; in 2021, that average dipped to 5.83. “Some of the negative comments and messages really got to me early on in the pandemic,” one respondent wrote. “Now I’m completely numb to all of it, which I also hate.”
Some of those stresses tend to come with workdays mostly spent online: Forty percent of respondents to Kuenzi’s survey said they spent between five and eight hours on social media each day. A constant barrage of information — much of it negative — takes its toll. Kuenzi’s husband jokes that she’s his primary news source: “I see everything,” she tells him. But she’d like a break. “I don’t want to know everything all the time, but it’s also imperative to my job that I do know everything,” she says, “because if there’s something going on, and I post something from the university account that is directly in conflict with that thing or just looks like I’m not paying attention to it, then that can have some real reputational impacts on the university.”
Social-media managers know reading negative comments is part of the job. But a stream of complaints can grate over time, especially when criticism seems like it’s addressing the reader directly. “When you read comments on social media enough times that say ‘you,’ it’s human nature to start reading them as ‘me,’” as if the comment were criticizing the social-media manager directly, Kuenzi says.
Victoria Mendoza, who leads social-media marketing at the University of Southern California, has learned not to take such things personally. “I know that they’re not talking to me. They’re talking to USC, and they don’t always understand that there is a person behind the social-media account,” she says. Those that do “seem to assume that when they’re talking to USC on social media, they’re talking to, probably, a white male.” In fact, everyone on Mendoza’s team is a female from a minority population; she is Filipina.
What’s more, negative comments are often criticizing a decision the social-media manager had no say in making. Only a third of respondents to the 2021 West Virginia University survey were members of their institution’s crisis-communications team, and 13 percent of respondents said they learned about crises the day they were publicly announced, leaving little time to develop a social-media communication plan. That’s what happened to Goodwin at Columbia College; had she been allowed input on the college’s initial announcement, she says, she could’ve told administrators that, based on her knowledge of the community, it probably wouldn’t go over well, and suggested alternatives. Things at Columbia appear to have changed, according to its current director of marketing and communications, whose tenure began after the events Goodwin described. Emily Wilson said in an email that her staff is now a partner with the administration. “Our team — including social media — is involved at the outset of any planning, including the strategy for releasing those plans,” she wrote.
Tensions, however, can be magnified when political or controversial topics are involved. Gerrish offers as an example the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. “We don’t make a public statement on it, and all of a sudden we’re not supporting, or I’m not supporting, our Bipoc students at our institution,” he says, using the acronym for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. But if an institution did make a statement, they risk being accused of “going woke and engaging in activism. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation, no matter what you do, with a lot of these situations.”
It’s not clear how well higher-ups understand the role a social-media manager plays. Asked to rate on a scale from 1-10 how well their supervisors understood their jobs, with 10 being a perfect understanding, respondents to Kuenzi’s survey gave their direct supervisors an average rating of 6.81. For university leaders, that number was only 4.22. One person wished for “some training for executive leadership to understand what our roles entail, strategy, etc. There seems to be a lack of awareness among execs that social media is an expertise.”
There seems to be a lack of awareness among execs that social media is an expertise.
More consistent conversations with their social-media staff members could also help supervisors better understand how to evaluate their performances. The instinct to judge a social-media manager’s work by, for instance, how many new followers a university’s Instagram account gained in the past month would be deeply misguided, Kuenzi explains; say Instagram headquarters purges fake accounts from the platform. A university’s account might lose a thousand followers as a result, but the supervisor reviewing those statistics is left to assume that drop was because of something the social-media manager did.
“Vanity metrics” like follower count may not even be the right measuring stick for a social-media manager’s job. “An account with 10,000 followers who aren’t really looking at your stuff or engaging with it is not as valuable as an account with maybe 500 followers who are constantly commenting and engaging with and clicking on your stuff,” Kuenzi says. It’s those nuances that even a well-intended supervisor might not understand without constant conversations with their staff members.
Kuenzi also has practical suggestions for easing social-media managers’ workload. Where hiring more full-time staff members isn’t possible, institutions could consider working with freelancers or external vendors, or filling gaps with student employees or interns. Teamwide social-media training and shadowing opportunities for teams whose work overlaps (for example, social media and media relations) can make a difference, too.
Mostly, though, she recommends that administrators open a line of communication with their social-media staff members. “So much of the pressure, I think, is put on the social-media team to try to find opportunities to raise when they feel underresourced or when they’re overwhelmed,” she says. “But I think it would mean a lot to them if it were reversed and it came in the other direction of a leader saying, ‘I want to learn more.’”
Gestures like that would have gone a long way for Gerrish, the former social-media manager for Weber and Utah State. Instead, the job — the years of checking his notifications the second he woke up with worries about what he’d missed while asleep, of being distracted by his phone during time with his wife and children, and of unconsciously internalizing negative comments — got to him. He gained weight and, for a time, needed to take medication for depression. The pressure led Gerrish to leave higher ed; he now works for a social-media analytics company.
Now, seeing posts in the #HigherEdSocial Facebook group — posts that no longer apply directly to him — Gerrish feels leaving was the right decision. “I should have done it years ago.”