A look at the role of social media manager, which has evolved from a position commonly filled by millennial interns into a more professionalized discipline
Krithika Varagur / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @mims , @arb , @owenmroe , @travishelwig , @genepark , and @kofie Tweets: Christopher Mims / @mims : Does the person who tweets for your brand account have a masters in social media? Maybe they should. How social media management went from the job you give to the intern to a high-stakes role for big businesses https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/... Amy B / @arb : one of the least competent people i've ever worked with had a phd in marketing https://twitter.com/... Owen M. Roe / @owenmroe : How do people still unironically pursue higher education If you go six figures into debt for this, it's just natural selection at that point. Sorry https://twitter.com/... Travis Helwig / @travishelwig : kids plz do not go into 100k in debt to learn how to post “it's the soup salad and breadsticks for me” from the olive garden account https://twitter.com/... Gene Park / @genepark : my worry about “social media degrees” is that it's gonna wrongly assure recruiters they're looking for the right people. a formal education (with synopsis, agenda, lesson plan etc.) would likely be obsolete by the time the semester is over. https://www.wsj.com/... @kofie : So we can have even less diversity in the social media sphere? No. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The WSJ piece by Krithika Varagur and Christopher Mims documents a hiring shift: brand accounts that were once handed to millennial interns are now run as a professionalized discipline, with the question on the table being whether the job deserves formal credentials like a master's degree. The debate lands in a corpus where social media's stakes keep rising — platforms have moved to a pay-to-play model that turns visibility and support into premium items, and individual writers and artists are being pushed to build personal brands whether they like it or not.
First-order effects
- Big businesses now treat the brand-account job as high-stakes rather than entry-level, which puts credentialed candidates at an advantage — but critics in the coverage warn formal social media degrees may falsely reassure recruiters while shrinking the diversity of who gets hired.
Second-order effects
- As brand accounts professionalize, the same pressure cascades onto individuals: writers and artists already compelled to become influencers face a labor market where personal-brand management is a skill employers expect, not a side gig.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social media management consolidates into a credentialed marketing discipline — echoing the researchers' argument that the field's societal impact should be treated as a crisis discipline — while degree-gated hiring risks filtering out exactly the practitioners who built the craft informally.
The trend: Social media work is professionalizing from an informal intern assignment into a credentialed discipline, just as platforms and audiences raise the stakes of every post.