Hey y’all! I’m Whitney.
“What’s going on? Who are you? Where’s Eleni? I’m scared.”
Don’t panic – Eleni’s just bringing me on to help write Return on Influence.
So, hi, nice to meet you. I’m Whitney. I run the survey program at Modash. I’m kinda like Content R&D. I’ve also been in content for a long time. Long enough to “pay my dues” in the industry.
Which brings me to the topic at hand: social media. The red-headed stepchild of marketing careers.
(I’m allowed to say that. I am a red-headed stepchild)
Social media is the thing that always gets pushed onto other people. It used to be a “content” problem. I spent years wanting to focus on content, only to get told to also “just go do social,” as if it’s something you can just go do real quick.
But now, it seems that content people aren’t the only ones with another full-time job dumped in their laps; it’s influencer marketers, too.
When we ran the Influencer Marketer Salary survey, I specifically asked if y’all also had to run your brand’s socials as part of your regular tasks.
Here are some of the wild things I found out:
Wild thing #1: 40% of influencer marketers also have to manage social media
As if you didn’t have enough to do.
I’d created what I thought was an exhaustive list of potential tasks influencer marketers had to handle in the day-to-day.
They said all of them. On top of that, nearly half said they were also responsible for social media.
And here’s the part you and I understand: social media is hard. It’s a full-time job that requires a metric ton of creative, analytical, and social intelligence.
That leads me to the next problem:
Wild thing #2: Influencer marketers can’t dedicate enough time to social media to do it right
And it’s literally not your fault. See: A second full-time job.
I asked marketers how much of their week was dedicated to managing social media. And the reality is “not enough.”
Influencer marketers are already averaging an extra 3 hours of overtime a week. Y’all are clearly overloaded – adding social media to the plate just means that around 25-30% of your time is spent doing the bare minimum on social.
And which of your influencer tasks fall off because of it? How many more creators could you recruit with that time back? How many more relationships could you build?
That’s not even the worst part.
Wild thing #3: You get more responsibility – and get paid less for your trouble
Influencer marketers who also manage social media get paid 12% less on average.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
And – as a result, these influencer marketers are also 15% less satisfied with their jobs.
Wild thing #4: It’s fixable (-ish)
If you find yourself in a position where you’re also managing social media (or anything else sucking time from your core function), it’s time to say, “This ain’t my job.” (We just need to translate it into corporate.)
Start by time tracking for 2 weeks:
Amount or percentage of your time spent on social
Which tasks does it replace (or what would you do if you didn’t have to do social)
Which things slip when your social responsibilities spike
Next, go to whoever is making decisions. And present the data from your time-tracking (with solutions!) For example:
Split the role between you and others
Cap social at a percentage of your time
Get clarity on which IM tasks you trade off for social (and which can’t be dropped)
So here’s what that sounds like in corporate:
“If I own both influencer and social, which influencer marketing outcomes should we deprioritize?”
“If we want both to grow, we need coverage: headcount, a freelancer, or fewer channels to manage.”
“Which should take priority? What are the cases where social media would take priority over influencer marketing?”
If no one’s willing to budge on priorities, ownership, or tools, it’s time to hit them with a “how are we adjusting my compensation to account for the added responsibility?”
Because we have to stop treating social media as an add-on afterthought – you don’t have time for that.
A good influence 🩷
I (Eleni, hiya!) asked Whitney to share her favorite creator, and she picked AlternateHistoryHub on YouTube.
Who he is: Cody Franklin, an American YouTuber with 2.47M subscribers who's been asking "what if?" about history since 2012.
Why he's worth a subscribe: Cody takes a single historical variable — what if the Roman Empire never fell, what if Germany won WWI, what if the nuclear bomb was never invented — and traces the consequences. If this wasn’t a great hook already, he also delivers it through simple animated characters (with no arms or legs) and bone-dry humor. The jokes do land harder when you know what actually happened, but it also works if you don’t know anything. You'll end up learning history almost by accident, because you can't follow "what if the Sahara was green?" without first understanding why it isn't.
Dream collab: We’d love to see Cody team up with Hungry Minds. They’re an indie publishing house behind The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization — a hand-illustrated, 400-page encyclopedia of human invention. Everything Hungry Minds makes is painstakingly drawn by hand: detailed, lush, illustration work. Put them together — a video or a print collab where Hungry Minds' artists bring one of Cody's alternate timelines to life in their style — and you'd have something entirely unique.
Tell me about a creator you love and any dream collab you have in mind. Email me at [email protected], to be featured.
See you next time!
Whitney <3
Content R&D @ Modash. Connect and send hatemail on LinkedIn.
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