The Social Media Managers Are Not Okay
They’re on the front lines of a relentless and overwhelming news cycle that is pushing them to the edge
Until recently, Christina Garnett worked at a global agency managing social media accounts for Fortune 500 companies, running a team that moderated and responded to people’s online questions. During the first months of the pandemic, she would wake up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., anxiously checking her phone and email to see if there was yet another crisis that required a quick response: Did the stock market crash? Did the president tweet about a specific brand? Was there a potential Covid-19 vaccine?
The 37-year-old social strategist often felt depressed and misunderstood by upper management, who didn’t fully understand how much time, effort, and stress social media work entails — and how toxic it can be for those who perform it every day, for hours and hours. “They don’t know what it’s like to live in that Twitter feed… to live in the comments section and to be able to see a populace that is agitated, that feels hopeless, that feels angry, that feels powerless,” she says. “It has turned to a point where we are either crying into the void or we’re yelling at it.”
In the relentless news cycle of 2020, social media managers are first responders. At a time when many…
