How Much Are Social Media Managers Making?

The results for the 2024 Social Media Compensation Survey are here.

Last month we sent out the 2024 Social Media Compensation Survey. As of this writing, we’ve received over 2,280 responses from all over the world. Responses came in from over 350 cities across 35 different countries! Thank you to everyone who took the time to answer our questions. Today we’re very excited to dive into the data we’ve collected so far and share the results.

This newsletter is going to get into the big dollar sign amounts—so you can see how you compare to your peers when looking at years of experience, industry, and job title. The goal is for you to be able to get a salary benchmark from this data. The next newsletter in this series will dig more into the vibe check questions we included—like morale in the industry, how many of us are feeling burnt out, and more. Stay tuned for that newsletter, which will be sent out in the coming weeks!

Let’s dig into the 2024 Social Media Compensation Survey results.

- Rachel Karten and Mitch Goldstein

Response Demographics

It is important to note that this is an imperfect dataset skewed towards existing subscribers to this newsletter. That means respondents were largely based in the United States, and heavily weighted towards those working in New York City and Los Angeles. You’ll also notice that the majority of respondents were white women. While this is partly due to the dataset, it also aligns with the industry demographics other trusted surveys, like Sprout Social, have found. Still, we think our data paints a wider and helpful picture that can help situate yourself in the industry.

One last note, the conversions to EUR and GBP found below are calculated using the conversion rate from the date of data collection, September 30th, 2024.

Salary by Years of Experience

Excluding for salaries where the currency conversion skews the results lower, entry level salaries are averaging around $64,000 (€57,454 / £47,834). (The average shown above is slightly lower due to factoring in roles in the Middle East and South Asia.) The only experience band that is earning an average of more than $120,000 (€107,726 / £89,690) annually are those with 12 or more years of experience in the industry, which generally aligns with a director level or above title.

Salary by Title

In the chart above, the dot and corresponding middle number represents the median salary for each aligning title. The orange bar represents the interquartile range of salaries for that title—the lower number for each range is the 25th percentile and the higher number in the range is the 75th percentile of reported salaries in the survey. Industry-wide we would expect to see base salaries fall within the above ranges.

While the lowest reported salary remains somewhat consistent from title to title, the upper reaches are less limited by title than one might expect. Some respondents wrote in titles that were more unique—like Engagement Marketing Specialist, Content and Communications Manager, and Growth Marketing Strategist. We found that those more specialized titles did not indicate as much of an increase or decrease in salary as one might expect. Where we do see significant increases in salary ranges are in tiered or leveled roles, as seen in the Director and VP level titles in the chart.

Given the state of the labor market right now, if you are looking for your next role it might be better to look at listed salary bands (which every employer should be providing, in our opinion!) rather than direct apples to apples titles in comparison to your own.

The largest group of survey responses, about 30%, are Social Media Managers, so let's dig into those numbers a little bit more. The median Social Media Manager salary is $80,000 (or €71,818 / £59,793). While the benchmark range is $52,500 to $101,400, the top 1% of SMMs in the survey are earning over $260,000 (€233,407 / £194,328), averaging five to nine years experience.

Salary by Employment Type

In a fiscal sense, there is not a big discrepancy between those that freelance, those that work in-house, and those that work at an agency. That being said, there are obvious major differences in working style, hours kept, and responsibilities. A vast majority of respondents (71%) work in-house, which follows observed trends we’ve seen of more and more companies both big and small preferring to bring social talent in-house as opposed to working with agencies.

Salary by Industry

On average, the salaries are highest working in Finance, with Tech being a close second, and at an average of $20K less a year, the Entertainment industry lands as third highest.

The lowest earning industries reported are Small and Medium Businesses, Non-Profit/Not-for-Profit Companies, and Sports.

The highest reported social salary in the survey is earning $500,000 (€448,860 / £373,707), working in-house for a tech company.

Salary by Company Size

For those that freelance or are self-employed, you’re earning almost as much as those who work at companies ranging from 250 to 1,000 employees. Working for very small companies (1-10 employees) is where we see the biggest drop in average salary, whereas salary by company size scales somewhat consistently from there, with another jump up when you get to 250+ employees.

On Salary Negotiations

By the numbers, negotiating for your starting salary is worth it. A bit more than half of respondents said they did negotiate their salary when they started their current position, and 76.4% successfully negotiated for a higher starting rate.

On average, respondents who successfully negotiated are earning 16.9% more than those who did not negotiate their salary. To put that in context, the average salary for Social Media Managers who did not negotiate their salary is $80,858.12, the average for those that successfully negotiated for a higher base salary is $90,593.47.

Layoffs by Company Size

Survey respondents working at companies with 100 or more employees were more likely to have dealt with layoffs in the last 12 months. Those working at companies with 100 or more employees were also reporting higher averages of those layoffs directly affecting their work and/or their team.

Median Salary by Locale

We received a few replies and comments from those working outside of the US calling out that the median salary for the survey seemed high, and they were right! We divvied up salaries by major and non-major cities within and outside of the United States, showing that the median salaries skew lower abroad. We also received a lot of responses from those early in their careers in London, which is why the Global Major Cities salary is skewed lower than Non-Major Global cities in the chart above. The true average for more senior roles is higher in Major Cities regardless of whether you’re in the US or not.

Comparing Men’s and Women’s Salaries

Unfortunately, even in an industry where women make up a majority of the workforce, we still see a clear gender pay gap as well as a power differential in seniority and titles between men and women working in social media. Even though men made up only 12.8% of respondents, they are on average being paid more across almost every job title and they have a higher likelihood of holding more senior titles like Director of Social Media, where men were almost twice as likely to hold that title, or VP of Marketing. It is worth noting that for those holding Social Media Manager titles, the most common role in our survey, the salary gap is the smallest.

Salary by Race

While the dataset was less diverse than we’d like to have seen, what was reassuring is that there were no eye-popping pay disparities (but not zero) between races. However a large majority of the top earning respondents were still white people, so there is still work to be done to ensure equity at the higher end of the pay scale.

Some Closing Thoughts

We’ll get more into how we’re all feeling (spoiler alert: the words “burnt out” came up a lot) in a future newsletter. As far as fiscal numbers go, we’ve made some progress in average salary numbers since the last Link in Bio Compensation Survey in 2021 (Social Media Managers are making 25.38% more), but generally speaking we’re still wearing a lot of hats and making less on average than our non-social marketing counterparts.

On a more positive note, when Link in Bio has shared salary data in the past, we’ve heard from lots of people that it empowered them to ask for a raise or negotiate a better starting salary. This survey and the charts above can also be a good starting point to begin conversations with your team and colleagues around salary transparency, which is one of the first steps you can take towards ensuring a more equitable workplace. Even though salary transparency conversations can be awkward and uncomfortable at first, we are strong advocates for them!

If there’s a specific data point that you think is missing or would really help you build a case, please respond to this email. For paying subscribers, Mitch and I will be hanging around in the Discord this afternoon to talk through the data and answer any questions as well. Either way, always happy to help and make sure this industry keeps growing and getting the recognition we all deserve.

I want to quickly thank Mitch Goldstein, who designed and ran this survey. His deep understanding of this industry and ability to translate data into useful insights made today’s newsletter what it is. He also designed all of the beautiful graphs and charts!

Finally, you can support free resources like this one with a paid Link in Bio subscription!

It’s likely an educational expense at your company—here’s a template for you to use when asking your manager. I personally think the Discord is worth the subscription alone!