What can we do about community manager burnout?
In the run up to World Mental Health Day Julie Delaforce argues businesses need to give more backup to community managers or risk burnout.
Do you know what happens when you’re in the middle of giving birth and your midwife’s shift finishes? She goes home. The same is true for almost any professional whose work operates 24/7. Yet in the world of community and social media management managers lament that they are “always on”, “the job never ends”, and “the Internet doesn’t sleep”.
Few community and social media managers deal with life and death situations (and massive credit to those who do). So, why have we created the expectation that we’re always on? It’s a behaviour that’s not expected in other industries, even those that do operate 24/7 such as mining, hospitality, nursing, and law enforcement. And what can we do about it now?
What is burnout?
First, it’s important to recognise that burnout is different from everyday stress.
i love these joking articles. Seriously – if you are getting burnout over this maybe you should try a real job like nursing / teaching.
Community manager burnout…now I’ve heard it all
Community Managers. Saving lives one post at a time. Really? Has anyone questioned the point that perhaps people don’t really care about most brands social posts anyway?
Doctors, Restauarants, Shops etc all close. Customers have to wait till they reopen. Social media should be no different (with some exceptions) Sure customers can carry on like twats about how they can’t return a casserole dish at 3am on Facebook. But should brands give a toss and staff up around mediocre needs for a minority? Absolutely not. Common sense needs to prevail, things can almost always wait. Aside from some frustration and inconvienance, the world isn’t ending. There’s very little case for community managers to be doing what they do 24/7. This article doesn’t address what these potential 24×7 cases would be.
That aside I wonder how real this CM burnout issue actually is. Are brands & businesses really directing this requirement or is it actually self inflicted? From my own experience I suspect it’s more a misguided sense amongst some Community Managers / Community Martyrs that someone must always man the fort and if someone doesn’t the world will end. There’s certainly an over inflated sense of self worth in some quarters of the CM sector….
the reality is that community managers are generally going to young and inexperienced. Its likely that role will either be their first job in advertising, or a move from being an unpaid intern. We all know the tax advertising takes on our stress levels. Now imagine you are (arguably) in the least respected role in the agency. And you are expected be on call 24/7. And everyone thinks your job is easy and can do it better than you. And you’re expected to make a new piece of content every single day, with a new idea never done before. 30 ideas. Over maybe 3-4 brands. 150+ unique content every month at minimum. And each time you post you instantly know whether your idea was good or shit and will be criticised by a client who is questioning everything they pay for, especially social. Who in their right minds would accept that job?
So @Paul. Good job mate. You sound like a real go getter and someone pleasant to be around. All the best to you.
To everyone else who is a junior (not just a community manager) in an agency and experiencing stress and a sense of never-ending work that is getting beyond your control, just ask for help. Just ask. You will get it. It’s alright to say no when you know you won’t be able to get something done in time, no matter how important a suit stresses that it is. No brand has dipped in sales because a facebook post didn’t go out in time or wasn’t responded to quick enough.
Others will help you if you simply ask and that’s a really important lesson for every junior in advertising to know.
Don’t be facetious, Paul. Just because other people have problems doesn’t mean that you don’t have your own – there are people of all sorts getting burnt out, whether they’re in investment banking, law, teaching – or, god forbid, community management. If you’ve never had to deal with the vitriol that are the keyboard warriors of the internet, I’d encourage you to explore the YouTube comments of any major brand and see for yourself how hard it would be to try and resolve issues, turn around customers and ‘manage expectations’ online. Have a little empathy.
Our midwife didn’t go home, firefighters – don’t go home, a lot of teachers, don’t go home. I’d call a role where I wasn’t under some stress and something extra wasn’t going on – Boring
Traditional marketers generally spend weeks/months and many agency and research dollars + multiple levels of stakeholder approvals before their creative and messages even see the light of day.
CM’s on the other hand, create and sends brand messages many, many times a day – both through content posts and responding to consumers. Yes, the messaging is on a more micro level, however these posts can potentially be seen by a few thousand to a few million people in just a few days (depending on budget and post type).
The stress and anxiety that can go alongside this is huge – one mistake on social and all of a sudden you can have a full blown brand reputation issue on your hands. We’ve all seen it and yes, it doesn’t happen all the time, but I can assure you there’s been plenty of “near misses” that would scare any CM, with a quick realisation on how easily that could happen.
The risk of mistakes, error in judgement etc is much greater for a CM compared to more traditional marketers purely based on the sheer volume of content pushed out. This person is essentially the brand’s voice – and that’s a massive responsibility. Don’t judge or dismiss too quickly, I think it’s a valid argument.
Thanks for backing us CMs up here. I am a CM and have had to seek medical help for insomnia. I don’t think it’s very realistic to have one person check clients’ social media 24/7.
Burnout is a major issue that employers should be aware of regardless of occupation. It’s not caused solely by stressful work or too many responsibilities. Other factors in lifestyle and personality traits all feed into burnout.
Employers ignoring these issues regardless of the cause can lead to burnout worsening, resulting in decreased productivity and increased turnover. Mental health week is a time to reach out to people and ask are you ok, not to tell shut people down and tell them it could be worse.
To anyone feeling the signs of burnout starting to appear please seek help http://www.helpguide.org/artic.....urnout.htm
Great post, Julie! This is something a lot of community managers feel pressure with and it’s important to start the conversation about how to shift that culture and for people to get help if they need it!
I think some people posting here don’t realise that being a CM can feel like like being a customer service rep – where people phone you at home, 24 hours a day. On top of that, people in other departments will notice something happened over night or on the weekend, and demand why it wasn’t addressed – when everyone deserves time off. For those commenters who state that other professions like firefighters and nurses don’t go home at the end of the shift – their shifts gets extended if they’re working. Or it’s called in for a one-off shift? Will they get called in to work every three hours every day of the week including weekend and Christmas? Probably not. But CMs do. It’s that constant pressure for months which can wear a CM down.
I’ve seen some strategies to help CMs to create some seperation and breathing space: they don’t get notifications to their personal facebook when people post on work pages to help create that work/personal life seperation; or posting “operating hours” on their page, of what times of day queries will be responded to. And of course, educating your colleagues and setting an expectation of “no, it’s monitored during x hours” can be great. It can at least create a bit more peace of mind for people in these roles.
i agree completely with comment 4, well said
Change settings so all posts to page require approval and have an autoreply for PMs.
Solved.
As life goes on forever, we all have responsibility and commitments in our daily living. I work 14 nights and 1 day off a fortnight and during that 14 nights I work up to 16 hours 3 or 4 times a day in a week. I work for the 24/7 community myself and I know what its like working extremely hard and to much pressure pushes its limits. we have been so short on staffing and I choose to go that extra mile because who else will do the job, as stress levels goes for me, burnt out does take its toll if you cant cope with it, then you should reach out and call for help. we all only human beings at the end of the day not robots.
Businesses have done this to themselves and unfortunately the problem really extends from how the case for social was justified in the first place:
‘We’re always listening, responding’
‘Our customers are 24/7 and so are we!’
‘We’re there for our customers all the time’
And all those things are fine to say but not if other channels like a call centre isn’t open all hours of the night too.
I agree with qt3.14 in comment 12: Simply remove the ability for customers to self-publish, or (if possible) never set the expectation in the first place, and get a good nights sleep.
Most brands, save for those like Lifeline and emergency services, simply aren’t dealing with life and death situations – there isn’t anything can’t wait until the morning for a response – and if the call centre is closed it’s not like the brand is going respond then anyway.