If you like Social Lives, it would be great if you could pass it onto someone and encourage them to subscribe! If you *really* like my work, you can also buy me a coffee. For the price of just one Cappuccino, you can help this freelancer continue to be caffeinated!
THE GREAT RETURN
Remember 2020? Remember fighting people in the aisles of Tesco over the toilet roll and pasta we were stockpiling because we all thought the world was ending? Remember people banging pots and pans (and, on some occasions, playing the extended remix of the Eastenders theme tune through a sound system) ‘for the NHS’? Remember when offices across the world shut their doors and we were all told we were entering a glorious new era of remote working?
2020 was an incredibly weird, scary and emotionally taxing year. It could be argued that many of us are still living with the effects of the global pandemic - a pandemic that is still active. A lot of negatives came out of the Covid era. But one positive was how it demonstrated that many people could work from home just as easily as from an office. As someone who has been banging this particular drum for over ten years now, it felt refreshing to see everyone coming around to my way of thinking. It felt like employers were finally realising that their employees didn’t have to be in an office five days a week to get great work done. For people like me - a lowly freelancer who lives in the North West of England with numerous clients based in London - it felt like we would finally get more access to high-paid, high-quality projects without having to commit to living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Man, was I naive.
Over the past few months, I’ve seen more and more job opportunities - both freelance and full-time - cropping up that make a big deal out of being ‘flexible’, yet require people to be in the office three days out of five. This is feasible if you live in London or the South of England and can commute. It’s not if you don’t.
These job opportunities worry me because they’re closing the door on talent that doesn’t have the access or money to work in London. It’s not like wages or day rates are increasing dramatically to accommodate this. According to Glassdoor, the average full-time social media salary is £35,000. An Off Peak return rail ticket from Liverpool Lime Street to London Euston is £103. It rises to over £200 if you need to get to London before 11am. And this is before you figure out where you’re going to stay, what you’re going to eat and what public transport you’re going to take to get you to your fancy office on time.
London isn’t the centre of the world when it comes to social media. But that doesn’t mean that Manchester - another growing social media hub - is any cheaper. It’s also much harder to get a train to Manchester that runs on time. Anyone who has tried to use Northern or TransPennine rail in the past twelve months will tell you about the absolute misery of commuting in the North of England. As for rents - the average for a two bedroom flat in Manchester is £1,539 pcm. Manchester has long thought that anything London does, it can do better. This also applies to the rising cost of living there.
Offices are also not great environments for neurodivergent people. As a person with ADHD, I find it really hard to concentrate in one because of the noise and because my focus is often diverted by conversations happening around me. I’m expected to work from 9am - 5pm when I’ve adapted my schedule to when I know I can get my best work done. I’d much rather sit in my messy office at 7am and bang out a content calendar when I know I won’t be bothered than try to write it when I have 101 different things happening around me.
You don’t need to physically work in an office to do a social media job. All you need is a laptop, a fast internet connection and a (relatively) quiet place to work. I’m not saying that remote work is for everyone - there are a lot of valid reasons why people dislike it. But I worry about the future of the industry if we are beholden to the idea that people can only do their best work when they’re crammed into the same room together. We’re an industry that’s always looking to innovate. So why can’t we do that for ways of working?
JOBS BOARD
Contract: That Lot are looking for a Senior Paid Social Media Manager on a six month FTC
Contract: Comic Relief have an opportunity available for a Social Media Moderator
Freelance: Jungle Creations want a freelance Social Media Executive to start work with them ASAP
Full Time: Manchester-based social media agency Carousel are recruiting a Social Media Executive
Full Time: The New York Times need a Senior Social Media Editor
INTERESTING THING OF THE WEEK: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELMO(‘S SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER)
I loved this interview that Link In Bio did with Christina Vittas, the Social Media Manager for Sesame Street and the voice of Elmo. It’s a really interesting insight into the importance of tone of voice as well as understanding your audience. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re looking for tips on how to create a distinctive voice on social, and also contains a lot of very cute Elmo tweets.
IN THE NEWS
Instagram has introduced 'nighttime nudges' to discourage teens from using it past their bedtime (Engadget)
Meta documents show 100,000 children sexually harassed daily on its platforms (The Guardian)
Mr Beast posted a full length video on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, despite saying he would never do so. Garbage Day has a good overview on this (BBC News)
Threads now lets you hide both like and share counts (Social Media Today)
TikTok can now generate AI songs, although it probably shouldn’t (The Verge)
THINGS I LIKE
Coming of age at the dawn of the social internet (The New Yorker)
The man who built a $1 million hi-fi - and the impact it had on his life and the lives of his family (The Washington Post)
Amelia Tait’s excellent newsletter tells the story of the man who collects lost pet posters (The Waiting Room)
“If Books Could Kill” examines Donald Trump’s magnum opus, The Art of the Deal (If Books Could Kill podcast)
This recipe for Chicken Rice with Buttered Onions will be the thing that gets me through this cold snap (Smitten Kitchen)
A GOOD TIKTOK
If you’re feeling stressed, take three minutes out of your day to go on a snowy high-speed train journey through Switzerland
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser