5harathFounding Growth Lead, Willow Voice

The role of self-pressure in burnout - Jack Appleby

21 Jan 2024 · 1 min

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1:01

In this short dialogue, Speaker A reflects on why many people are drawn to professional social‑media work, emphasizing a love of creative self‑expression rather than a focus on marketing or sales. The conversation then shifts to the many industry‑driven factors that fuel burnout for social‑media managers—overwork, unreasonable bosses, high expectations, and the reality of being a "team of one." While acknowledging these external pressures, Speaker A highlights a less‑spoken, internal source of strain: the self‑imposed pressure to deliver results and maintain personal standards, even when client performance or brand lift is lacking. The excerpt sets up the idea that self‑pressure is a critical, often overlooked component of burnout in the social‑media field.

I think human beings love to be creative. The reason we all have Instagram and post photos or post stories is we enjoy expressing ourselves that way. And I think when you enter this field, a lot of people who are entering professional social media, they're doing it because they love social media, not because they love marketing or not because they love selling things.
Hmm.
I was fascinated by all of the above. And I think in retrospect, I'm finding that was maybe the most important thing for me is because I wasn't interested in retweets if my client's product didn't sell or our brand lift didn't increase. So I think what, I think there's a lot of industry things that cause burnout. Overwork is very like happens all the time. That's true. Unreasonable bosses, too many expectations of team of one. There's a laundry list of reasons. That are out of a social media manager's control that cause burnout. But I do think an unspoken part of this is that there's a lot of self-pressure