A few years ago, I sat in on a marketing review for a mid-sized regional company that had decent revenue, a up-and-coming brand, and exactly one person responsible for social media.
So, she pulled up her system for reviewing the previous quarter, and it was… a sight. A Google Sheet that hadn’t been updated in weeks. A Slack channel full of automated alerts nobody looked at yet, and the Notion page where strategy notes supposedly lived wasn’t even accessible to the rest of the team.
You couldn’t find the creative to save your life with file names like FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.
I asked why they hadn’t repeated a campaign from the spring. It had clearly outperformed almost everything else they posted in recent history.
She said: “Honestly, I don’t think we made any decision not to do it again, we just wanted to try something else. I remember it worked though.”
Now, she was good at her job. She understood the brand, produced solid creative, and was clearly putting in real effort. But, the information needed to actually run the program was scattered across five different platforms, with no clean record of what had been planned, what had been approved, what had gone out, or what the team had learned from any of it.
That’s been years ago and since then I’ve run into this same situation… many times… it’s more the rule than the exception.
Most of the innovation in social centers on tools: publishing, scheduling, reporting, creating, listening. But hardworking people still lose track of their best campaigns and decisions. The harder issue, is that most teams are running a social media program with one person, a supervisor who isn’t in the platform, and a “process” that is whack.
One Person Is Running the Whole Function
This isn’t an edge case. Planable surveyed 1,000 marketers in 2025 and found that nearly 40% manage social media entirely solo, with nobody else checking a campaign before it goes live.
The person in that seat is also doing more than the job description suggests. They’re writing posts, coordinating creative, responding to comments, watching trends, and somehow finding time to explain results to leadership. It’s one of the broadest roles in marketing, but companies still treat it like an entry-level position, hiring someone early in their career and handing them the public voice of the brand. They assume the SaaS will make up for the lack of an actual standard operating procedure.
Sprout Social hiring data research found 66% of social marketers say they’re effectively doing more than one job, but only a quarter got promoted in the past year. Olivia Jepson, who leads social media intelligence at Sprout, doesn’t soften the conclusion:
“Clinging to generalist-only roles will lead to burnout and churn.” Olivia Jepson, Sprout Social
And it shows up at the survey level too. The 2025 Sprout Social Index found that 94% of social practitioners feel they have to be “chronically online” just to keep up with the job. Companies hire one person to cover it and call it a day.
The Manager Above Them Isn’t Logging In
There’s a second issue, and it’s one most social media software just assumes away.
Most platforms are built on the idea that managers and executives will log in regularly to review work, approve content, and check performance dashboards. In practice, most managers never do.
The specialist is doing the work. Their manager cares about the output but has six other things competing for their attention, and isn’t going to spend a morning inside a social dashboard. So approval ends up happening however it happens to happen, through a screenshot texted at 9pm or a quick reply buried in an email thread. A campaign idea gets hashed out on a call and never written down anywhere searchable, and someone types “looks good” into Slack that nobody can find three weeks later.
A recent Link in Bio industry survey found: 44% of social marketers say their boss doesn’t actually understand social media well enough to manage it. The platform can ship a full enterprise approval workflow, but if the manager’s actual habit is approving things over text, that workflow just sits there unused.
Most Teams Don’t Need an Enterprise Platform
There’s nothing wrong with Hootsuite or Sprout Social. They’re built to centralize publishing, scheduling, and reporting for teams managing a lot of pages across a lot of platforms at once, often with multiple users and clients in the mix.
Most businesses aren’t that though. Most social operators are running two or three pages, and what they actually need is simpler: a way to know what’s going out this week, confirm the creative is ready and signed off, and avoid repeating last quarter’s mistake of forgetting what they already tried.
The social platforms have been closing the gap on third-party publishing tools lately. Meta Business Suite handles free scheduling and a unified inbox for Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn, Pinterest, and X all run their own native schedulers now too. For a team managing a handful of pages, a good chunk of the “get the post out the door” job is already covered for free.
For most teams, the real challenge is keeping the program organized enough to run consistently, month after month, long after any single post goes out.
The Work Gets Lost Between the Brief and the Post
Most social programs run into trouble somewhere between the brief and the actual post going live.
The brief lives in one tool, the copy in another, and the creative sits in a shared drive nobody bothered to name properly. Feedback gets buried in a thread that scrolled away two days ago, and the calendar lives in Asana or a spreadsheet, so by the time a post actually goes live, the path it took to get there is a scavenger hunt.
A system where nobody can see the full story of the work. A good idea makes its way from assignment through revisions, approval, scheduling, and publishing, and then the team moves on to the next thing without ever circling back. A few weeks later someone asks why a decision got made, or whether something actually worked, and now they’re digging through old messages and folders hoping they find the answer, scrolling through their own Insta grids.
That’s how useful information disappears, and this isn’t unique to social media. MarTech.org’s State of the Stack survey found 62.1% of marketers are using more tools than they were two years ago, and other research puts the average organization at roughly 75 different martech tools running at once. Social teams are juggling a pile of tools that got thrown together haphazardly as needs came up, they don’t talk to each other.
AI is the newest layer in the pile right now. The same State of Your Stack research found that generative AI tools are now used by 68.6% of organizations, making them the sixth most popular category of martech after only a couple of years on the market. That’s a real boost for drafting captions and producing creative faster.
Memory is a separate question, more nuanced. Someone willing to put in the setup work, structured prompts, saved context, a deliberate system for feeding a chatbot the right history, can get reasonably good recall out of it. But that takes premeditation, and most people aren’t doing it. Most people are opening a new chat every time they need something, and losing whatever context existed in the last conversation. That still leaves nobody able to recall why a piece of content existed in the first place, or where all it had been shared.
Social Teams Need a Memory, Not Just a Calendar
Social media moves fast, but that’s no excuse for a team to forget everything it did last month. A healthy program should be able to answer simple questions without anyone relying on memory, like what’s gone out recently, which campaigns have already been tried, and what actually worked well enough to repeat.
Most teams can answer those questions eventually. Answering them quickly and with confidence is the harder bar, most teams can’t do it. A feed shows what got published, but not why. A calendar shows dates, but not what changed along the way. A performance report shows the numbers, but not the decisions that led to them.
Gary Vaynerchuk, traced the failure point to something simpler: people don’t have the discipline to do the little things day by day. That’s the part the dashboards can’t fix.
That ongoing historical context is exactly what makes a program improve over time. It tells you what worked, what flopped, and how to get better. It also makes onboarding painless, because the next person doesn’t have to start from zero just because the last person left.
What Better Operations Actually Looks Like
Better social media operations don’t need to feel heavy. They should make the job easier for someone who’s already stretched thin, not pile on another layer of process.
The team should have a clear view of what’s coming up and what still needs attention. The history of the work should still be there after the post goes live, not buried in a thread or lost when someone leaves the company. Leadership should be able to get a real answers to basic questions about their social programs.
Good creative instincts and a sharp content strategist are still what make the work good in the first place. A system just keeps that work from evaporating the moment it’s published. Posting volume and software stack size have surprisingly little to do with which teams actually improve over time. The deciding factor is whether they keep a clear record of what they’re doing and can actually learn from it.
The platforms have publishing covered. You can post every which way. Now it’s about building a better way to run the program around it.