I was playing around on Indeed.com which is basically a massive job search engine that also allows you to look at trends for various job titles or descriptions. I thought it would be fun to take a look at what’s going on with “social media” jobs and trends and…well…wow! The charts below should speak for themselves but let’s just say that there are a lot of companies out there looking for folks who can “do” or “understand” social media. Is Indeed.com 100% accurate? I’m going to go with a NO on that but hey the trends are still there. Indeed.com says that they search millions of job postings from thousands of job sites, so I’d like to think that the information is pretty accurate. You will notice that there a few charts below and some of them say “percentage of matching job postings” and other say “percentage growth.” I played around with both just to give a better picture of what I found.
So apparently over 60% of all job postings online have “social media” in the description somewhere, that’s massive!
To give you an idea of what kind of growth we’re looking at for the “industry” I included this chart as well. Yes, that’s right, the peak is just about 1.2 million percentage growth…what do you say to something like other than holy sh*t!! It’s really interesting to see that while this trend started in 2008 that it really didn’t sky rocket until just last year.
I also wanted to take a look at “social CRM” as a job trend and while the trend is definitely growing the percentage of job postings that even mention “social CRM” are minuscule.
Same thing with “social business,” not a job title or description that organizations have started using yet. Having said that though, I’m sure the role of “social business” person exists but perhaps it is just called something else.
I found this quite interesting as well, especially since I’m so interested in enterprise collaboration. I suppose “collaboration” is a trend that we should be expecting to see? However, the growth is pretty darn huge and I would correlate some of this to the whole Enterprise 2.0 movements we are seeing.
I have to be honest here, I actually expected this percentage to be MUCH higher than the chart shows, I thought “community manager” would have seen a similar trend that “social media” did, guess I was wrong.
I decided to look at the general trend for “community” as well, and while there is better growth there, it’s still not quite as strong as I had expected. After all, a good portion of this “social media” stuff IS about community.
Clearly this whole “social media” thing is pretty big if the growth is THAT big and if THAT many job postings online are looking for “social media” help. It will be interesting to see how this trend continues and shifts over the next year or two. I’m still not convinced that most of the companies looking for social media are looking at this strategically, I think most organizations are looking at social as a way to sell more stuff, spam more customers, and market to a wider audience. I also think that too often, social is being associate specifically with a tool or channel such as Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile over at Chess Media Group we are writing a client social customer roadmap that includes eCommerce, CRM, ERP, change management, collaboration solutions, and a few other things. I actually don’t think we mentioned Twitter or Facebook once in the whole document. A disconnect? Ya, maybe just a bit.
What do you think of these charts/numbers? Interesting or something you expected? Ho do you think organizations are looking at social media?
Thanks for pulling together these charts, Jacob.
I think job postings are an interesting way to look at what companies are really doing. Because hiring people is a serious commitment.
On the one hand, it suggests that terms like “social CRM” and “collaboration” are just industry buzzwords. “We” know what they mean, but the average business manager doesn’t speak the lingo or care.
On the other hand, if you think that, broadly speaking, “social business” means using social media in business, then it’s clear that something important is happening.
Of course, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether the business managers hiring all these people to do social media jobs will achieve the benefits that vendors and consultants promote.
“CRM” is a huge and well-known industry at this stage. Take a look at this chart, which shows an uptick about 1 year ago. My guess is that “social” is what caused this bump after several years of stagnation.
I think you’d need to take into account other factors, such as the increased scope of the search engine and weather it’s filtering out duplicates, not to mention the effect of the rise in job search aggregating sites. As such, I think we could take some figures with a pinch of salt.
So, while I wouldn’t want to completely discredit and disregard the growth of certain trends here, what I find more interesting is the snapshot of where we are now. 60% of all jobs posted online have ‘social media’ in the description – that is something that should make people sit up and take notice. That clearly shows that companies are unified in recognizing the importance of social media, even if they’re not settling on fixed job titles or terminology. It also reaffirms the need for tools to make sense of the social web. So, while sCRM isn’t yet on the tip of everyone’s tongue, it is at least in the back of their minds, moving forwards.