Andy Burnham during a video call published on TikTok. No 10 has created five new roles for social media professionals. Photograph: Screengrab View image in fullscreen Andy Burnham during a video call published on TikTok. No 10 has created five new roles for social media professionals. Photograph: Screengrab Social media No 10’s ads for a TikTok team show why social media is a smart career move The Guardian’s deputy editor of social platforms on the demand from high-profile people and brands for help in harnessing the power of TikTok
Prefer the Guardian on Google I didn’t want to work in social media. If you’d asked 15-year-old me my dream job, I might have said foreign correspondent, or maybe travel writer. So you can imagine my surprise to now find myself giving these very colleagues advice on how to get the best selfie angle or write the sharpest TikTok ‘hook’.
But taking a job as the Guardian’s deputy editor of social platforms, may prove to be one of my smartest career moves if the current job market is to be believed.
You don’t need to be a digital native to have noticed the way that celebrities, brands and, yes, the prime minister, are taking their social media game seriously these days.
Westminster watchers keeping an eye on the government jobs board to get an idea of the type of people Burnham’s operation wants to recruit, noticed no less than five newly created roles for social media professionals – the most senior of them earning a touch under £70,000 per year.
Burnham’s wholesale commitment to feeding the algorithm may feel like a relative novelty on this side of the pond, but social media has been a political battleground in the US for much longer.
Early in Trump’s presidency, outgoing press secretary Karoline Leavitt could regularly be seen recapping the administration’s “successes” with the catchy “Maga minute ”, and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s masterful use of social comms is the envy of politicians the world over.
But while it’s true that the internet game requires a charismatic personality, backstage there is a squad of editors, producers and strategists making the whole thing sing. That’s where we come in.
View image in fullscreen Burnham running alongside Mo Farah also made the cut on his TikTok. Photograph: Andy Burnham/TikTok My journey into social media began when my team at CNN took over producing for the TikTok channel in 2023. I realised that’s where audiences, including myself, really were.
If you hear the word TikTok and think it’s just dance trends and memes, think again. My job involved getting phone calls from war zones asking if I had what I needed and being sent selfies from craters . When I left earlier this year we had grown the account to almost 12 million followers.
Now mainstream media is trying to beat content creators at their own game. Oxford’s Reuters Institute this year reported that social and video networks have overtaken news websites and apps by audience share. The BBC has even hired a gen z whisperer .
As with most things in the world of social media, this change has happened rapidly, one of the consequences of that change is that there is really no such thing as a “traditional route” into the industry.
View image in fullscreen Burnham talking about homelessness on TikTok. Photograph: Andy Burnham/TikTok Lauren Spearman is an accidental influencer who found a TikTok following, now at 62,000, while documenting her own frustrations finding a full-time role in marketing. She no…