No one is old enough to handle your social media

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about what the right age is for your social media manager.

For the past couple weeks many of the major social media influencers have been discussing a two articles. First someone says that every social media manager should be under the age of 25. Then someone else says your social media manger should be older than 23. And then the whole Internet gets into a pissing match over an argument that can’t be won.

As a social media professional, and a young one at that, I think it’s important for me to share my overwrought and extremely important opinion without having read either source article.

How on earth should you, a marketing or corporate communications professional, know what the right age is to hire? How are you going to know who the right person is to manage your social media channels? If you don’t know their age, how can you decide if they’re the right person?

What’s even worse? As the hiring manager, you can’t ask someone their age here in the US. So how are you going to know who’s old enough and young enough to manage social media properties?

The answer is simple. There is no one old enough and young enough to manage your social media properties.

If you need to hire social media professional today the better answer is to not hire a social media professional. You will never find someone eho is simultaneously old enough and young enough with the perfect skill set to be your social media manager.

I know how hard it is to accept that. Once you learn that no one can manage your social media appropriately you’ll learn that it’s better to live your business life without social media.

Still, if we as social media bloggers focus on the age of social media managers, we will never discuss the real things that matter to social media professionals and the businesses they work for. Things that matter, such as measurement and enterprise social media scaling. Things that could get you hired, like real and demonstrable skills. Or things that change the very nature of our work, like the convergence of social messaging and social advertising into paid, owned, and earned media.

But that shit is boring and doesn’t get page views.

So fine. Let’s just focus on age of social media managers. We don’t want to get anywhere productive in our social media conversations. Who seriously wants to discuss what the right skill set is for an entry-level social media position?

And if you’re going to seriously discuss that, I’m going to need a drink.