It's almost midnight when the phone buzzes — a client text, a comment that needs a reply, a trend that will be stale by morning. For the people who run brand accounts on social media, the workday never really ends. This isn't hyperbole; it's the reality documented by a team of marketing researchers whose work has just been spotlighted by Fast Company, revealing a profession quietly running on empty.

The researchers — Kelley Cours Anderson of the College of Charleston, Ashley Hass of the University of Portland, and Breanne A. Mertz of the University of Tampa — published their study in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice in September 2025. They interviewed social media marketers across five countries — the United States, Ireland, India, Germany, and Australia — and found a workforce united by a common experience: passionate, creative people who are mentally drained by jobs that rarely turn off.

The numbers paint a stark picture. More than 40 percent of social media marketers plan to leave their jobs within two years, and nearly half report receiving little to no support from supervisors for their mental health. When you consider that turnover costs between one-half to two times a worker's annual salary, this isn't just a wellness problem — it's a business problem hiding in plain sight.

What makes this profession uniquely taxing? The researchers identify a phenomenon with no easy parallel in other fields: the platform is simultaneously the workplace, the tool, and the leisure environment. The same apps a marketer uses to create content, monitor engagement, and respond to customers are the same ones they turn to for entertainment, social connection, and news. You can't log off from your workplace when your workplace lives in the same app as your friends' baby photos.

The study identified two forces driving this burnout that deserve careful attention. First, the comparison trap: marketers spend their evenings scrolling personal feeds hunting for trends to use at work, and the line between relaxing and researching dissolves entirely. One participant described scrolling as "constantly being told I was doing things wrong" — a double dose of social comparison, personal and professional, all day, every day. Second, the paradox of tools: scheduling platforms and AI assistants promise to lighten the load, but algorithms reward constant engagement and fresh content. The tools offer freedom, yet the always-on expectation remains stubbornly untouched.

Here's where I want to add a layer of analysis the study didn't fully explore. Social media marketers are canaries in the coal mine of the broader creative economy. The boundary dissolution they experience — where professional identity, creative output, and personal life all happen in the same digital space — is spreading to designers, writers, video editors, and independent creators of every stripe. When we solve burnout for social media managers, we're prototyping solutions for an entire generation of knowledge workers whose jobs are mediated by the same platforms that dominate their personal lives.

And there's a historical parallel worth considering. Every profession that deals with high-stakes, always-on demands has eventually had to formalize its boundaries — not out of kindness, but because the alternative proved dangerous. Medicine instituted resident work-hour limits after studies showed exhausted doctors made more fatal errors. Air traffic controllers have mandatory rest periods written into law. These weren't luxuries; they were professional guardrails that made the work sustainable. Social media marketing is a younger profession, but it's undergoing the same maturation. The question isn't whether boundaries will arrive, but whether they'll be adopted proactively or only after a crisis forces the issue.

The researchers' proposed fixes land on two levels. At the individual level, they distinguish between experimentation and copying: what restores one person — a radical digital break — may backfire for another who does better with small habit shifts like defined response windows or boundary scripts for clients. They also recommend using technology deliberately rather than reactively — scheduling proactively and treating AI as an assistant rather than a replacement for the creative work that makes the job meaningful. At the structural level, they call on employers to define social media roles more clearly, staff them realistically, establish communication charters with genuine response windows, and normalize conversations about digital fatigue.

Some countries are already ahead on the structural front. France, Italy, Spain, and Ireland have written a "right to disconnect" into law, and Australia recently extended protections to small-business employees. These legal frameworks recognize something fundamental: in a world where the office is a smartphone, the boundary between work and life doesn't set itself — it has to be deliberately constructed and collectively defended.

There's an economic argument here too that often gets overlooked in wellness conversations. Creativity is the core value proposition of social media marketing — the clever caption, the perfectly timed post, the authentic voice that makes a brand feel human. But creativity is one of the first cognitive faculties to degrade under chronic stress. A burned-out marketer posting from a place of exhaustion produces flat, formulaic content that audiences scroll past without a second thought. Investing in marketer wellbeing isn't just humane — it's a direct investment in the quality of the creative output that drives engagement and revenue.

The broader lesson extends well beyond social media. As more work becomes platform-mediated, more workers will face the same challenge the researchers document so clearly: the tools that make us productive are also the tools that make us exhausted, and no amount of individual willpower can solve a structural problem. The brands profiting from attention, and the companies hiring for it, have a choice to make about whether the people behind the screens get to log off too. Forward-thinking organizations that build sustainable digital work cultures now will have a competitive advantage in talent, creativity, and longevity — and that's a trend worth scrolling for.

Source: Kelley Cours Anderson, Ashley Hass & Breanne A. Mertz, "The hidden burnout crisis facing social media marketers," originally published at Fast Company (June 28, 2026) and The Conversation. Read the full research-backed analysis at The Conversation. Original Fast Company article: Social media marketers are stuck in a burnout trap. Here's how to break free.