Rachel Karten got her start in social media in a way she admits is now a punch line: as an intern.

“That’s the classic joke when brand accounts mess up online, of course,” she says. “Did an intern tweet this?”

Rachel Karten got started in social media in 2013 as an intern and now works independently.

Rachel Karten got started in social media in 2013 as an intern and now works independently.

Photo: Chelsea Kyle

Ms. Karten, now 30 and based in Santa Monica, Calif., started running social media for Plated, a meal-kit startup, in 2013, and persuaded the company to turn her internship into a full-time role. There were few mentors in the still-new field at the time, so she got better at her job by seeking out meetings with people behind the accounts of companies she admired, like Warby Parker and Birchbox.

After more than seven years running social media for Plated and the food magazine Bon Appétit, she felt there was enough work available that she could become an independent consultant. Last December, she also launched a newsletter for industry professionals to discuss topics like mental health.

“There are enough of us now that people don’t need to start from scratch like I did each time,” she says. And there are so many full-time jobs that she even started posting some listings on her newsletter—a far cry from her one-woman campaign to create a position for herself eight years ago.

Some 15 years after Facebook and Twitter opened their platforms to the public, social media is an established, mainstream career field. There are academic programs dedicated to its practice. Workers say it’s sometimes still treated as a job for rookies, both through pay grades and interpersonal dynamics from those who think it’s just not that serious. But that’s changing: Those in the field see more bargaining power and more full-time roles than ever before.

Many social-media specific jobs still offer lower salaries than comparable fields like marketing. The average annual salary for marketing managers is $102,496 and $109,607 for marketing directors on Glassdoor, according to a spokesperson for the jobs website. Meanwhile, the average annual salary is $67,892 for social-media directors and $47,908 for social-media assistants.

“There’s still this idea that everyone uses social media, so it must be easy,” says 30-year-old Alana Visconti, a brand social account lead at Verizon.

Alana Visconti says social media wasn’t seen as a full-time job when she graduated college but now is a viable career path.

Alana Visconti says social media wasn’t seen as a full-time job when she graduated college but now is a viable career path.

Photo: Alana Visconti

But Ms. Visconti notes that the field has become more professionalized in recent years. When she got her undergraduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2015, she says, “It definitely wasn’t seen as a career path.” Today, following work for clients including Hyatt and Puma, she believes she can dedicate her whole career to social media. “What I love about it is that it’s the way to connect most directly with consumers,” she says.

The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism launched a master’s degree in digital social media in 2018 in response to the growing number of jobs in the field, says Daniela Baroffio, who oversees the program. The school aimed to meet executives’ demand for social-media experts who have a handle both on hard skills, like data analytics, and storytelling, she says.

“These jobs are way beyond entry-level positions now,” she says. She also believes that social media’s maturation as a field has had social benefits: Online organizing and activism around movements like Stop Asian Hate are linked to the more sophisticated ways in which people use these platforms today. “That’s also a product of this new social-media talent,” she says.

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Mike Stelzner has been organizing Social Media Marketing World, an annual conference for industry professionals, since 2013. Its attendance nearly quadrupled from 2013 to 2020, from about 1,100 to over 4,000 people, he says. During that time, attendees changed from primarily community managers—workers reacting to customers on brands’ social-media accounts—to more full-time social-media marketers who actively create content.

The stakes of making a gaffe on an institutional social-media account, and the ability of nearly anyone to express displeasure or outrage over controversial content through social media, mean that nearly any public-facing body, from startups to the CIA, now has professionals behind its accounts.

That’s partly why even companies in fields not traditionally associated with a voice-y online presence, like financial services, have full-time employees in that space. Hannah Atiyeh runs social media at Yotta, a New York fintech startup launched in 2020. Before that, she was half of a two-person team running the social accounts of Marcus, the digital banking unit of Goldman Sachs.

Though the 28-year-old has several years of experience now, she notes that much of her job remains self-taught. She learned Figma, a graphic-design tool, on her own, and keeps abreast of TikTok trends by maintaining a personal account in her spare time for her dog. “I never sign off,” she admits.

The fact that brand-new platforms like TikTok emerge every few years means that younger workers can have an edge in the field over veterans.

David Meerman Scott, a 60-year-old marketing strategist in Boston whose 2006 book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” about using social media for business purposes, is on its seventh edition, says that aspects of the industry are now beyond his grasp.

“In the beginning, it was all about the need for businesses to create content specifically for social media, which was an insight that I had somewhat early,” he says. “Now it’s much more about understanding how algorithms work, and I just don’t understand things like what time of day to publish a TikTok video on a deep level.”

Amya Zhanelle, who runs her own firm, says even many older clients understand that social media is hard work and worth paying for.

Amya Zhanelle, who runs her own firm, says even many older clients understand that social media is hard work and worth paying for.

Photo: Christine Templeton

Some young people entering the field today are finding more bargaining power than their predecessors.

Amya Zhanelle, a 22-year-old in Montclair, N.J., who runs her own social-media and marketing firm, says that clients seem more receptive to the notion that social media is hard work today than when she did part-time marketing work in college. Her one-off packages for new clients start at $2,500. Ongoing content management starts at $700 a month, for which she requires a binding, minimum six-month commitment.

“Even if some of my older clients don’t completely understand the process, they’ve seen how things can go wrong when brands mess up on social media, so they understand that it’s worth the investment,” she says.

—Write to Krithika Varagur at krithika.varagur@wsj.com.