As the demand for more engaging content increases by the minute, social media managers and content creators alike are feeling the pressure in hopes for a viral moment.

One difficulty for content creators is that many clients and collaborators don’t necessarily understand what it takes to get the viral results we do. They’ll drop a lot of ideas on you at once, or they have a lot of different ideas that you know just won’t work but you have to find a way to let them down gently while staying employed – this is particularly hard as a freelancer. 

For social media marketers at agencies juggling multiple projects at once, fatigue is real and burn out very frequent. For this reason, many are defining their niche more, for example claiming they are content creators only rather than content creators and social media managers. 

Interestingly, many creators are finding Instagram more stressful than TikTok. “TikTok, I see as the least amount of effort. With all of my clients, we’re able to have fun on TikTok. But with Instagram, everything has to be so technical because some of my clients have different [product] features that some of my other clients don’t. If a client sees something, they’re like, “I want that. Can I do something like that?” And it’s like, “You don’t even have that feature [available on your account].” Then they feel upset and we have to manage expectations. [Clients asked for more] when Reels came out. When video content literally took over, because everybody wanted to be seen. When Reels dropped, that’s the only way people saw people’s content. [It] was through video content” these are the words of an anonymous creator in speaking with Digiday. 

The reason for this in a nutshell is because TikTok thrives off of authenticity whereas Instagram must maintain a glossy reputation. 

As a creator myself, the element I find the most frustrating is having to churn out repetitive content. We are multi-faceted content. For example, as a music artist, I write music, perform music, come up with content ideas, arrange live shows, engage in brand partnerships and more. Naturally I want to speak about all those things plus my interests (fashion cooking and web3) on my socials. Instead, I have to wait for a video to go viral and then put out the same kind of content and that feels limiting and suffocating on my creativity. As a result my mental health suffers.