Run a brand's Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn for a living. Creative work with numbers attached.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $74,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $43,000 at the lower end to about $119,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
1 to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
$1,000 to $51,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Moderate demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$74,000
Lower end
$43,000
Upper end
$119,000
Job Bank's national median is $35.58 an hour, about $74,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The lower end ($20.50) and upper end ($57.44) are the bottom and top of the wage range for everyone in the group. Job Bank pools social media roles with public relations specialists.
About $20 an hour
In Ontario the lowest paid tenth of the group earn this or less, about $41,600 a year
Job Bank does not publish a starting rate. A first job is usually a social media coordinator at an agency or small company, and many are contracts or part time.
$37.02 an hour
The median in Ontario, about $77,000 a year, the highest of the provinces
The territories pay more: Nunavut's median is $52.67. Manitoba's is the lowest, at $28.85. Within any province, the jump comes from running a team and a budget for paid ads.
Roughly, all in
$1,000 to $51,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Nobody checks for a credential in this job, so the low end is free platform courses, such as HubSpot Academy, plus a phone and editing apps to build a portfolio with. The high end is a four year communications or business degree at a higher tuition rate with better camera and editing gear. A two or three year Ontario college marketing diploma sits in the middle at roughly 5,500 to 17,000 dollars in tuition. What the numbers hide is that the thing that actually gets you hired is an account you grew yourself, which costs time rather than money.
Roughly $1,000 to $51,000 in all. Plenty of people in this job have no related diploma. What they have is an account they grew themselves.
Salary
In-house at a brand, a charity or a media company.
Agency
Several clients at once and fast learning.
Freelance
Monthly retainers per client. Uneven, but you can stack a few.
Your own audience
Some managers earn on the side as creators. Paid posts must be disclosed by law.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Build an account, learn the tools, then get hired on what you have already made. Quebec has its own route: tap Quebec route to add it.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Run social media for a club, a team, a school event or a small local business. Track what worked.
Post-secondary, optional but common
0 to 4 years
A 2 or 3-year college diploma in marketing or digital media, or a 4-year degree in communications or business. Some take a 1-year graduate certificate in digital marketing afterward.
Platform courses
Weeks
HubSpot Academy's social media certificate is free and takes about 5 hours. Meta and Google teach their own ad and analytics tools too.
Coordinator job
1 to 2 years
Scheduling posts, replying to comments, pulling reports, shooting content.
Manager
By year 3 to 5
Owning strategy, budget and results for a brand or a set of clients.
English and writing
Captions, scripts, replies to angry customers.
Media arts or photography
Shooting and editing short video is half the job now.
Business and marketing
You post to sell something.
Data management
Reach, engagement and conversion are numbers.
No licence or diploma is required. The rules that do apply are advertising law. The Competition Bureau requires paid or gifted content to be clearly disclosed, on every platform, without the reader having to tap to expand. Ad Standards runs the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards and takes complaints about misleading posts. Privacy law limits what you can collect about followers. A manager who ignores these can get the brand fined.
Quebec adds a CEGEP (public college) step, and by law company posts aimed at Quebec customers must be in French.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Run accounts for a club or team and track what works. Practise writing posts in French as well as English.
DEC (Diploma of College Studies)
2 or 3 years
Techniques d'intégration multimédia (multimedia integration, 582.A1), a 3 year technical DEC, in English at Vanier College. Or a 2 year pre-university DEC such as Arts, Literature and Communication (500.A1).
Bachelor's, optional
3 years
A communication or marketing degree. UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal) has a 90 credit BA (Bachelor of Arts) in strategic communication and public relations with an internship.
Coordinator job
Varies
Scheduling posts, replying to comments, pulling reports. Expect to write and answer in French.
Manager
Varies
Strategy, budget and results for a brand or a set of clients.
From the guide of the OQLF (Office québécois de la langue française, the Quebec French language office). The rules were strengthened on June 1, 2022.
Posts in French
Commercial posts about products or services for the Quebec market must be in French, including videos and text inside images, permanent or temporary.
Bilingual is allowed
An English version can run too, if the French one is at least equivalent and just as easy to reach, without changing any settings.
Two accounts
Separate English and French accounts are allowed if everything posted in English goes up in French at the same time.
Replies
You may answer a comment in the language it was written in, but anyone who wrote in French must get a French reply.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Paid social advertising
Running ad budgets on Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn. The line between a coordinator and a manager.
Video editing
CapCut, Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. Short video is where the growth is.
Analytics
Google Analytics and platform dashboards. Proving posts led to sales.
Community and crisis management
Handling a pile-on calmly. Rare and valuable.
An account you grew yourself
Any niche. Numbers you can show beat any diploma.
Basic design
Canva at minimum, Figma or Photoshop is better.
French
National brands post in both languages.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Check overnight comments and messages first, especially anything that could blow up. Review the day's scheduled posts. A content shoot mid-morning: product photos, a short video, a quick interview. Writing captions, editing clips, sending them to a manager or client for approval. Afternoon in the analytics: what worked last week, what to try next. A planning meeting for a launch. Evenings and weekends are quieter but the phone stays on, because the internet does not close.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The Competition Bureau says any post where you were paid, got a product at no charge or have a personal connection to the brand must say so clearly, on every platform, visible without tapping to expand the post. Tagging the brand or posting a discount code is unlikely to be enough.
Ad Standards, the industry body that has run Canada's advertising code since 1963, received 776 complaints about ads in 2025, 27% more than the year before. Influencer posts without a clear disclosure came up in 8% of the ads it looked into.
In 2025, influencer marketing made up 20% of the ad complaints from Quebec, against 7% on average across Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Marketing and sales first, then the rest of the field. See every career in business and money.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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