Why the Youngest Person Shouldn't Run Your Social Media
"He's always on his phone" is how most small businesses end up handing their public image to the newest person in the building. Here's why platform fluency isn't marketing skill — and the account-ownership check you should run today.
Dave Smith
# Why the Youngest Person Shouldn't Run Your Social Media
"Get Jamie to do it — he's nineteen, he's never off his phone."
It gets said in workshops, salons, warehouses and cafés up and down the country. The business needs to be on social media, nobody senior has the time or the confidence, and there's a young person standing right there who clearly understands all this stuff. Problem solved.
Except it isn't. Handing your social media to the youngest person in the building is one of the most common mistakes small businesses make, and it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with how capable that young person is.
Using a platform isn't the same as marketing on it
Yes, your apprentice can edit a Reel faster than you can find the camera app. That's genuinely useful. But it's the smallest part of the job.
The hard part of business social media is knowing what to say. Why do customers choose you over the place down the road? Which jobs make you the most money, and which enquiries do you wish you got more of? What do your regulars actually care about? What's the story behind how the business started?
That knowledge lives in your head, not theirs. A nineteen-year-old three months into the job can't tell the story of a business they've barely met. So they fall back on what they can do: trending audio, generic captions, posts that look the part but say nothing. It's not their fault. They've been given the microphone without the script.
Personal social media is a different skill
There's a quiet assumption underneath the "they're always on their phone" logic: that posting for your mates and posting for a business are the same activity. They're not even close.
Posting personally means entertaining people who already know you. Posting for a business means representing a brand to strangers, judging what's appropriate, knowing when a joke lands and when it cheapens you, and handling the customer who leaves a sarcastic comment at 9pm. That last one alone is a judgement call plenty of experienced owners get wrong. Expecting the newest, youngest member of staff to navigate it on instinct is asking a lot.
It's unfair on them, too
Think about what you're actually asking. Someone on a junior wage, hired to do a completely different job, is now responsible for your public image — with no training, no budget, no plan, and usually no allocated time. They're expected to squeeze it in around their real work.
Then, six months later, when the posts haven't magically produced customers, there's a vague sense that they've let the side down. They were set up to fail, and they usually know it. It's a rubbish position to put a keen young employee in, and it can sour someone who might otherwise have become genuinely good at this.
The ownership problem nobody thinks about
Here's the practical danger: when social media is informally handed to whoever's youngest, the accounts tend to get set up informally too. Their personal email. Their phone number for the verification code. Their personal profile as the only admin.
Then they move on — because junior staff do — and you discover your business page is effectively theirs. Best case, it's an awkward series of messages asking a former employee for passwords. Worst case, you're starting from zero followers with a page you can't access sitting in search results above your new one. If nothing else in this article moves you, go and check right now who actually owns your accounts.
What actually works instead
The fix isn't "the owner must do everything." You genuinely don't have the time, and that's fine. The fix is splitting the job into its two real parts.
The knowledge has to come from you. The stories, the expertise, the opinions, the answers to the questions customers always ask — that's the raw material, and only the people who've lived the business have it. This doesn't mean writing every post. It means the content should be built from what you know, not from what a junior can guess.
The mechanics can be delegated — properly. If your young team member is genuinely interested, brilliant. Involve them like you'd involve anyone in a real responsibility: a proper brief on tone and topics, clear boundaries on what needs sign-off, time actually set aside for it, and admin access that stays with the business, always. That's delegation. "You're young, sort the Facebook" is abdication.
And if nobody in the building has the time, the mechanics are exactly the bit technology is now good at. This is the problem Aunty Social was built for — it learns your business from your website, writes in your tone of voice, and posts for £29 a month, so the knowledge stays yours and nobody has to lumber the apprentice.
The test worth applying
Would you hand this person the keys and let them reorder your stock, set your prices, or redesign your signage unsupervised? Probably not — not because they're not bright, but because those things shape how your business makes money, and they need context that takes years to build.
Your social media shapes the same thing. It's often the first impression a potential customer gets, and increasingly the only one they bother with before deciding whether to call you.
Treat it with the same seriousness. Use the young person's fluency, absolutely — but pair it with your knowledge, your judgement, and your ownership of the accounts. The phone skills were never the valuable part. You were.