Waking up in the morning, you stumble out of bed, grab your phone. You open up Facebook, nothing new. Instagram? Some cool pics. On Twitter there’s some new GIFs spreading around. Maybe one deserves a favorite, maybe even a retweet. You’re barely awake. This is easier than talking to people while your eyes blearily adjust to the bright stream of light emitting from your iPhone. Social media isn’t hard.

But it is. Facebook posts, Instagrams, tweets, they all take effort. It may not be hard to retweet that cat GIF for the second time around, but you’re not a brand, you do what you want, on your own time.

Brands have timelines, editorial calendars, deadlines. You need to curate, days in advanced, while still being flexible enough to turn around at the drop of a dime. Social media is no longer about retweeting that cat GIF every time it comes across your feed, it’s about serving a brand, following guidelines, building a following and increasing brand awareness. You need to be on the ball 24/7.

That’s what’s hard, the constant social engagement. Of course there are tools that help but sometimes that’s not enough and things slip through the cracks. That’s why companies such as SMC and B² Interactive have started up here in Omaha. Social media is more that just social media. It’s content marketing, SEO, web design. It’s using all these things together to create one cohesive digital marketing campaign.

Running social media accounts requires a drive that few have. It requires a huge array of skills. One day you could be curating tweets for a brand in the health industry, and the next you could be writing blogs on self-storage. But it’s this same insanity that keeps you coming back day after day because every time you step foot in the office, it’s something different.

It may be a job that is often thankless, because what’s so hard about writing a few posts, and curating a couple of tweets? But it’s the accounts with the highest stability that have the greatest teams working behind them, because underneath that smooth surface is a billowing volcano, just waiting to explode. That content has to come from somewhere, and it’s not going to write itself.