Professionalization and key competencies of social media content creators, paper presented at AoIR 2025.

The paper “Competency Prescriptions by Social Media Platforms and the Rise of Organizational Professionalism Among Content Creators”, presented by Dr. Liana Pithan and Drs. Willian Araujo and Marlon Dalmoro at The 26th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (Niterói, Brazil, 15–18 October 2025), analyzes how social media platforms define and promote specific competencies to guide the work of content creators in increasingly professionalized environments. Building on Julia Evetts’ concept of organizational professionalism, the study examines how platforms’ management discourses—such as standardization, performance indicators, and goal setting—shape creators’ practices, behaviors, and identities in line with business objectives. From this perspective, professionalism is understood not only as a system of shared values within an occupation, but also as a mechanism for disciplining and regulating autonomous work through ideals of performance, responsibility, and self-control. The paper argues that the competencies prescribed by platforms function as a form of indirect governance, defining what it means to be a “professional” content creator and reframing creative work as a set of measurable deliverables aligned with corporate interests.