"Social media post" or "social-media post"? [duplicate]

Should "social media" be spelled with a hyphen in the phrase "social media post"?

To me, the hyphen looks wrong, but I would like to be able to provide some grammatical rationale to explain why.

When a modifier is composed of two or more words, and it isn't of the pattern [adverb] [adjective], then it is most common to hyphenate it. If it is of the pattern [adverb] [adjective] then it may still be hyphenated if adverb in question also has an adjective sense; to distinguish e.g. "more-important points" meaning those points that are more important than others from "more important points" meaning additional points, that are important.*

Two other exceptions are [noun] [noun] if confusion is particularly unlikely, and if either or both of the parts of the compound are a proper noun or a proper adjective.

So, considering all those rules; in this case you have a modifier of the form [adjective] [noun]. And since that isn't [adverb] [adjective], isn't [noun] [noun], and uses no proper adjectives or proper nouns, then the most normal thing to do would be to hyphenate it.

Now, some people will not hyphenate if the pairing is extremely common. Just how common the pair need be is subjective. I would say it's probably just about common enough that "social media post" isn't technically incorrect, but not quite so common that it is to be recommended over the more normal "social-media post".

So if your debate had money riding on it, call off the bet as both being technically allowable, but write it "social-media post" when you actually use the phrase.

*You can also find cases of [adverb] [adjective] being hyphenated when the adverb ends in ly, but this would be rather old-fashioned today. It's more likely to be found in older books than anything current.

The hyphen in social-media post is a clarifying mark of punctuation, that removes potential ambiguity. Without the hyphen, the reader is forced to rely upon their specific domain knowledge to infer the correct attachment of words.

Specifically, are you describing a post to social media, or a media post that is social.

To provide an alternate example, consider a similar example such as free-range chicken. Without the hyphen, it is ambiguous as to if I am discussing a chicken that is somehow 'free range,' or if I am, instead, discussing a 'range chicken' with a price of zero dollars.