Social media management you can keep up with

Social media management is four jobs that people usually mistake for one. Planning: deciding which platforms you serve, what you will say and how often, and writing it into a calendar somebody can work from. Production: getting the photos, video and copy made, which is the part that quietly eats the week. Publishing and community: posting on schedule and then answering what comes back, in public and in the inbox. Measurement: knowing which posts moved something that matters to the business. Most accounts stall because the first and second jobs are treated as free, and only the third is put in someone's diary.

Often enough to be recognised, rarely enough that the quality holds — for most small teams that is two or three times a week per platform, not daily on five. The honest constraint is production capacity, not the algorithm: a schedule you can only sustain for a month teaches your audience to expect something you will stop delivering. Pick the frequency you can hold in your busiest month, not your quietest, and add to it only once a filming and editing routine exists. Consistency at a lower frequency beats a burst followed by silence, both for the audience and for the people doing the work.

The ones where your buyers already are, and where you can produce the format that platform rewards. That second half is what gets skipped: a platform built on short-form video is a video commitment, and joining it without anyone to film is how accounts end up posting reformatted stills that reach nobody. Two platforms served properly will beat five neglected ones every time. Audit honestly once a year: if a channel has not produced attention, enquiries or useful conversation in six months and nobody enjoys running it, closing it is a legitimate decision, not a failure.

It depends on whether you are buying publishing or production. A freelancer scheduling and replying on two platforms typically runs $500 to $2,000 a month. Add content production — filming days, editing, design — and $2,000 to $8,000 a month is the common range for a small brand. Full agency management with paid social usually starts above that, plus the ad budget itself, which is separate and should never be folded into the fee. In house, the real cost is time: budget a realistic number of hours a week for production, or the calendar quietly becomes reposting.

The ones that connect to the business, and a couple of leading indicators that tell you why. Follower count is the weakest number on the page: it moves slowly, it is easy to inflate, and it says nothing about whether anyone bought. Watch reach or views for whether you are being seen at all, saves and shares for whether the content earned anything, and clicks, enquiries and sales for whether attention turned into money. Report a small set consistently over months. A dashboard with forty metrics is not measurement; it is a way of avoiding the one number that did not move.

Hire in house when your content depends on daily access to the product, the workshop or the people — nobody outside can film what happens in your building. Use a freelancer when the work is steady but small, and you mainly need consistency and a reliable inbox. Use an agency when you need several skills at once — strategy, video, paid social, reporting — or when you need to move quickly and have the budget for it. Whichever you choose, the failure mode is the same: hiring someone to publish while leaving production unassigned, then wondering why the calendar is full of stock photos.