Should someone in-house
run your social media?

On the invoice, yes: there's no monthly fee to pay anyone outside. The sums change as soon as you add the opportunity cost, which is what that person stops producing while they post, write copy and answer messages. The most honest way to estimate it is to ask yourself what that person would do with those hours if they weren't spending them on social media, and give it the same value as their usual work, not a token value. There's also a cost that almost never gets counted: if that person leaves the company, the knowledge of what has worked, the style the profile had settled into and the backlog of ideas leave with them, and you have to start almost from scratch with whoever replaces them. That doesn't happen in the same way with a well-contracted external service, because the method is documented regardless of who carries it out each month.

It can't photograph the job you did yesterday, or know that new stock arrives on Thursday, or answer a technical question about what you sell accurately without someone inside explaining it first. And there's something subtler that people notice even without being able to explain it: followers can tell when there's someone behind a profile who knows the business and when there's someone writing from outside with the information they've been sent. It isn't the agency's fault; it's a structural limitation of not being inside. What it can do, and usually does better than someone inside with no previous experience, is shape that material: find the angle, keep a recognisable style post after post and maintain the pace even when the week goes badly. That's why the split that works best almost always separates the two things instead of forcing one party to do both.

It's the most common case, and the one least well solved by leaving it to goodwill. If that person's job is already full and social media gets squeezed in between tasks, you don't need a complicated diagnosis to know what will happen: it'll go well for three or four weeks and then disappear as soon as something more urgent comes along, which it always does. Before looking outside, it's worth first seeing whether another task can be taken off their plate to leave a real, protected slot in their calendar, because sometimes the problem isn't resources but badly distributed priorities within the team itself. If there's still no room, that person can keep contributing the ideas and material — which only they have — while someone outside turns it into posts and keeps the calendar going. Ideas without the time to carry them out don't get anywhere on their own.

Yes, and so the switch doesn't start from scratch, it's worth keeping a minimal record while you run it in-house: which posts worked best, in what format, and how often you actually managed to post, not what was planned at the start. That history is worth more than any sales pitch when assessing an external quote, because it lets you compare what the agency promises with what you already know works with your particular audience. It's also worth keeping the original material — photos, videos, copy — in a shared folder from day one, not just on the phone of whoever was running it, because if that person changes role or leaves, that archive is what lets the next stage get going without starting over. The usual mistake isn't this order, which works well, but waiting until the social media has been dormant for months and then looking for urgent help with none of this prepared.

As well as the profiles, the material archive and access to the numbers, there's one point worth checking before signing rather than once the relationship is over: what the contract says about what happens on the day it ends. A serious contract specifies that access and archive are handed over immediately and at no extra cost; if that point doesn't appear anywhere, ask about it before starting, because it's much easier to agree it calmly at the outset than to demand it once the relationship has broken down. It's also worth checking every now and then, rather than just taking their word for it, that the company email is really listed as administrator on each profile and not just as a collaborator with limited permissions, because they're different things and the difference only shows on the day you need to regain full control.

There's no figure that works for every business, because it depends on how much material has to be created from scratch and how many messages come in that need answering, which is the part that varies most from one business to another. What is constant is where the time goes: posting itself is quick; what eats up hours is getting usable photos or video, writing copy that doesn't sound the same as last week's, and replying thoughtfully rather than with a copied generic answer. One way to make it more manageable is to batch the material-gathering into a set slot each week rather than trying to do it on the fly between other tasks, because interrupting the day's work to take a single photo costs more real time than it seems. Answering messages, on the other hand, can't be batched: it has to be done almost straight away or it shows.

Yes, and in practice it works through a shared group or channel where the person inside drops photos and notes as they come up, with no need for meetings or polished copy: a photo with two lines of context is enough for us to do the rest. It isn't a reduced or cheaper version of the full service; it's a different split of tasks, because we still do the plan, the design and the calendar just as if we were running everything — the raw material simply comes in through another channel. What really changes is how quickly that raw material is needed: if the business has news every week and nobody sends anything, it shows in the content just as if any other part of the split were missing. That's why, before agreeing to this model, we make clear who we need to talk to inside the business and how often we expect to hear from them.

Besides not having a brand yet, there are two other moments when it's worth waiting. One is when the business is still defining what it's going to sell or how, because posting about a product or service that will change in a few weeks means explaining the change and apologising for the confusion almost at the same time, and that hurts your image more than not posting anything during that period. The other is a highly seasonal business that starts from zero each season: there it usually pays to concentrate the effort just before and during the season, rather than paying a steady fee all year when half the months have nothing new to show and content is posted just for the sake of it. In both cases the answer isn't to rule out social media for good, but to wait until there's something real to say.