In-house, freelancer
or agency: who
runs your social?

A freelancer is one person. An employee is one salary. A small team is a different thing entirely. Here's the honest trade-off between all three.

At some point most founder-led brands hit the same wall: doing your own social has stopped working, and you know it. The next question is who takes it over. There are three real answers — hire someone, use a freelancer, or bring in a team — and each one is right for a different kind of business. Here's how to tell which is yours.

The freelancer

A freelancer is usually the first move, and for good reason. It's the cheapest way to get help, it's flexible, and for a specific, narrow job — someone to edit your Reels, or design your posts — a good one is excellent. If what you need is a pair of hands for one part of the work, this is often the right call.

The catch is baked into the model: a freelancer is one person. They're strong at the thing they're strong at, and thinner everywhere else — the photographer who's a weak strategist, the strategist who can't shoot. And they're a single point of failure. If they get sick, take a holiday, or get busy with a bigger client, your social stops. You're also managing them, briefing them and chasing them yourself. For a narrow task, fine. For running your whole presence, it's a lot resting on one freelancer's week.

The in-house hire

Hiring someone in-house is the option that feels most like a real solution — a person who lives and breathes your brand, sits in your team, and is fully yours. If you want someone physically present, reacting to things inside the building minute to minute, an employee is the fit. But "social is important to us" doesn't automatically mean "we need to hire someone." Social can be central to your business and still be handled brilliantly by an outside team — the two aren't opposites.

Two things make people hesitate about the hire, and both are real. The first is cost and it's bigger than the salary. The number that matters isn't base pay — it's the total cost of employment once you add payroll taxes, benefits, software subscriptions and the time and money it takes to recruit and train them. Independent estimates put a social media hire's all-in cost well above the headline salary. The honest comparison, which most people skip, is total cost of employment against what the alternatives cost, not salary against a retainer.

The second is that one hire is still one person — one skill set. Social done well needs strategy, writing, design, video, photo, managing and analysis. It's rare to find all of that in a single hire at a price a small brand can pay, so you often end up with someone good at part of it, doing the rest passably. And if they leave in six months, you're back to the start, recruiting again.

The agency

Bringing in a team is the option people assume is the most expensive and it usually isn't — which is the part worth understanding. A small agency covers the whole job between it: the trends and updates, the planning, the shooting, the editing, the running of it day to day. You're not hiring one person and hoping they can do all of that — you're getting a group that already does, without you having to assemble it.

And here's the part that surprises people: it's usually noticeably cheaper than one in-house salary. For less than what you'd pay a single hire — before you even add their software and the cost of managing them — you get a team that covers the range, with all the tools already included, and nobody for you to manage. No recruiting, no onboarding, no subscriptions to buy, no performance reviews. The work just gets done.

That's the real difference. A freelancer is one skill. A hire is one salary for one skill set, plus software, plus management. A team is the whole job handled, tools in, for less than that salary and it doesn't stop if one person is off. The trade you make is control: the work happens outside your walls, and a good team closes that gap with clear communication and regular check-ins. But it's a smaller trade than it sounds, and for most brands the maths and the range both point the same way.

So which one?

Here's the honest sorting, without the pitch:

If you specifically want a person physically in the room every day, reacting to daily things inside the building, and you've budgeted for the real cost — hire in-house. If you need just one part handled — say the content itself, photos or video, without the ongoing management — that's a content project, and it's something we do as a one-off, not a reason to go find a freelancer. And if you want the whole thing handled well and consistently — the range, the tools, none of the managing — a small team, usually for less than that hire would cost you.

The thing worth catching: "social is important to us" isn't a reason to hire on its own. Social can matter enormously and still be run by an outside team — often better, and for less. Most founder-led brands we talk to land on the team for a reason they didn't expect: they'd been comparing a team's price to a freelancer's rate, when the fair comparison was a full salary with software and management on top. Run that math and the team usually wins on range and cost both. But the right answer is the one that fits your business — and if a hire is genuinely better for you, a good team will tell you so.

If you're weighing it up and want a straight read on what your social actually needs, that's something we're happy to look at.