In-House, Freelancer or Agency: Who Should Run Your Social Media?

This article is not about whether social media is worth paying for. You have presumably settled that, or you would not be reading a piece about who should do it.

It is about the bit that comes next, which nobody makes easy. Three routes, three sales pitches, and every one of them written by somebody with a horse in the race.

Including this one, obviously, so we have tried to be straight about where our own interest lies.

The three routes, and what actually separates them

Set price aside for a minute, because it is the thing everybody leads with and the thing that matters least once you are a few months in.

Read the table again with that line in mind and the decision gets simpler, because two of those rows are doing nearly all the work. Everything else is negotiable. Cover is not.

First, let us kill the National Insurance argument

You will hear this from any agency selling against an in-house hire, ours included in the past, and it deserves proper scrutiny rather than a nod.

The pitch goes: the salary is only the start, wait until you add employer National Insurance and pension and holiday, an employee really costs you a third more than the advert says.

Let us do it with the government's own numbers instead of vibes.

• The National Careers Service puts a social media manager at £25,000 for a starter and £50,000 experienced, on 38 to 45 hours a week.
• Employer National Insurance runs at 15% for most category letters in the 2026 to 2027 tax year. Even if the whole £25,000 were charged at that rate it would come to £3,750, and it is not, because only earnings above the secondary threshold count at all.
• The Employment Allowance is worth up to £10,500 against an eligible employer's annual National Insurance bill. That is nearly three times the absolute ceiling above.
• Auto-enrolment pension costs you a minimum of 3% as the employer, on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. On a £25,000 salary that is a shade over £560 a year.

So for a small business claiming the allowance, the on-costs on that first hire are roughly five hundred and sixty quid of pension.

Not the seven or eight thousand the pitch implies. The scare is doing a lot of heavy lifting for people who benefit from you believing it.

What actually makes an in-house hire expensive

The real costs are all in the places nobody puts on a spreadsheet, and they are considerably more awkward than a payroll line.

Start with the calendar. Every worker is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, which for a five-day week is at least 28 days, and bank holidays only count towards it if you choose to include them.

So somewhere north of a month a year, your social media manager is being paid and is not working. If nobody covers, nothing goes out, and the account you are paying to build goes quiet during exactly the periods people are at home on their phones.

Then there is you. Managing a specialist means being able to tell good work from busy work, and most owners hiring their first marketer cannot yet, which is fair enough because it is not their trade.

What that means in practice is either you spend evenings learning enough to judge it, or you do not, and a year later you are looking at a lot of activity and not much business.

And then there is the day they hand in their notice, which is the one that really bites. The logins, the content calendar, the half-finished ideas, the sense of what has worked and what fell flat, the relationships with the four local accounts who always share your posts.

All of that walks out with them, and you start again from a standing start. One person doing a job alone is a single point of failure, whether they are on your payroll or somebody else's.

The freelancer: cheapest, right up until they get busy

Plenty of small businesses are best served by a good freelancer, and we would say so to anybody's face. You get a real specialist without any of the employment machinery, you can start next week, and you can stop without a conversation about notice periods.

Two things are worth knowing before you start, though, and neither of them is a criticism of freelancers as people.

The first is that you are never their biggest client. When their largest account has a crisis in the same week your posts are due, you can guess which one waits. That is not disloyalty, it is arithmetic, and any honest freelancer will tell you the same.

The second is that a freelancer is the single point of failure again, only this time without the loyalty an employee builds up. Holiday, illness, a change of career, a better offer. All of it lands on you the same way, and the handover, if there is one, is whatever goodwill produces.

That said, the freelance route wins outright in one specific situation: when you already know exactly what you want made, and you just need a capable pair of hands to make it. If you can write the brief yourself, paying an agency to write it for you is money you did not need to spend.

The agency: what you are actually paying the premium for

An agency costs more per month than a freelancer and, on a straight comparison of hours, more than an employee too.

Worth being clear about what the extra buys, because it is not talent. There are brilliant freelancers and there are mediocre agencies.

What it buys is that the job does not stop. Somebody is off, somebody else picks it up. Somebody leaves, the account and the plan stay where they are. The knowledge lives in a system rather than in one person's head, which sounds like a small thing until the person leaves.

It also buys you range. Social sits next to the website, the reviews, the ads and the search rankings, and those things pull on each other constantly. One person, however good, is rarely strong at all of it.

The honest downside is intimacy. An agency will never know your business the way somebody sat in it every day knows it, and you are openly one client among several. A bad agency hides behind a monthly report full of numbers that go up and none that pay wages.

Ask any of them, us included, what happened to enquiries rather than impressions, and see how comfortable the answer is. The complete guide to social media for small businesses has a section on measuring the right thing that is worth reading before any of these conversations.

Eco Heat Surge, a heating firm over in Barnsley, is one of ours and their own review makes the continuity argument better than we can. They say we "manage all of our social media platforms", then sign off by thanking us for our "continued support". That second word is the one carrying the weight in a decision like this. Anybody can put together a decent first month.

So should you hire a social media manager, or outsource it?

No route is better than the others in the abstract. They suit different situations, and the situation is usually obvious once it is written down.

The question to ask all three, including us

Whichever way you lean, one question sorts the serious from the rest, and almost nobody asks it until it is too late.

Who owns the accounts, the logins and the work?

The answer should be you, in writing, on day one. Your Facebook page should sit on your business manager with them added, not on theirs with you added. The photographs and the graphics should be yours to keep.

The scheduling tool should be billed to you, or you should be able to walk away with the calendar. None of that is unreasonable to ask and none of it is awkward to agree if the other side is straight.

If any of the three routes gets vague at that point, you have learned everything you needed to learn, and it cost you one question.

What we charge for social media management begins at £225 monthly, and the contents are set out plainly, with every figure printed on the packages page. For what freelancers and agencies of different sizes charge across the UK, rather than just what we do, the going rates for each route breaks it down tier by tier.

Frequently asked questions

Decide on cover, not on price

Most people trying to work out whether to hire a social media manager, use a freelancer or bring in an agency compare the three on monthly cost, pick the cheapest they can defend, and end up doing it again eighteen months later.

The better question is duller and more useful. What happens to this job in the week nobody is available to do it? Answer that honestly for each of the three and the decision usually makes itself, whichever way it points.

If you would like somebody to talk it through without a pitch attached, tell us where you have got to. We will say plainly if a freelancer would serve you better this year, because a client who was talked into the wrong thing does not stay one.