Social media in house or outsourced: how to decide
How to compare the real cost of an in-house social hire against an agency retainer and decide which one your business can actually support.
The calendar is empty again
The decision usually arrives at a bad moment. The intern has left or the agency contract is ending and nothing is scheduled past Friday. Under that pressure the comparison gets made on monthly cost alone and that is the one basis on which the two options look most similar.
They are not similar. An in-house hire buys you availability and access. An agency buys you a standard of craft and a process that does not depend on one person staying. Which of those your business is short of is the actual question.
What each one excludes
An agency retainer excludes more than most buyers expect. It excludes paid media spend which is billed by the platform directly. It excludes production beyond the written scope. It excludes photography and talent and location costs. It excludes community management and comment response unless that is stated in the scope. Any fee carries GST at 18% and the rate sits on the service page.
An in-house hire excludes nothing on paper and costs more than the salary. Add design tooling and stock subscriptions. Add a phone and a camera if there is capture work. Add your own management hours because a junior without direction produces very little. Add the gap when they resign. A single in-house person is also a single skill set and very few people are strong at strategy and design and writing and editing at once.
Which one suits your business
In-house wins where the content is made from access. A kitchen. A factory floor. A clinic. A shop with new stock daily. Nobody external can film the thing that happened at four o'clock and if that is your content then proximity beats craft.
Outsourcing does not suit a business that cannot supply raw material or approvals. An agency with no footage and no photographs and no reachable approver produces generic design-led posts. Both sides then blame each other for six months. If you cannot commit to a weekly input slot and a named approver do not outsource yet because you will pay a retainer for output you will not publish.
It also does not suit a business where nobody internally will own the relationship. An agency managed by nobody drifts to the lowest-effort interpretation of the scope. That is a predictable outcome and not a failure of the agency.
How the decision actually plays out
Split the work by what each side is genuinely better at before choosing a side. Strategy and design and editing travel well and are the usual candidates for a social media management service with a published scope. Capture and community response are usually better held internally because both need presence.
Whichever route you pick put five things in writing. The number of posts by format. The number of revision rounds included. The response time on comments and messages. Who owns the source files. What is handed over on exit.
The exit clause matters more than the monthly rate. Agree now that logins and source files and the content archive return to you. Agencies that resist this are telling you something useful. The same applies internally. Accounts should sit on company email addresses rather than on an employee's personal one.
Judging either arrangement
Posts delivered per month is the flattering metric and it is the one most retainer reports lead with. Volume is the easiest thing to supply and the least connected to results.
Measure cost per published asset rather than cost per asset delivered. The difference between those two tells you how much of what you are paying for you were willing to use. Track revision rounds per post as a brief-quality signal. Track enquiries attributed to the channel however roughly. And for an in-house hire track how much of your own time the arrangement consumes because that cost never appears in the salary line.
The mistake that costs a year
The common mistake is hiring a junior in-house to save money and then giving them no brief and no approver and no reference for what good looks like. It is attractive because the monthly number is lower than any retainer.
The expense is a full year of salary spent learning what a three-month engagement would have shown you. The person is usually capable. They are being asked to decide strategy in their first job which is not a reasonable thing to ask. Meanwhile the channel produces nothing usable and the conclusion drawn is that social media does not work for your category. Either route demands somebody senior deciding what the channel is for. Neither route removes that.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.