Fewer posts. Ones people finish.

Four things, and the fourth is the one that decides whether the first three were worth buying. Strategy: the point of view, the platforms worth your time, the pillars and the cadence. Production: assets made for each platform, in batches, to a house style. Community: daily replies, moderation, routing of sales-intent messages and a crisis playbook. Measurement: reporting tied to enquiries and assisted conversions rather than to follower counts. A good engagement should leave you with a documented content system, an asset library you own, an inbox that gets answered, and a monthly review that changes what happens next month. If an agency only sells you a calendar, you are buying a scheduling tool with a retainer attached.

The market range is wide and honest scoping matters more than a headline figure. Published guidance puts agency programmes at roughly $3,000-$5,000 a month for growth accounts, $6,000-$10,000 for premium mid-market programmes, and $30,000-$50,000+ for enterprise or multi-brand work (Fifty & Five, 2026). What moves the number is production volume, how much original video is involved, how many platforms and languages you need, whether community management is daily or business-hours only, and how many approval layers exist on your side. We quote a fixed monthly fee against a written scope with the deliverable counts in it, so you can compare proposals on substance rather than on adjectives, and we would rather reduce platform count than thin out quality to hit a budget.

Less than most calendars assume, and consistently. The evidence points the same way twice: Socialinsider recorded a 48% decrease in monthly posting frequency as brands moved toward fewer, higher-value posts, and Buffer found reach per post tends to decline at higher frequencies. In practice, three to five strong posts a week on one primary platform beats daily filler across four, and short video plus stories or reactive posts carry the rest. The number that matters is the one you can sustain for a year without quality drifting, because algorithmic distribution rewards accounts that keep their promises. We set the cadence from your production capacity and then protect it.

Yes, provided you buy it for the right reasons. Reach has genuinely compressed — Facebook's average organic reach went from roughly 16% in 2012 to 1-2% in 2025, Instagram fell 12% and LinkedIn 34% year on year (Hootsuite) — so treating follower count as a distribution channel no longer works. What still works is the rest of it: social is where buyers check whether you are credible, where your creative gets tested cheaply before it goes into paid, where recruitment and partnerships start, and where customer questions surface first. The programmes that pay are the ones designed for saves, shares, watch-through and profile visits, with paid amplification behind posts that have already proved themselves.

We write it; you approve it, on a schedule that does not stall publishing. A strategist, a creator and a community manager are named on your account, and they are briefed properly — we read sales calls, support tickets and reviews, and we interview the people in your business who know the product best, because that is where the specific detail comes from. Drafts go into a shared calendar a set number of days ahead with one clear approval step; anything that misses the window rolls forward rather than blocking the queue. Reactive posts have pre-agreed guardrails so we can move on the day without waiting for a committee, and anything sensitive escalates to a named person on your side.

By reporting the metrics that survive a distribution squeeze and tying them to demand. Saves, shares, watch-through, profile visits and link clicks show whether content lands; campaign parameters on every link mean the resulting sessions appear as social rather than as direct traffic; and we track assisted conversions, enquiries mentioning social, and branded search volume as the demand signals. Benchmarks come from published datasets such as Metricool's 2026 study of 39,762,999 posts across 1,059,949 accounts, so a soft month can be judged against platform reality instead of last year's chart. Where a channel's contribution is genuinely arguable, we say so plainly rather than claiming credit the data does not support.

Yes, and it is usually where the fastest wins are. We handle comments, direct messages, mentions, tags and reviews daily inside a response window we agree with you, using a written policy that says what gets answered publicly, what moves to a private conversation, what gets hidden and what escalates immediately. People asking about price, availability or booking are routed to your team with the conversation history attached, because a warm enquiry answered three days later is a lost sale. Recurring questions are logged and turned into content, and sentiment is reported monthly. For regulated or sensitive categories we agree an approved-language list before we answer anything.

Either, and the blended model is often the best value. Where you have an in-house creator or social manager, we tend to own strategy, production capacity, reporting and the systems, while your person keeps the voice, the reactive posting and internal access — they know the business in a way no agency will. Where there is nobody in-house, we run the whole function and train whoever inherits it later. Either way everything lives in your accounts with documented processes, the asset library is yours, and we keep the tooling conventional so a handover is a handover rather than an excavation.

We use the playbook we wrote before it happened. That document names who decides, who speaks, which holding statements are pre-approved, what pauses automatically (scheduled posts and paid amplification), and how fast each step happens. In the moment, our job is to slow the situation down: pause publishing, respond factually where a response helps, move individuals into private channels, log everything, and give you an hourly picture of volume and sentiment rather than a stream of screenshots. Afterwards we run a review and update the playbook and the FAQ content, since most flare-ups repeat in a different costume and the second one should be duller than the first.

It works best as part of one plan rather than a separate service. Organic social builds the audience and produces the creative; paid social and other digital advertising campaigns buy reach for whatever earns attention; SEO and the website capture the demand all of it creates; email keeps the relationship going. In practice that means shared briefs, shared tracking and one report, so a piece of content that drives ecommerce sales or booked calls is credited properly. Where other agencies run your search or advertising work, we share content, audience insight and performance data with them — a social programme that only helps itself is not much use to the business.

Three things beyond the posting. First, an opinion: the best agencies tell you what to stop doing, not only what to add, and are specific about which platforms deserve your budget. Second, production capacity that is verified rather than promised — ask to see a real month of output for a business like yours. Third, measurement that connects the work to traffic, leads and revenue, with a written monthly review instead of a dashboard link. Good agencies are comfortable being audited: clear scope, transparent reporting, no lock-in, and every account, asset and insight owned by you.

Usually yes, and the two get better when the same people see both. Organic is the cheapest place to find out which hooks and formats earn attention; paid social is where a proven idea gets the audience it deserves. Running them together means creative learning flows one way and audience data the other, and frequency is managed rather than accidental. We also pair this with influencer marketing and creative strategy where creator content is doing the heavy lifting. Buying organic management on its own is fine too — we will share what we learn with whoever runs your paid accounts.