Hiring someone to post on social for your business

Hiring someone to post on social costs £200-£800 a month from a specialist, £15-£30 an hour for a virtual assistant, or is included in managed plans at £99-£199. Before you spend any of that, one honest observation: for most local service businesses, social media is the fourth most valuable thing on the list, and plenty of businesses buy it first.

Where social actually ranks

For a local service business, in order of return:

1. Google Business Profile. Free. It is where people search when they need something now.
2. Reviews. Free. They decide who gets the call among the results.
3. The website. Where the enquiry gets confirmed or lost.
4. Social media. Useful, and rarely where the next customer comes from.

If your profile is neglected and you have eleven reviews, paying £400 a month for Instagram posts is spending in the wrong order. Fix the free things first. They work faster and cost nothing.

Which businesses genuinely benefit

Social is not a waste for everyone. It has a real audience, and the pattern is consistent.

Worth it: salons and barbers, restaurants and cafés, gyms and studios, photographers, florists, retailers, anything visual or discretionary where people browse, get inspired, and decide they want something they were not actively looking for.

Marginal: builders, decorators, landscapers. The work photographs well, which helps, but the buying decision usually starts with a search rather than a scroll.

Rarely worth much: emergency trades, most professional services, anything urgent. A blocked drain does not get solved on Facebook.

If you are in the first group, social deserves real budget. In the third, a modest presence so you look alive is enough.

The three ways to buy it

That last row is not a joke. DIY social produces the best content, because it is real, and it almost always stops. The value of paying someone is continuity rather than creativity.

The input problem nobody mentions

Here is what goes wrong with outsourced social for small businesses, and it is worth knowing before you sign anything.

Whoever posts for you needs raw material. Photos from your jobs, your kitchen, your salon, your site. Without it, they fall back on stock images, industry quotes and generic tips, which look exactly like what they are and get almost no response.

So the arrangement only works if you actually send photos. Most owners agree to this and then do not, and three months later the feed is full of sunset stock photos with motivational captions.

What good looks like

If you do buy it:

Posting frequency that is sustainable. Three times a week consistently beats daily for a month then nothing.

Your own material, mostly. Finished work, the team, behind the scenes, before and afters. Real beats polished.

One platform done well. Better one active account than four abandoned ones. Which social platform covers choosing.

Replies to comments and messages. A social account nobody monitors is worse than none, because a message sitting unanswered for a week is visible.

Something measurable. Not followers. Enquiries mentioning social, clicks to the website, bookings from a link.

The follower trap

Worth saying plainly: follower count is close to meaningless for a local business.

A plumber with 400 local followers who occasionally get a leak is worth more than one with 12,000 followers scattered worldwide. Anyone selling you follower growth is selling a number that does not convert.

Judge social on whether the phone rings, the same as everything else.

What we do

Social posting sits in our Complete and Premier tiers at £99 and £199 a month, alongside the website, local SEO, Google profile and reviews. It is deliberately not the headline, because for most of our customers it is not the thing that brings the work.

If your business is visual and social is genuinely your main channel, a specialist at £400 a month will do more with it than we will, and we would tell you that rather than take the money.

The pricing page sets out what each tier covers. If you are unsure whether social is worth it for your trade, tell us what you do and we will give you an honest answer, including if the answer is to fix your Google profile first and spend nothing.

Related: do small businesses need social media and a website and how often to post on social.