Search for someone to take over your social media and you run into two kinds of provider that seem to promise the same thing: agencies and virtual assistants. They do not do the same work and they do not cost the same. Below I put the three routes side by side, including the route where you simply keep doing it yourself, because that one is right more often than you would expect.
What is the difference between a social media agency and a virtual assistant?
The difference is not quality. It is what you are buying.
With an agency you buy a team. There is a strategist on it, usually a designer, often someone who runs the ads and sometimes a video editor. You get a content calendar that comes out of a plan, campaigns that connect to each other and a report where someone explains what happened. That is genuinely worth something if you still have to work out what you stand for, or if you are going to advertise with a budget. You also pay for that whole layer when you do not use it.
With a virtual assistant you buy execution. Scheduling and publishing posts, answering comments and messages, cropping images per channel, preparing copy that you supply or that we think through together, and making sure something actually goes out each week. No strategy deck, no media plan. What that service looks like with me is on the social media management page.
And that is where the line sits, which I would rather write down here than in a sales call. If you already know what you want to say and the problem is that it never gets done, an agency is heavier than what you need. If you do not know what your story is yet, a virtual assistant will not fix that. I can fill your week, but I cannot decide what your business stands for. Put that on a VA anyway and after a few months you are left with a neatly filled feed that does nothing for anyone.
What does outsourcing social media cost per month?
My side is easy, because it is simply on the site. Ten hours a month is 840 euro, twenty hours 1600 euro, forty hours 3000 euro and sixty hours 4200 euro, all excluding VAT. There are no setup fees and you adjust it monthly.
What an agency asks varies far more, so there I can only tell you what you see in the market. For smaller clients you often come across a monthly retainer somewhere between 500 and 2,000 euro. As soon as advertising, video or several channels come along, that runs a good deal higher. With any quote, ask what exactly sits inside that amount and how many hours go into it, because that is where the real difference is, not in the total at the bottom.
| Route | Cost per month | What you get | Who it fits |
|---|
| Do it yourself | The hours you put in yourself, plus what you do not bill during that time | Full control and your own voice, but everything lands in your own week | Anyone who posts rarely, enjoys doing it and genuinely gets around to it |
| Virtual assistant | From 840 euro for ten hours up to 4200 euro for sixty hours, excluding VAT | Execution: scheduling, publishing, replying, preparing content within your boundaries | Anyone who knows what they want to say but never gets to it |
| Agency | What you see in the market for smaller clients is often a 500 to 2,000 euro retainer, higher with advertising or video | Strategy, campaigns and a team that includes a designer and an advertising specialist | Anyone missing direction or advertising with a serious budget |
The virtual assistant figures are my own package prices. The agency figure is an indication of what you meet in the market, not a fixed rate.
Look closely at the first row. Doing it yourself is not free, it just lands on a different invoice. Count your own hour at what you normally bill and it is regularly the most expensive of the three. What you get back for an hour with me is set out in what does a virtual assistant cost.
Which option fits your situation?
A few situations, written down as honestly as I can put them.
- You know what you want to say, it just never happens. Then you do not need to buy strategy. You need someone to execute, and that is exactly a virtual assistant.
- You have no story and no direction. Do not start by outsourcing the execution. Buy direction first, from an agency or through a one off strategy session. Otherwise you pay for posts that lead nowhere.
- You want to advertise with a real budget. Then you want someone who does that every day. That is agency work. My side is the organic work and the visibility around it, as I describe under online marketing and SEO.
- You post twice a month and that works fine. Then you do not need to outsource anything. There is no rule saying you have to post four times a week.
- You are somewhere in between. Start small and keep it cancellable. Ten hours a month is enough to see whether it runs, and you adjust from there.
How many hours you need is the next question, and it depends mostly on how many channels you want to keep up properly. I wrote about that separately in how many hours of a virtual assistant do you need.
Which social media tasks can you actually hand over?
This is what ends up on my list in practice:
- Keeping the content calendar. What goes out when and on which channel, so you are not reinventing your week every week.
- Scheduling and publishing. On LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook, in the right aspect ratio per channel.
- Preparing image and video. Cropping, adding subtitles, reusing existing material instead of commissioning something new every time.
- Answering comments and messages. Within boundaries you set up front, and anything outside them comes to you first.
- Reusing what already exists. One blog post becomes three posts, a recurring customer question becomes a carousel.
- A short monthly readback. What worked and what did not, in plain language, without thirty pages of charts.
What is not in there: deciding the tone of your business, the opinions you hold in your field, which clients you want to attract and how the advertising budget is split. That stays with you, and that is not modesty but a boundary that makes the work better. If you are unsure where to start handing things over, which tasks can you outsource takes you further.