How much should a firm spend on social media management?

What you are actually paying for

Before comparing prices, it is worth being precise about the product. "Social media management" sounds like one job. In practice it is five, and every quote you receive is a different answer to the question of who does each one.

• Writing. Posts that sound like your firm and say something useful. For an accountancy practice that means content tied to the real calendar: a Self Assessment reminder published well before the 31 January deadline is worth more than any amount of generic filler afterwards.
• Design. Feeds are visual. Text alone gets scrolled past, so someone has to produce images and carousels that look like they belong to a professional firm.
• Scheduling. Posting consistently, at sensible times, across the platforms your clients actually use, without a partner setting reminders.
• Replies. Comments and direct messages are where posts turn into enquiries. Ignoring them wastes the money spent on everything above.
• Strategy. Deciding who you are trying to reach, what you want them to do, and how you will know whether it is working.

Each option below buys a different mix of those five jobs, and leaves a different share of them on your desk. If you want to see what the writing job looks like for your kind of practice specifically, we have separate pages for accountants and solicitors.

The four options, honestly compared

An in-house hire

A dedicated marketing person starts at around £2,500 or more per month in salary, before you add recruitment costs and the ongoing management time to direct them. The deeper problem for a small firm is that social media is rarely a full-time job. You end up either paying for capacity you do not use, or stretching the role across tasks it was never hired for. This option makes sense once marketing genuinely is a full-time function, and usually not before.

A marketing agency

Retainers typically start at around £1,500 per month, and quality varies widely. A good agency brings real craft. A mediocre one produces posts that could belong to any business in any town, and you cannot reliably tell which you are getting from the pitch. Either way, the retainer does not remove your involvement: someone at the firm still has to brief them, correct drafts written by people who do not do your kind of work, and approve everything before it goes out.

A generic AI tool

The subscription is cheap, roughly £20 to £50 per month. The real price is your own hours, because the tool only does fragments of the job. You write the prompts, fix the tone so it stops sounding like a robot, make or source the images, schedule the posts somewhere else, and handle every comment and message yourself. You have swapped the writing for editing and kept the other four jobs.

Specialist software built for firms

This is the category Pillr is in: software that does the production work end to end for a specific kind of business. Pillr reads your firm's website, drafts posts in your voice in runs of 10, 20 or 30 depending on plan, produces the images, schedules everything, and handles replies. Plans run from £69 to £249 per month: Starter at £69, Growth at £129, Max at £249. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

The hidden cost every option shares

None of the price tags above include the most expensive input: partner time. Every option consumes some of it, and the amounts differ far more than the monthly fees do.

An in-house hire needs managing and reviewing. An agency needs briefing, feedback and approvals, and the less they understand regulated work, the more correcting you do. A generic AI tool is the worst offender: it makes you the operator of the whole process. Specialist software is built to push partner involvement down to the part that genuinely needs a partner, which is reviewing and approving drafts rather than producing them.

So the honest comparison is never fee against fee. It is fee plus hours against fee plus hours. You know your own charge-out rate; apply it to the time each option demands from you and the rankings can change completely.

Questions to ask before you commit

Whichever route you are leaning towards, these four questions expose the differences that the pricing pages gloss over:

• Who actually writes the posts?A named person, a rotating junior, or a model with no oversight? For a regulated firm the writing has to be accurate and free of misleading claims, so ask what the writer knows about your profession's rules.
• Who approves before anything publishes? The answer should be: someone at your firm, every time. If content can go out without your sign-off, that is a compliance exposure, not a convenience.
• What happens to comments and DMs? Enquiries arrive as replies. If nobody owns them, the spend above is generating leads that nobody answers.
• Is there a contract lock-in? Agency retainers often want a minimum term. Ask what happens if you want to stop, and prefer options you can leave easily. Pillr, for what it is worth, is monthly with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

How to decide by firm size and ambition

The right spend depends less on budget than on what you want social media to do for the firm.

For a sole practitioner or a small partnership, the goal is usually credibility: a feed that looks alive when a referral checks you out, without eating fee-earning hours. That argues for the cheapest option that fully removes the production work, which means specialist software rather than an agency retainer or a hire.

For a growing firm with several partners, presence alone may not be enough. If you want campaigns, positioning work or a rebrand, that is strategy, and strategy is worth paying a human for. Many firms at this stage sensibly combine the two: software for the weekly production and engagement, and targeted agency or consultant work for the thinking.

For a larger firm, an in-house marketer becomes defensible once marketing is a genuine full-time function. Even then, production software tends to survive the hire, because it frees that person to do the strategic work you actually hired them for.

Where Pillr sits, honestly

Pillr replaces the production and engagement work: the writing, the images, the scheduling and the replies. It does not replace a marketing strategist. If your ambition is a brand campaign, a PR push or paid advertising, you still need a human plan, and we would rather tell you that here than have you find out after subscribing.

What it does, it does for £69 to £249 per month, which is a fraction of a junior hire's salary or a typical agency retainer, and unlike a generic AI tool it does not hand the job back to you in pieces. Everything it covers is listed on the features page. If the numbers in this article have given you a benchmark, the fastest way to test it is to compare a real proposal against the Pillr plans: every plan is monthly, and the 30-day money-back guarantee means the comparison costs you nothing if it does not fit.