When small business owners decide to handle their own social media, the reasoning is usually the same: it’s free, it’s easy enough, and it saves money. And on the surface, that logic makes sense. You already have a phone. You already know your business better than anyone. How hard can it be to post a few times a week?
Quite hard, as it turns out. And quite expensive, once you start adding things up properly.
The truth is that managing social media effectively is not just a case of snapping a photo and writing a caption. It involves planning, creating, designing, scheduling, monitoring, and engaging, and it takes a significant chunk of time every single week. Time that, for most small business owners, is already in short supply.
Let’s talk about time
Research consistently shows that small business owners spend an average of six hours per week on social media. That includes coming up with ideas, writing copy, sourcing or creating images, posting, and responding to comments and messages. Six hours might not sound like much, but over the course of a year that is more than 300 hours, or roughly eight full working weeks.
Now think about what your time is actually worth. If you bill clients at £50 an hour, those 300 hours represent £15,000 in potential earnings or productive work time. Even if you value your time more conservatively at the UK National Living Wage of around £12 an hour, that is still over £3,600 a year spent on social media tasks that could be handed off to someone else.
Put another way: if 99social costs £99 plus VAT per month, that is £1,188 a year. Compare that to the value of the time you would get back, and the numbers tell a pretty clear story.
The hidden costs you might not have considered
Time is the obvious one, but it is not the only cost. Managing your own social media often comes with a few less visible expenses too:
- Design tools. Creating graphics that look professional takes software. A Canva Pro subscription costs around £110 a year. Adobe Express, Photoshop, and similar tools cost more.
- Scheduling tools. Posting manually at the right times is impractical. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Later start at around £10 to £15 per month, adding another £120 to £180 to your annual spend.
- Stock imagery. Not every post can be a photo you took yourself. Stock image subscriptions or one-off purchases can quietly add up over the year.
- The cost of inconsistency. When you are busy, social media is usually the first thing to slip. Inconsistent posting hurts your reach and your credibility, and recovering lost momentum takes time and effort.
None of these are huge on their own. Together, though, they add a meaningful amount to the real cost of the DIY approach.
What about just hiring someone?
Some business owners reach the point where they decide to bring someone in-house to handle social media. It is a reasonable instinct, but the costs here are even more significant. The average salary for a social media executive in the UK sits at around £25,000 to £28,000 per year. Once you factor in National Insurance contributions, pension, holiday cover, and the time spent recruiting and managing that person, you are looking at a total employment cost closer to £35,000 annually.
For most small businesses, that simply is not viable. And hiring a traditional agency is not much better; entry-level social media management packages from agencies typically start at £500 or more per month, which adds up to at least £6,000 a year.
The bottom line
Managing your own social media is not free. It costs you time, it costs you money, and it often costs you consistency. When you lay out the real numbers, paying a small monthly fee to have it handled properly is not an extravagance, it is just good business sense.
Ready to hand it over? Find out more about our affordable social media management and get started today.
Some business owners simply can't be bothered with social media management, and that’s perfectly understandable.
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