Social media manager or agency: what an architecture firm should actually hire

Sooner or later every growing architecture practice reaches the same decision. The account has been run by whoever had a free evening, it shows, and someone says it is time to do it properly. Then the question arrives: do we hire a social media manager, or do we give it to an agency?

Most firms treat that as a cost comparison. It is not really one. The question that decides whether it works is simpler and less comfortable: who is responsible for the output every week, including the weeks when the practice is buried in a deadline?

What the job actually contains

Before comparing options, it helps to be honest about what "running social media" means for an architecture practice. It is not one skill, it is five:

1. Strategy. Which clients you want, what the account should say, which projects serve that.
2. Content production. Photography and video on site, editing renders into something that moves, writing.
3. Understanding the work. Translating a section, a detail or a planning constraint into something a non-architect stops for.
4. Publishing and community. A steady rhythm, replies, the profile itself.
5. Analytics. Reading reach, profile visits and link clicks every month, and changing course because of them.

Any option you pick has to cover all five. Most options quietly cover three.

Option one: hiring a social media manager in house

The appeal is obvious. Someone sits in the office, knows the team, can walk onto a site on short notice.

The problem is that you are asking one person to be all five of the roles above. People who are strong strategists are rarely also good videographers, and people who edit well rarely enjoy analytics. You get one or two of the skills done well and the rest done adequately.

There are three further risks that practices underestimate:

• They are usually not from architecture. A capable generalist needs months to learn how to talk about a project in a way architects are not embarrassed by. Until then, the partners edit every caption, which defeats the point.
• Management falls on the partners. Someone has to brief, review and decide. In most practices that someone is the busiest person in the building.
• The account stops when the person stops. Holidays, sick leave, a resignation. The rhythm that took a year to build breaks in a month.

In-house works best in larger practices that can afford a small team rather than one person, with a clear lead who owns it.

Option two: an agency

An agency gives you a team instead of a person: strategy, production, editing and analytics from different people, and continuity when someone is away. The rhythm does not depend on one individual's calendar.

The risk is the opposite one. A generic agency covers the production roles and misses the third one, understanding the work. You end up with polished posts that say nothing an architect would stand behind, and the partners rewriting them anyway.

If you go this way, three things separate a useful agency from an expensive one:

• Look at their own account. An agency that cannot grow its own presence will not grow yours. Ours is the #1 architecture account in Germany, roughly 150,000 followers built in two years, and that is the kind of evidence to ask any agency for.
• Ask what the monthly report contains. If the answer is followers and likes, move on. You want reach, profile visits, link clicks and inquiries, the funnel we explain in what Instagram actually returns for an architecture firm.
• Ask how approvals work. A process where you approve every single post turns the partners back into the social media team. The workable version is that you approve the idea and the content plan, and execution belongs to the agency, with one round of revisions.

Option three: consulting when you already have a team

Larger firms often already have marketing people in house. What they lack is not hands, it is direction: which platforms deserve the effort, what the content should be built around, whether the numbers are actually moving, and how to get architects inside the practice to supply material without it becoming a burden.

That is a consulting job rather than an execution one. A strategy, an audit of what exists, a working process between the design teams and the marketing team, and a way of measuring it. We do this for larger companies alongside running accounts for mid-size practices, because the problem looks different at that scale. The team is there. The system around it is what is missing.

The hybrid that works for most mid-size practices

For a practice that is past the founder-posts-on-weekends stage but has no marketing department, the arrangement we see work best is simple: one person inside the practice owns access to material, the agency owns everything else.

Internally that person does not create content. They make sure the project folder is shared, the site visit is announced, the partner is available for twenty minutes when a story needs a voice. The agency turns that into a steady output and reports on it monthly. It is the setup behind turning project files into content, and it keeps the practice's time cost close to zero.

How to decide

Put simply:

1. A small practice with a founder who enjoys it can run its own account, as long as the rhythm survives busy months. The plan in marketing for architecture firms is written for exactly that.
2. A mid-size practice with budget and no marketing department is usually best served by an agency from the industry, with one internal owner of material.
3. A larger firm with an existing marketing team usually needs consulting and a system, not more people producing posts.

Whichever you pick, give it time. Reach moves within weeks, but an account needs a few months of consistent work before inquiries follow, which is why we work from a three-month engagement rather than a trial month.

Common questions

Is an agency more expensive than hiring a social media manager? Compare the full cost, not the invoice. An in-house hire brings salary, equipment, software, training and the partners' management time, and covers one person's skills. An agency covers a team's skills for a retainer. Which is cheaper depends on scale, but most mid-size practices underestimate the hidden side of the hire.

What should a social media manager for an architecture firm be able to do? Plan content around the clients you want, produce and edit photo and video, write about projects credibly, publish consistently and read the analytics. If a candidate is strong in only one or two, plan for how the others get covered.

Can we keep control of what gets posted with an agency? Yes, at the right level. Approve the strategy and the monthly content plan. Approving every individual post slows everything down and usually makes the output worse.

How long before we see results? Reach moves within weeks. Inquiries follow over a few months, because a prospective client needs to see you more than once before they write.

Does LinkedIn need the same setup? Mostly, with more of the partners' own voice in it. We cover that in LinkedIn for architects.

Decide who owns the week

Every option works if someone genuinely owns the output every week. Every option fails if nobody does. Choose the setup where that responsibility is clear and survives a busy month, and the rest of the decision gets much easier.

If you would rather hand it to people from your own field, tell us about your firm. We run Instagram and LinkedIn end to end for architecture and engineering firms, and advise larger companies that already have a team in house.