How to hire a social media manager without getting the math wrong

Decide which job you're hiring for

"Social media manager" covers three different jobs, and hiring the wrong one is the most common way this goes sideways.

The first is a poster. Someone keeps the accounts alive, schedules what exists, answers comments. The second is a producer. Someone shoots and edits video, designs carousels, writes captions in your voice — a creative job, and the person doing it well is rarely the person who enjoys the scheduling. The third is a marketer. Someone decides what the content is for, watches which posts drive calls, and changes the plan when it isn't working.

The title you put in the ad decides which pool you fish in, and Canada's own labour data shows how wide the gap is. Job Bank classifies a social media coordinator as a professional occupation, paying a national median of $35.58 an hour with a low end of $20.50. It classifies a social media manager as a management occupation, median $55.29, top end $89.74. At full-time hours that is roughly $74,000 against roughly $115,000 for two roles most owners use interchangeably in conversation.

So write down which one you need before you post the ad. Most owners describing a "social media manager" are describing a coordinator's job, and they are surprised by both the applications and the salary expectations when they use the manager title.

Option 1: hire an employee

Take a $55,000 salary as the working example, which sits between Job Bank's low and median for a coordinator. That salary is not the cost.

The statutory lines are the only ones anyone can quote you exactly, and they come to $4,319. That puts a $55,000 hire at $59,319 a year, or about $4,940 a month, before you have bought a laptop, a benefits plan or an editing subscription. Those three only move the number one way. And two of the 52 weeks are vacation, so you are buying about fifty weeks of output for it.

American owners swap the top two lines for the employer half of FICA — 6.2 percent for Social Security plus 1.45 percent for Medicare — then add state unemployment insurance, and then health coverage, which is the line that dwarfs everything above it.

What you get for the money is real: someone in your building who learns the business, answers today, and can shoot a video in the treatment room at 4pm. What you also get is a single point of failure. One person rarely writes, designs, edits video and reads analytics equally well, and when they take two weeks off, the feed goes quiet.

Option 2: hire a contractor

A freelancer for ongoing social work typically runs $500 to $1,500 a month. No CPP, no EI, no vacation pay, no laptop. The invoice is the entire cost, which is why the comparison against a salary looks so lopsided at first glance.

Three things to watch. Availability, because you're sharing them with five other clients and December is busy for everyone. Range, because the same person is unlikely to be strong at writing, design and video editing. And classification: if you set their hours, direct their daily work and they have no other clients, the CRA may consider them your employee regardless of what the contract says. Worth a five-minute conversation with your accountant before you set it up.

Contractors work best with a clear brief and a defined deliverable. "Four reels and eight posts a month, drafts by the 25th" holds up. "Handle our social" does not.

Option 3: buy it as a service

A managed service is a team on a fixed monthly fee. No employer costs, no hiring risk, and the work continues when one person is away. Market rates sit between roughly $500 and $5,000 a month depending on video volume — the bands are broken down in what the market charges for social media management.

The trade-offs are honest ones. You're one of several clients. Nobody is standing in your lobby at 4pm with a camera. Institutional knowledge takes a couple of months to build instead of arriving with the person. In exchange, the work doesn't stop, and you're not managing anybody.

How to read a portfolio

Portfolios are curated by definition, and the curation is where the information is. Four moves get past it.

Ask for last month, not the best month. "Show me everything you made for one client in July" tells you about consistency. A greatest-hits reel tells you they have had one good week since 2023.

Ask which parts they personally made. Agency portfolios travel with people who art-directed rather than executed, and that is fine as long as you know it. Point at one video and ask which cuts they chose and why. Anyone who made it can answer in ten seconds.

Match the constraint, not the aesthetic. A beautiful fashion feed proves very little about a dental clinic where every claim is regulated, the space is beige and the staff are camera-shy. Ask for work made under your constraints: no shoot budget, a real location, a client who has to approve.

Look for a business behind the numbers. "Reach went from 4,000 to 22,000 over five months" is a claim you can probe. "We grew the account" is not. The follow-up that separates people: what changed in the same period that wasn't content?

Then a live test. Give one true detail about your business on the call and ask for a caption while you're talking. You learn more from that ninety seconds than from an hour of slides.

Interview questions that actually separate people

• Walk me through one account from month one to month six. What changed, and what did you change?
• Take one reel from idea to published. Every step, including who approved it
• What would you post for us next Tuesday, and why that?
• Show me something that flopped. What did you learn from it?
• What's your realistic turnaround on an edited 30-second video?
• A customer leaves an angry comment on a Sunday. What happens?
• What do you need from me each week, in hours?
• How will you report, and which numbers will you put first?
• Which tools do you need me to pay for, and what do they cost?
• What would make you say this isn't working?

Question seven is the one owners skip and regret. Every arrangement needs something from you — footage, approvals, five minutes of context. Find out how much before you agree to it.

Pay for a small piece of work before you commit

Skip the unpaid test task. Pay for one month or one small project instead: three posts and a reel for your actual business, at a rate you'd both accept. You'll learn more from that than from four interviews, and the candidate will take it seriously because it's paid.

Set it up so it's readable. Give them the same brief you'd give in month three, a real deadline, and one round of feedback. Then judge it on four things: did it arrive when they said it would, did it sound like you, how much did you have to rewrite, and how did they take the notes. A great sample that took three weeks and four rounds tells you exactly what month six will feel like.

Approvals, access and the compliance part

Set this up in week one, whoever you hire. It is tedious and it is the difference between an awkward month and a legal problem.

• Ownership of accounts. The Business Manager, ad accounts, Google Business Profile and domain are registered to your business, with your hire added as a user. Never the other way around
• What can publish without you. Write the list. Ours is short: nothing that names a price, a result, a medical claim or a named person goes out unapproved
• Review replies. Positive ones can run on a template you signed off. Negative ones come to you first, every time
• Regulated claims. If you're a clinic or a licensed practice, your hire needs to know what your college permits before they write a caption. The Competition Bureau also applies a general impression test to advertising, so the overall effect of a post matters as much as the literal words
• Email. Under Canada's anti-spam legislation, a commercial message needs consent, must identify the sender, and must carry an unsubscribe that works for at least 60 days. Penalties reach $10 million for a business. Nobody imports a list they found
• Faces. Written consent from customers and staff before anyone appears in a post. Get it once, keep it on file

The first 90 days

Agree this before they start, and you remove most of the arguments that happen in month four.

Days 1–30: access and evidence. Accounts handed over properly, the brand file written down, an afternoon spent at the front desk listening to what customers actually ask. By day 30 you want ten pieces shipped and one report format agreed. Not a strategy deck. Something posted.

Days 31–60: a cadence without you. Drafts should be arriving on a schedule you didn't have to chase, the first edited video should exist, and the review backlog should be cleared. This is also when the first honest read of performance is possible — four weeks of data, not four days.

Days 61–90: they bring you the change. One thing to stop, one thing to start, with a reason attached. A hire who reaches day 90 still doing exactly what you told them in week one is a poster, and you should decide whether that's what you bought.

Two questions to ask yourself at day 90. Has anything come through the door because of this? And am I spending less time on it than I was in April? If the answer to both is no, the problem is usually the brief, not the person.

Where we fit

We're the third option, priced in the open. Organic Growth is $1,000 CAD a month: ten designed posts, five reels, five search-built blog articles and one newsletter every month, plus the brand kit, review management, and your website built and edited on request. A monthly strategy call comes with it. Paid Growth is a separate line at $1,000 with the ad budget separate and in your own account, B2B Sales is $2,000 to set up then $1,000 a month, and Automation runs from $1,500 to build then $500 a month. Each is bought on its own, and taking more than one earns no discount.

Our human team sets the direction, edits the video and talks to you. AI drafts underneath them, which is why the price sits where a freelancer's does. Nothing publishes until you approve it from your phone, about ten minutes a week. First drafts come back in one to two business days and something ships every week. We're based in Toronto, with people in British Columbia, working with businesses across Canada and the US.

The limit we say up front: search takes around 90 days to move, and ads are the only line we sell that is built to move a number sooner. You'll see what ships every week long before the search numbers do, and if someone quotes you faster than that, ask them what they're counting.

Sources

• Government of Canada Job Bank, wage reports for social media coordinator and social media manager, updated 19 November 2025
• Canada Revenue Agency, CPP contribution rates, maximums and exemptions and EI premium rates and maximums, 2026
• Ontario Ministry of Labour, Your guide to the Employment Standards Act: vacation
• Internal Revenue Service, Topic no. 751, Social Security and Medicare withholding rates
• Competition Bureau Canada, False or misleading representations
• CRTC, Canada's anti-spam legislation: frequently asked questions