What does doing it yourself involve?
The owner or a staff member plans, photographs, writes and schedules every post with the platforms' own tools, such as Meta Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram. The advantage is accuracy: the person posting knows the job, the customer and the stock. The weakness is time. Posting stops whenever the business gets busy, which is usually when there is the most worth showing. If you go this way, set a small fixed routine, such as taking three photos on every job and writing the week's captions in one sitting, instead of relying on spare moments that rarely come.
When does a freelancer make sense?
A freelancer suits a business that wants one person to learn its voice and work a set number of hours. Ask how they will reach your accounts: they should be added through each platform's access settings, never given your password. Plan for their holidays and sick days, since one person means one point of failure. Check how the arrangement is set up for tax as well. The ATO says whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor affects your tax, super and other obligations, and it publishes a list of common myths that lead businesses to get this wrong.
What does an agency add?
An agency spreads the work across several people, often including a strategist, a designer and someone who manages paid ads. That suits businesses running campaigns across several channels or spending real money on ads. The trade-off is more process: briefs, approval rounds and an account manager between you and the person writing. Ask who actually writes your posts and how many other businesses that person handles. Ask whether your Pages and ad accounts stay in your own business portfolio. Meta lets a business share a Page or ad account with a partner agency while keeping ownership, so there is no reason to hand the assets over.
How does an AI-assisted service differ?
An AI-assisted service uses language models to draft captions from your material (job photos, notes, website copy and past posts), with a person setting the rules and checking each draft. Drafting is quicker, so less labour goes into each post. The risk is confident errors: a model can state a price, a suburb or a timeframe that is not true. That makes the approval step the most important part of the arrangement. Australia's guidance for AI adoption says an organisation stays accountable for how it uses AI and recommends keeping human control, so treat every draft as unapproved until someone who knows the facts has read it.
Who is responsible if a post is wrong?
Your business is. The ACCC says any claim a business makes about its products or services must be accurate, truthful and based on reasonable grounds, and it lists social media among the channels this covers. That holds whether the caption was written by you, a freelancer, an agency or software. Outsourcing moves the work and leaves the obligation with you. Put a named approver in every arrangement, keep a record of what was approved, and give whoever drafts posts a written list of claims they must not make, such as prices, availability or comparisons with competitors.
Can you combine the options?
Many small businesses use a mix. A common split is that the owner supplies photos and approves posts, a service drafts and schedules them, and replies to comments stay in-house because they need someone who knows the job. Another is doing Google Business Profile updates yourself, since they are short and local, and getting help with Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Write the split down: who supplies material, who drafts, who approves, who publishes and who answers the public. Any gap in that list is where posts stall or go out unchecked.
- Who supplies photos and job notes, and by which day each week
- Who drafts captions and adapts them for each platform
- Who approves each post or batch, and who stands in for them
- Who schedules and publishes
- Who answers comments and messages, and in what hours