What a social media agency actually does
The job is smaller than most pitch decks suggest and harder than most price lists imply. Stripped back, a social media agency is responsible for deciding what a brand should say each month, producing it to a standard the platform rewards, publishing it on a reliable schedule, replying to the people who respond, and reporting honestly on what happened.
Almost every failure in this category traces back to one of those five, and usually to production. Strategy decks are cheap to produce and easy to sell. Shooting, editing and writing forty pieces of content a month, every month, is the part that quietly collapses. When you are comparing agencies, most of your attention should go to how the work actually gets made.
The part that gets skipped
Community management is the most commonly under-resourced line in a Singapore social retainer. On TikTok and Instagram in particular, replies in the first hour materially affect how far a post travels, and a comment left unanswered for two days reads to a potential customer exactly as a phone left ringing does. If a proposal does not say who is replying and how fast, that work is not happening.
What social media management costs in Singapore
Published pricing in this market is rare, which mostly benefits agencies. The ranges below reflect what brands here are typically quoted for ongoing management. They are a planning guide, not our rate card: we quote per scope, because the same post count costs very different amounts depending on how much original shooting it needs.
| Monthly budget | What that realistically buys | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Under S$1,500 | One channel, mostly graphics and repurposed material, little to no original video. Below this level an agency is usually worse value than coaching your own team. | Very early brands, or a coached in-house setup |
| S$1,500 – S$3,000 | One or two channels, a consistent weekly cadence, a modest amount of original video shot in batches. Community management included. | SMEs establishing a presence |
| S$3,000 – S$6,000 | Multi-channel with regular original video, a monthly shoot day, platform-native writing per channel, and reporting tied to enquiries rather than impressions. | Established brands treating social as a real channel |
| S$6,000+ | Multi-channel and multi-market, higher production values, influencer and paid layers, and a strategist genuinely embedded in your marketing calendar. | Brands where social media drives revenue |
The question that reveals a padded quote
What is in our scope
We publish this because vague scopes are how disappointing retainers start. A typical engagement with us includes the following every month.
- A content plan a month ahead. Themes, formats and posting dates agreed before anything is produced, so nothing is being invented the night before it goes out.
- Production. Shooting in batches on scheduled days, editing, graphics, and captions written per platform rather than copied across them.
- Scheduling and publishing. Posted at the times your audience is actually active, which we establish from your own account data rather than from a generic best-time-to-post article.
- Community management. Comments and direct messages answered on weekdays, with anything that looks like a sales enquiry routed to you the same day.
- Monthly reporting. What we published, what performed, what we are changing next month, and what it means for enquiries. Not a screenshot of impressions.
What is not included by default
Paid media budget, influencer fees, licensed music beyond platform libraries, professional talent, and studio hire are passed through at cost and agreed before we spend anything. We would rather this list be boring and explicit than discovered in an invoice.
The platforms, and when each is worth it
Being on every platform is how small teams produce mediocre content everywhere. Two channels done properly beats five done thinly, every time.
| Platform | What it is genuinely good for | When to skip it |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok | Reach beyond your existing following, and testing which messages land before you spend on them elsewhere. | When your buyer is a procurement committee and nothing about the product is visual. |
| The place people check to decide whether a brand is real. Reels for reach, grid and Stories for credibility. | Rarely worth skipping, but it can be maintenance-only if TikTok is doing the discovery work. | |
| B2B credibility and hiring. Founder posts consistently outperform company-page posts here. | Consumer brands, unless you are recruiting hard. | |
| Older demographics, community groups, and local service businesses. Still the strongest paid platform in Singapore for many categories. | When the audience is under 30 and the goal is organic reach. | |
| YouTube | Content with a long tail. A good explainer keeps earning views years later, unlike a Reel. | When you cannot commit to the longer production cycle. |
How we work
Weeks one and two: the plan
We go through what you sell, who actually buys it, and what has already been tried. Then we audit your existing accounts and whatever content you already own, because most brands have more usable material than they think. Output is a content plan for the first month and a format list we intend to repeat.
Week three: the first shoot
Batch shooting on a scheduled day, structured so a single session produces several weeks of material. Repetition is deliberate here: a format we can shoot again cheaply is worth more than a one-off concept that never returns.
From week four: the cadence
Posting, replying, and a monthly review that changes the next plan. The review is the important half. A retainer where month six looks exactly like month one is not being managed, it is being administered.
What we need from you
Roughly two hours a month: one hour for the plan review, one for the shoot. Plus access to your accounts and a single decision-maker who can approve content without a committee. The single most common cause of a stalled social media retainer is an approval chain, not a lack of ideas.
How to choose between agencies
Most comparison advice in this category is written by agencies and conveniently describes themselves. Here is the version we would give a friend, including where it does not favour us.
- Ask to see the work, not the deck. Specifically, ask for an account they have run for more than six months. Launch content is easy. Month nine is the test.
- Ask who does the actual editing. If the answer is an offshore team you will never speak to, that is not automatically bad, but it should be priced accordingly and you should know.
- Ask how they will report. If reporting is impressions and follower growth with no line connecting to enquiries, you will not be able to judge the work in six months.
- Be suspicious of guaranteed results. Nobody controls organic reach. An agency willing to guarantee it is either describing paid media or is being careless with the truth.
- Consider a bigger agency when you need scale. If you need six markets, simultaneous launches and a large paid budget managed, a network agency is a better fit than a studio like ours, and we will say so.
Where we are genuinely a poor fit