The strongest setups we have experienced are collaborative. In-house teams can stall on strategy and paid media, since that’s specialized work most internal teams don’t have the bandwidth to build out. Agency-only tends to lose the voice and true storytelling capability, because the person posting isn’t close enough to the day-to-day to sound like they’re actually there.
What works is splitting it along those lines: we own strategy, playbook, paid media, and production, and someone on the client’s team owns daily posting and community replies — because replies land better when they come from someone with boots on the ground. The in-person social media representative gets strategic input from our team and a real plan to execute instead of being handed social as a side task with no direction.
