What the largest agency publishing a social rate card costs in year one at its entry tier: a $4,650 setup fee plus $3,150 a month, before a dollar of ad spend. That buys ten posts a month on one channel.
Source: WebFX published social media management pricing table, August 2026The posting pace that builds momentum, per channel. Once a month builds none, and five a day everywhere wrecks the quality. For a local business, one or two Google Business Profile posts a month do more than a fifth social channel.
Source: Buffer social media posting frequency guide, 2026Top-ranking social and reputation agency pages that tell you who owns your accounts if you leave. The one that answers it does so by refusing to create your accounts at all, so the logins stay in your hands.
Source: Southern Tide Media teardown of 10 top-ranking provider pages, August 2026What’s included
Social is the cheapest place to be recognized and the most expensive place to be inconsistent. The accounts that work aren’t the cleverest ones. They’re the ones that show up every week with something worth stopping for.
Focus areas · Full-funnel marketing
Content calendar
Planned a month ahead, built around your season.
Production
Graphics, short video and copy produced on brand, in batches, ready to publish.
Publishing & scheduling
Posted on schedule across the platforms your audience uses.
Community management
Comments and messages answered like a person, inside a response-time commitment.
Paid amplification
The posts that perform get ad budget behind them, run through Paid Media.
Profile upkeep
Bios, cover images, highlights and pinned posts kept current. It’s your shop window.
Seasonal campaigns
Launches, events and offers planned into the calendar, not bolted on the week before.
Reporting
Reach, engagement and, where it can be tracked, what social sent to your site. See a sample monthly report →
What a month on your feed looks like
The question buyers ask about social agencies more than any other is some version of “how would I even know if they were doing anything?” It’s a fair question, and the answer is a list. Here’s ours. Every line below shows up in the report you get. See a sample monthly report →
A calendar built around your season, your events and what worked last month, sent to you for approval before anything is produced. You know what’s going out and when, every time.
Graphics, short video and copy made in one pass instead of scrambled together the night before. Batch production is what makes a steady schedule affordable, and it’s why the calendar comes first.
Scheduled and posted on the rhythm we agreed, on two or three platforms run well instead of five run badly. A busy week for you never costs you a month of momentum.
Community management inside a response-time commitment, not left to pile up over a weekend. Anything that needs you rather than us gets flagged the same day.
Bios, covers, highlights, pinned posts and seasonal hours checked and fixed. Where your Google Business Profile is in play, it gets the same treatment.
What went out, what earned attention, what it sent to the site where that can be tracked, what we changed and what next month does differently. Written by the person who did the work, not exported from a dashboard.
The month, before it happens
Four of the ten top-ranking social agency pages we reviewed name a “content calendar” as a deliverable. None of them shows one. So here’s a real month for a fictional business: sixteen posts, not thirty, because sixteen you keep up beats thirty you don’t. Some of it is deliberately unfinished. Two cells are waiting on a photo from the client, three are still in review, and two are held open on purpose.
- Sixteen, not thirty. A number that gets published every month beats one that gets abandoned in week three. Two to five posts a week per channel is where the consensus sits, and that’s what this calendar is built to.
- The unfinished cells are the point. A calendar where everything is approved and nothing is waiting is a template, not a plan. Real months have a post held for an event that hasn’t happened yet and a photo that hasn’t arrived.
- The Google Business Profile line. One local post here does more for a local business than a fifth social network, and it appeared in none of the ten competitor packages we reviewed. It belongs to Reputation Management, and it lands on the same calendar so the month reads as one plan.
And the posts themselves
One of the five social agency pages we tore down shows any actual work. Here’s a week of a fictional outfitter’s feed, with the captions written the way they’d publish, plus the part nobody shows: the same post with two captions, and which one won.
The water is still warm and the flounder disagree. Five things worth having in the boat before October — swipe for the list, and the first one is not a rod.
6:40pm push-off, back before dark, no experience needed. This is the one people book twice. Link in bio for the September dates.
Third summer in a row for this crew. Tag us and we will share the good ones — with your permission first, always.
Check out our new fall fishing gear, now in stock at Pelican Point Outfitters. Come see us today!
4.1%Engagement rate for the version that describes the shopThe water is still warm and the flounder disagree. Five things worth having in the boat before October — and the first one is not a rod.
6.8%Engagement rate for the version that gives something away- Real captions, not placeholder text. The caption is most of the work. A sample post with lorem ipsum under it is a design mockup. A sample post with the actual words is the deliverable.
- The A/B strip is the evidence. Two versions, one number each, and the winner is the one that says something useful instead of something promotional. That’s a method you can check, not a claim you have to take on faith.
- Illustrative only. Pelican Point Outfitters is a fictional business and every figure here is invented to show the shape of the work. Yours would be built from your products, your season and your photography. See the report these posts feed →
Us vs. the typical social agency
Every line on the left is a pattern we found on the ten top-ranking social and reputation agency pages we tore down in August 2026, or, in two cases, a warning AI assistants now give buyers unprompted.
The typical social agency
- A budget dropdown instead of a price
- Ten posts a month, plus a setup fee bigger than a year of our management
- Comments and messages quietly excluded from scope
- Nothing at all about who owns the accounts or the content
- “No long-term contracts,” with the notice period left vague
- AI in the production pipeline, never mentioned
- A monthly report promised on the page and shown by nobody
Southern Tide Media
- Published plan pricing, with the market’s own numbers printed beside it
- A pace you can sustain, planned a month ahead, no setup fee
- Community management in the service, inside a response time
- Your accounts, your content, your photography, in your name, in writing
- Month to month with 30 days’ notice after any initial term
- What AI drafts and what a person always writes, stated plainly
- A written report every month, and a sample of it on this page
Where it starts
In the Growth plan$1,295/mo bundleOrganic social (2–3 posts a week for one brand) is built into Growth and every plan above it, alongside content, AI Visibility Managed and Website Care Pro.
How pricing worksIs an agency the right answer for you?
Then keep it. The biggest factor in whether social works is whether it happens every week. If that’s already true in your business, you’d be paying us to replace something that isn’t broken. We’d rather set up your scheduling properly and leave.
Spend the money proving people want the thing first. Social amplifies an offer that already lands. It doesn’t rescue one that doesn’t. This is the most common reason we tell someone to come back later.
Nothing here works in three weeks. Sixty to ninety days is the realistic window before an account starts to show movement, and a month of posting followed by a pause is worse than not starting. If the budget is uncertain past next quarter, wait.
If the real problem is that nobody can say what the business stands for, posting four times a week just spreads the confusion faster. That’s Branding & Creative or Consulting first, and this second.
If none of those four is you, meaning you know what you sell, you can’t get to it every week, and you can give it a season, then this is the right service, and the rest of the page is the detail.
How pricing works
Social lives inside the bundles, where it belongs. Sold on its own it turns into a posting habit. Here are the published numbers, and what they buy compared to the rest of the market. Of the agencies that publish a rate card at all, one charges $99 a month for ten posts, one charges $750 for twelve, and one charges $3,150 a month plus a $4,650 setup fee, a first-year total of $42,450 before any ad spend. That’s a 34× spread on the price of a single post, and nobody explains it. We will: format costs more than volume, and a named person who knows your business costs more than a content mill.
Organic social (2–3 posts a week for one brand) is built into Growth and every plan above it, alongside content, AI Visibility Managed and Website Care Pro.
Each additional social brand or property adds $450/mo: its own calendar, same schedule, same production standard.
Shoots, campaign microsites and one-off pushes beyond the calendar, scoped in writing and approved before we start.
Bundling is cheaper than buying the pieces.
See plans & pricingHow long it takes
What to expect
Social rewards consistency over brilliance, and consistency takes a system. Here’s how it runs.
What you’ve posted, what worked, and what your competitors are doing. Then a month of planned content, approved by you, before anything publishes.
Batch production, scheduled posting, community managed in between. A busy week for you never costs you a month of momentum.
A plain read on what earned attention, and what next month changes because of it.
Who we help
These aren’t a menu. They’re the industries on our client roster today, and social does a different job in each.
Hospitality & Resort
The property, looking like the reason someone books it.
Explore →E-commerce & DTC
Product in the feed, proof in the comments, launches with a runway.
Explore →Medical & Med Spa
Results and reassurance, posted with taste and inside the rules.
Explore →Outdoor & Recreation
A community that carries the brand through the off-season.
Home Services & B2B
Proof-of-work content that makes the estimate call easier.
Legal & Professional
Visible expertise without the cringe. It can be done.
Chambers & Nonprofits
Events, members and wins, amplified on a community budget.
Restricted categories
Organic reach where the ad platforms won’t sell you any.
When you win, we win
Real clients, real numbers. Ratios and rankings, sourced, with each client’s sign-off.
Outbidding the category leader — at a 5.9× return
2023 – 2026
Thirteen years of showing up with the numbers
2013 – present
Don’t take our word for it
“The Southern Tide Media team has smartly positioned itself as partners, versus “vendors.” Each step along the strategic path, I feel as if they are “all in” and have our best interests at heart.”
“Southern Tide Media increased our conversion rates on our SEO campaigns by 60% in short time… Brandon takes the worry out of all the technical jargon and translates that into workable applications you can understand as a business owner.”
“In every dealing I have ever had with Brandon Evans, he has been knowledgeable, fair, and has responded quickly. I would highly recommend using him for any of your business’s marketing or advertising needs!”
Questions, answered
Which platforms do you cover?
The ones your customers are on. Usually Facebook and Instagram for local and hospitality, LinkedIn for B2B, and short video where the audience supports it. We’d rather run two platforms well than five badly.
Do I have to be on camera?
No. Plenty of accounts we run never show a person. It helps when the owner is the brand, but it isn’t required, and we won’t build a plan that depends on something you won’t keep up.
Who owns the accounts and the content?
You do, always. We work inside your accounts and you keep full ownership and access.
How do you measure social?
Reach and engagement as a health check, and, where it can be tracked, what social sent to your site. Where attribution is uncertain, the report says so instead of inventing precision. Our fee goes in the denominator when we talk about return. An agency that leaves its own cost out of the ROI math is telling you a story, not a number. See a sample monthly report →
How many posts a month should we actually be doing?
Two to five a week on each channel that matters, which comes to eight to twenty a month per platform. Once a month builds no momentum. Five a day everywhere burns your team out and the quality goes with it. Three a week, every week, beats an inspired burst followed by six quiet weeks. If a plan depends on a pace you can’t sustain, it’s a bad plan and we’ll say so before it starts.
Do you handle comments and DMs, or just posting?
Both. Community management is part of the service, inside a response-time commitment. Ask every agency you talk to about this, because it’s the most misunderstood boundary in the category. Several well-known providers decline comments and messages outright and leave them with you, and the exclusion is easy to miss until the first customer complaint sits unanswered over a weekend.
Do we see posts before they go live?
Always. The month is planned and approved before anything publishes, and nothing goes out without your sign-off. You’re never surprised by your own feed.
Who owns the accounts, the content and the photography?
You do, all three, and we put it in writing. The accounts are created and held in your name, on an email address your business controls. We work inside them as a user or partner you’ve granted access to, never on a shared login, and you can revoke our access in about a minute without calling anyone. The posts, graphics and photography are yours the moment they’re made. This matters more than it sounds. Ask an AI assistant who owns a business’s social accounts and the answers come almost entirely from law firms warning people about agencies. Getting locked out of your own page by a departed vendor is common enough to have its own body of legal advice.