There is no shortage of people in Nigeria offering to manage your social media. The difficulty is that the job title covers at least four different jobs, and most bad hires happen because the business wanted one of them and hired somebody who does another.
Work out which job you are hiring for
A content producer makes things. Photographs, graphics, short videos, captions. If your problem is that you have nothing to post, this is who you need, and you should judge them on the work they produce.
A community manager talks to people. Replies to comments and messages, handles complaints, keeps conversations going. If your problem is that enquiries sit unanswered, this is the hire, and the skill is speed and judgement rather than design.
A strategist decides what the account is for, who it is talking to, and what it should say. If your problem is that you post constantly and none of it seems connected to the business, this is the gap, and it is usually a shorter engagement rather than a monthly role.
A paid social specialist runs advertising. Completely different skill set from all of the above, and the most common mistake is assuming the person making your posts can also run your ad budget well.
Most small Nigerian businesses actually need the first two and think they need all four. Deciding which before you post the role saves the entire mess.
What to look at, and what to ignore
Look at accounts they have actually run. Ask for two or three, and go and look at them as a customer would. Is it obvious what the business sells? Could you get in touch? Has it been posted on recently? A manager whose accounts read clearly is showing you the thing that matters.
Ignore their follower count. Theirs and their clients'. It is the easiest number in this market to buy, and we have written about why it tells you almost nothing. A manager who leads with follower growth is measuring the wrong thing, which means they will keep measuring the wrong thing for you.
Look at how they handle being asked a hard question. Ask what they would not do for your business. Anybody who says they can do everything is either inexperienced or telling you what you want to hear.
Ignore the portfolio of designs with no context. A grid of pretty graphics tells you somebody can use Canva. It does not tell you whether the account produced any business.
The five questions worth asking
What would you measure, and how would you report it? The answer you want involves enquiries, messages, saves, profile visits and clicks to your contact route. The answer that should worry you is impressions and follower growth alone.
How would you handle a complaint posted publicly? This happens, it happens at the worst time, and how somebody answers this tells you more about their judgement than any portfolio.
What do you need from me to do this well? A good answer involves access to the product, time with you, and knowing what is actually profitable. Somebody who says they need nothing from you is planning to guess.
Which platforms would you drop? Almost every business is spread across more platforms than it can do well. A manager willing to recommend closing one is thinking about your results rather than about looking busy.
What happens in the first month? You want to hear about setting the account up properly, agreeing what it is for, and building a small repeatable set of content formats. If the first month is entirely posting, the structure underneath will never get built.
How to brief them so it works
This is the part businesses skip, and it is the difference between a hire that works and six wasted months.
Tell them what you actually sell and what makes you money, which is often not the same as what you are best known for. Tell them who the customer is in real terms, not demographics. Tell them what you are not willing to do, whether that is discounting, dancing to trending audio, or being funny. Agree what success looks like in numbers you both understand, and agree when you will look at it. And tell them who decides, because a manager waiting three days for approval on every post cannot work to any rhythm.
On pay
We will not quote you a figure for somebody else’s work, because the range in this market is enormous and a single number would mislead you.
What is worth knowing is that the cheapest option is expensive in a specific way. A manager charging very little is managing many accounts to survive, which means yours gets minutes rather than attention, and the output shows it. Equally, a high fee guarantees nothing on its own. What correlates with results is whether the person understood the business before they started posting.
Ask what the fee covers and what it does not. Content production, community management, advertising budget and advertising management are four separate things and they are frequently confused in a single monthly number.
Before you hire anybody
Know what state your accounts are actually in. A lot of businesses hire somebody to post more when the real problem is that the profile cannot be found in search, the bio does not say what the business does, or there is no way to get in touch. No amount of posting fixes any of that, and you will pay for months of activity before discovering it.
That check takes an hour on your own phone, logged out, and it is also part of our free deep digital audit, which looks at the profiles alongside everything else a customer meets on the way to you.
