A few years ago we agreed to run a social media program for a professional practice at eight hundred and ninety-five dollars a month. One post a week. At that price and that pace, the numbers worked.

Then we all decided to push for follower growth. The posting doubled. We added paid boosting on Facebook and Instagram. And rather than reopen pricing in the middle of a trial we had asked for, we absorbed the difference and kept going.

Here is how that ended. Across seven months the program ran roughly three hundred and forty dollars underwater in hard costs — including the ad spend, which we paid ourselves. And not one dollar of the $895 ever compensated our own account-management time. It simply wasn’t in the number.

We are not telling you that to complain. We are telling you because it is true, because we told the client the same thing in writing, and because it explains every figure that follows.

Eight hundred and ninety-five dollars a month does not cover even weekly posting produced to a standard a serious practice would want its name on.

The arithmetic

Two posts a week is about twenty-six hours a month.

Not four hours. Not eight. Twenty-six, give or take, every month, for two posts a week across Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn with a real person handling the replies.

That is because each post is a small production rather than an upload. Someone builds the imagery — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator. Someone else develops the storyline that the image has to serve, coordinated to the calendar: the holidays, the seasonal turns, the moments that actually matter in that profession’s year. Then it all gets loaded into a professional scheduling platform, weeks ahead, so that a Mother’s Day post lands on Mother’s Day morning rather than depending on whether anybody happened to be at a desk.

That forty-two-hour month is the part most people find surprising, so it is worth dwelling on. We produce in planned batches, usually in the stretches between major website builds. A heavy month buys a light one. The pace is steady; the invoices arrive in waves.

Which leads to something you can use on any agency, including us. If a shop bills you the identical flat figure every single month, one of two things is true: they are averaging the number for their own convenience, or the work is not actually varying because the work is not actually happening.

The part nobody says out loud

Followers you bought will leave when you stop paying.

Boosting works. It is the ordinary tool for growing an audience, and used properly it is cheap — we have driven a thousand profile visits for well under two hundred dollars. It is how a page crosses out of three digits, which matters, because a page with eighty followers reads as abandoned and a page with a thousand reads as established.

But when the budget stops, the count drifts back down. That is not a failure and it is not a scam. It is what buying attention means. Anyone who sells you followers without telling you they are rented is selling you something else.

The hard categories

“You can’t advertise that on Instagram.” Yes, you can.

Some practices are supposed to be impossible on social media. Family law. Criminal defence. Bankruptcy. The reasoning sounds sensible: nobody follows an account about the worst week of their life, and nobody hits like on a divorce.

We believed a version of that ourselves, and we were wrong, because it misunderstands who is watching.

Nobody engages with those accounts. People follow them — quietly, months early, from a phone, telling no one. Someone who suspects the situation at home is not what they are being told does not call an attorney on the day the suspicion arrives. They look. They read a little. They keep an eye on somebody who seems composed and competent, and they carry that name around for a while before anything happens.

Then the day comes, and it is not a search result they reach for. It is the firm they have already been watching.

That is the difference between search advertising and this. Search catches somebody at the moment they have decided, and it should stay exactly where it is — it keeps the phone ringing. Social works earlier and much more quietly. The two compound. Neither replaces the other, and an agency that tells you otherwise is defending its own product.

How we bill

Like a retainer, because that is a system you already trust.

When a client hands us a lump sum for a stretch of months, we do not treat it as revenue on the day it arrives. We treat it the way a law firm treats a retainer.

1. It is reconciled every month against work actually performed — hours at a stated production rate that includes our overhead and a modest profit, tracked in the same billing system we use for everything else.
2. Advertising spend is passed through at cost. No markup, ever, with the platform’s own ad report available.
3. You get a one-page statement every month. Hours, costs, the draw, ad spend, the balance remaining and the follower count. One page, so that nobody is ever guessing.
4. Money left over is still yours. It shows on the ledger to the dollar, and what happens to it is your decision, not ours.
5. We never speak as you. A courteous reply, a thank-you, an acknowledgement — never commentary in your voice, and never anything that could read as professional advice from your practice.
6. Your side of it stays here. Your strategy, your audiences, your pathways — never shared, never cited, never turned into anybody’s case study. That is why there is no client named anywhere in this paper.

None of the above is generous. It is just arithmetic performed in the open. After forty-five years of doing this we would rather show a professional the numbers than ask them to trust us — trust that survives is the kind that was checkable in the first place.