how to build a content team.

brands that bring content in-house often hire one "social media person" and wonder why output stalls. real content is a team sport. here is how to build one that actually ships — and what to keep outsourced.

— 01the roles you need.

strategy, creation (shooting), editing, and distribution/community. one person rarely covers all four well. understand the functions before you write a single job description.

there are five distinct jobs and one title. someone decides what gets made, someone produces it, someone edits, someone publishes and replies, and someone reports on it. most job adverts staple three together.

the rarest combination is production and judgment — a person who can both shoot competently and decide what is worth shooting. that person is worth paying properly for and is usually the first real hire.

and someone has to be able to write. most of the output is words, and a team with nobody who writes clearly will need one permanently.

— 02hire in order of bottleneck.

hire against your biggest constraint first — usually creation or editing. add roles as volume justifies. do not build a big team before you have the output to keep it busy.

hire against whatever is actually stopping output. if content exists and nothing publishes, the bottleneck is approvals, not production, and another producer makes it worse.

the usual order is: a producer who can shoot and cut, then a coordinator who owns publishing and community, then a specialist for paid. strategy stays with whoever owns the business outcome until the team is large enough to warrant it.

and give one person approval authority with a stated turnaround. content teams stall on sign-off far more often than on capacity, and no hire fixes that.

— 03what to outsource.

specialist or spiky work — production, paid, design — is often cheaper outsourced than hired. many brands keep strategy and community in-house and partner with an agency for the rest.

outsource whatever rewards equipment, specialism or volume — photography, video production, motion graphics, paid media. those are expensive to build internally and readily available.

keep community, brand judgment and anything requiring product knowledge inside. the person who answers customers and notices when a post is wrong for the business is the hardest role to outsource well.

and keep the archive internal regardless of who shoots. an external supplier holding the only copy of two years of footage is a problem discovered at the worst moment.

— 04what a small team actually needs.

one producer, one coordinator, one approver, and external production for anything requiring a crew. that shape covers most businesses under fifty people and it survives someone going on leave.

and two weeks of banked content at all times. a team producing this week's output this week is permanently reactive regardless of how many people are in it.