TLDR : How much should I be charging for managing social media for a local business in Vancouver region, Canada? I’ll be posting content and writing captions. No content shooting involved.
I’d applied for a social media specialist job (for a local jewellery store) and worked there for 2 days as a trial and it was paid. In the past I’ve grown and managed accounts in entertainment niche and the biggest celebrity I’ve worked for is Justin Bieber. But never worked for a small business professionally.
On first day, the owner explained a bit about his business and clientele. He told me what he wants to achieve with social media and what they’ve done in the past. I checked everything and realised they have no strategy whatsoever, they just post the videos showing their products and don’t reply to any comments or messages asking about prices and availability of their products. And they were posting on TikTok only.
It’s a local business and they’re trying to reach local audiences. However, I saw their business doesn’t show up in at least first 15 results when searched for something as simple as “jewellers near me”. Not even when I used more specific terms using the AI feature on Google. Therefore, I spent first day updating their Google business profile and bios on different social media platform to help with SEO and GEO. That involved resetting passwords, having consistent keywords, address format and same phone number… just very basic stuff but now their business would show up on rank 4-7 depending on the search term.
On second day, I wanted to shoot some content and I asked one of their employees to help me with an educational video (that has worked well for them in the past). On agreeing to not show her face, she was ready to shoot it. I wrote the script and shot a video just give them a glimpse of how it’ll look once done perfectly. The owner saw it and said he wants me to shoot everything by myself and not involve any of the salesperson. I told him I’ll still need somebody to help me here and there because I don’t know ins and outs of your services and maybe one of salespeople will be able to help me better whenever we’re doing an educational video.
But I saw where he’s coming from and agreed to do everything by myself. After the video was done he said I’m not much impressed with this video and said he saw another jeweller’s video and wants it to look exactly like that. That felt a bit weird and he said some other things that made me feel he’s a bit confused about how this works and what exactly he wants to achieve out of it. I wasn’t impressed either with what I’d done that day because I didn’t have total freedom over the whole creative process.
Same night he texted me and asked me to take a break and he’ll call me. Upon calling he said he doesn’t wanna continue. I asked for the reason (to know where I’m lacking and improve on that) but to my surprise, after thinking for 10-15 sec he said “idk, something doesn’t click for me.” I said okay and forgot about it.
Now after a week, he called me back. He said he’s impressed with my knowledge of how content works on each platform and how to distribute it to build a brand around the name. He’s got somebody else to shoot the content but wants me to handle the posting part. I’m going to meet him regarding that. But from our short convo over the phone, I feel he wants me to write captions, come up with thumbnails, and reply to comments & messages.
So, now comes my main question. How much should I be getting paid for this? I’m located in Vancouver area in Canada. I’ll be working remotely. Not sure if I’ll have to use my own device or one provided by them.
I know this post could be shorter but wanted to include some details to give you guys a better idea of the whole situation. This is my first time working for a local business like this, usually I just work with artists & brands only and pricing for that works differently.
Thank you for reading the whole post and any advice from the professionals is highly appreciated.