What does a Social Growth FTE own?
A Social Growth FTE owns a brand's organic social presence end to end across LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. It is reviewed on engagement-weighted reach growth rather than on follower counts or posting volume, because reach that nobody engages with is not growth.
It is hired per brand, so its memory of what has worked, its calendar, and its brand rules belong to that brand and compound over time rather than resetting each week.
Why does it never cross-post?
The Social Growth FTE writes every post natively for its platform because cross-posted content underperforms on every platform it was not written for. A LinkedIn post and an X post on the same idea are different pieces of writing with different lengths, structures, and conventions.
This is a design rule rather than a preference. When the same idea belongs on three platforms, the FTE produces three drafts and shows each one as a native preview in the approvals queue, rendered the way it will appear.
How does the calendar work?
Each week the Social Growth FTE proposes a rolling calendar with a reason for every slot, and the manager approves the calendar before any post is drafted in full. That means you approve the plan and then the pieces, rather than discovering the plan through the pieces.
Cadence is a starting input rather than a fixed rule. The FTE proposes adjustments when the evidence supports them, such as shifting effort toward the platform where the brand's posts earn the most reach per post.
- Calendar: proposed weekly with a reason per slot, approved before drafting
- Posts: written natively per platform, previewed exactly as they will appear
- Replies: routine ones drafted for approval, sensitive ones escalated
- Review: a weekly report of what earned reach and what it learned
What happens with comments and replies?
Routine comments get a drafted reply that waits for approval; sensitive comments are escalated to a person and never auto-sent. Sensitive means anything that reads as a complaint, a legal matter, a journalist, a safety concern, or a topic on the brand's excluded list.
The escalation rule is permanent regardless of autonomy level, because the cost of a wrong public reply is asymmetric. Even at the highest autonomy the FTE may reach, sensitive replies stay gated.
How does it learn what works?
The Social Growth FTE keeps a per-brand performance memory: which formats, hooks, topics, and times earned reach on each platform, and which did not. That memory informs the next calendar, which is why the role compounds rather than repeating itself.
The memory is inspectable. A manager can see what the FTE believes about the brand's audience and correct it, which matters because an uninspectable model of your audience is one you cannot trust.
What can you ask it beyond the weekly routine?
Beyond the routine, the Social Growth FTE takes missions: bounded pushes with a goal, a target subset, and a deadline. A launch week across platforms is a production mission; engagement dropped, recover it is a diagnostic mission answered with ranked hypotheses and evidence rather than guesses.
Diagnostic missions are deliberately honest. The FTE ranks its hypotheses by the evidence behind them and proposes experiments, rather than asserting a single cause it cannot prove.
What does a Social Growth FTE need from you, and what does it cost?
A Social Growth FTE needs three things from you: connections to the social accounts it manages, scoped per property and granted with the permissions you choose; a confirmed Brand Brain that holds the voice, the vocabulary, the topics the brand does not comment on, and the audiences that are protected; and a remit that names which reply categories always escalate to a person, such as complaints, controversy, and anything about a named individual. Without the third, it will draft replies you would rather it had escalated.
It costs tokens from the organization's wallet for drafting posts, drafting replies, reading engagement data, and writing its brief, bounded by its per-FTE budget and visible daily. Approving posts and replies costs nothing. In the first weeks every post and reply is gated and the manager's time is minutes a day; as the approval record for routine post categories grows, those can be promoted to auto-publish while replies to anything sensitive stay on the always-escalate list. Many brands never promote public posting at all, and the FTE works fine that way.