Hire a freelancer, or hand over the whole thing?

Per hour, almost always. Per outcome, it depends on how many people it takes. A freelancer handling one channel is genuinely the cheapest way to get that channel handled. The cost shows up when you need four of them and the coordination between them becomes your job, because that coordination is unpaid work that lands on the owner.

When the work has edges. A landing page, a batch of ad creative, a logo, a one-off campaign. Anything you can brief clearly and check when it comes back is well suited to a freelancer, and hiring an agency for it is overpaying for coordination you don't need.

The work stops. Freelancers get sick, take vacation, take on too many clients, or move on to full-time roles, and none of that is a criticism of them. That's just what one person means. A system that runs on its own doesn't have that failure mode, which matters most for the work that has to happen every single day.

Usually not, and we say so on calls. Freelancers tend to be good at the creative and campaign work we're not trying to take over. What we handle is the repeating operational half: intake, follow-up, reputation and reporting. Those two things sit next to each other quite happily.

With a freelancer, you do. You write the brief and they execute it, which works well when you already know what you want. We build the strategy from your goals and what is working across our client base right now, then run it and show you the numbers, so the thinking isn't another thing on your plate.