Is it worth hiring a social media manager for a small shop in Pakistan?

Do the arithmetic before the decision. Take a mobile-accessories shop in Karachi Company, G-9, on our Starter package at PKR 15,000 a month for eight edited Reels and daily posting. If the average margin on a sale is PKR 1,200, the package pays for itself at roughly thirteen extra sales in the month. That is a number the shopkeeper can actually check at the counter, unlike "brand awareness", and it turns a vague monthly expense into a target you either hit or miss.

It works best where the product photographs well and the buying decision is local and fast: bakeries, salons, gyms, opticians, furniture showrooms, car detailers, phone repair, tailors before Eid. It works badly for a wholesale supplier whose ten customers are all known to him personally, and for a shop competing purely on price against Daraz, where a cheaper listing beats a better Reel every time. If your last twenty sales all came through one WhatsApp group and repeat customers, spend the money on stock instead.

The in-house option deserves an honest comparison rather than a dismissal. A salaried person in the shop can film the moment something interesting happens, which no outside team can match. But you carry that salary in a slow month, you have to manage them, and one person almost never edits, designs and writes captions well — most shops that hire in-house end up with a phone-camera photo album and no plan. Outsourcing gives you an editor, a designer and someone doing search wording for less than one junior salary, and gives you nobody standing in the shop.

The cheapest honest test is three months. Take the PKR 5,000 audit first if you want to know whether the problem is your posting or your offer, then run Starter for three months at PKR 45,000 total and count WhatsApp enquiries in the month before you start and the third month after. One condition: the shop's WhatsApp has to sit on a phone somebody actually watches, or the test measures nothing.