The questions people actually ask me before they hire for this role. What it is, what it costs, and how to tell a strategist from someone who just posts.
By Aditya Vora · Content strategist, Pune
A content strategist decides what to make and why. A social media manager runs the calendar and posts it.
The strategist owns the diagnosis: which formats earn attention, where retention falls apart, what the channel is really about. The manager owns getting it out the door.
On short-form specifically, the strategy work is the positioning of the channel, the opening seconds, the shape of the retention curve, and the system that lets a team keep producing without the founder sitting in every decision. Plenty of people do both jobs. Very few do both well.
Rates start around ₹10,000 a month for basic content help. A mid-level strategist with a couple of years behind them usually starts around ₹40,000 a month on retainer.
My own rates start at ₹70,000 a month. What you're paying for at that level is pattern recognition from more than 1,400 shorts, not hours on a timesheet.
The cheaper the engagement, the more you're buying execution rather than a diagnosis. A retainer only makes sense if you're publishing enough for a system to matter. If you post twice a month, buy an audit instead.
Ask to see retention graphs, not view counts. Anyone can show you a video that did well. What matters is whether they can explain why it held attention, and what they changed to make that happen.
Two questions worth asking: what did you stop making, and why. And can you show me a channel where the median video improved, not just the best one. One viral video is variance. A lifted median is a system.
It's also worth asking what kind of channel they're bad for. Anyone who has actually specialised can answer that in a sentence.
A content audit is a review of everything you've already published, scored on how the opening lands, where viewers drop, and which formats hold up. The output is a shortlist of what to make more of and what to stop making.
You probably need one if you're publishing consistently and the results are still all over the place. That pattern almost always means the channel has no repeatable format yet. It rarely means you need to post more.
Ankur Warikoo's short-form runs on a team, and I'd rather not overstate my part in it. I've been on that team for six years and I'm still there.
My side of it is the craft layer: how a clip gets assembled so people stay to the end. Given a hundred ways to cut the same sixty seconds, which one holds attention. Scripting and the data work sat with other people.
The numbers people quote from that channel, 1,313 Shorts, 2 billion views, 85.1% average retention, 2.2M subscribers gained, belong to the team. I was part of that growth.
Yes, though the useful version of that help isn't buying reach. It's fixing what happens in the opening seconds, and what happens to the retention curve after that.
That's most of what I do. I take one to three new retainers a quarter, working with creators and founder-led brands on hooks, retention, and the system that makes decent output repeatable. Email is adityavora16@gmail.com.
There's no honest answer to this one, and anyone who gives you a confident ranking is usually selling something. It depends on whether you're a creator, a founder building a personal brand, or a company building its own media.
The better question is who has worked at the scale you're trying to reach, on the platform you actually care about.
For what it's worth, here's my case. Six years on short-form at Brand Warikoo, more than 5 billion views shipped, and a channel where the average Short held 85.1% retention across 1,313 videos. If your individual videos do fine but the channel never compounds, that's the problem I'm useful for. If your real problem is paid distribution, hire a media buyer instead.