is it crazy to hire an entry level social manager as a third hire in a startup to try and hit more aggressive growth/scalability?

Depends. On one hand social is very important. On the other I am assuming you and the other hire do not have the capacity to do it yourself? I have found that when founders handle the marketing (At least for a while) the company is in a really good position to succeed once they do make that hire.

Yea basically. I lead growth so im swimming all over the place. I have an organic growth manager who is doing social, email, and some SEO. But as you can see we dont have the current power to handle social well given how lean we are

There is growth with social media however it's a long term game. You have to measure the metrics that mive the needle not vanity metrics like likes. Likes do not generate any revenue. If you are looking to grow now and want revenue coming into the business now, I would create an ad or hire a cold caller to solicit business with other businesses. Social media is a marathon and has it's time and place, you have to analyze your priorities abd then decide if this is a good move.

growth and scale is about constant and deliberate testing across channels with a consistent brand message the channels are about clicking with the audience. Social is only as important as where your target customers are. SO yes can be a third hire/contractor part time without knowing anything about your business model or market position. Social will grow awareness and maybe consideration today but that is an evergreen function for early stage growth. Determine how much you want/need to engage with first. Do you have a TAM.SAM SOM? Knowing your market will tell you a lot more about whether you "need" a social media person to escalate based on the oppts or noise level.

thanks for the replies. maybe more context will help. Its an insurance company so gaining trust for a product like Life Insurance is imperative. Because we are still pretty new, we see a lot of queries around are we "legit" or "reviews" or "reddit". So the angle is to come at buyers from a channel that is vastly underused by the insurance world to claim stake there. My focus is on B2B and partnerships while these other 2 team members are on SEO and social (primarily video). Our target demo is 25-45. The goal is revenue now however because of our newness to the market, we haven't developed our unique value prop yet (in dev) and we are simply another option, ads haven't returned very well yet (for life at least). So with a focus on revenue, the pivot seemed to make the most sense to go to SEO and Social on that side and focus more on B2B on my side.

In that case I would just double down on SEO, make more content. Go for more keywords. Try Bing, write longer more engaging content. If your writing one piece of content per week try 2 now.

yea im starting 4 next week per week. Ty~!

You definitely need a social marketing campaign, but I wouldn't recommend hiring an entry-level person. You need someone who knows the landscape and can get you the best ROI.