Step 1 of every collaboration is Platform selection, and the third option isn't a platform at all — it's Use Socialscale's managed services: working with Socialscale and trusted agency partners to run and scale your creator activities instead of running them yourself.
Activate my creator network
Activate your own creator network and invite the creators who have signed up to your creator platform.
Tap into Socialscale's creators
Activate Socialscale's creator network and access thousands of creators already available on the platform.
Use Socialscale's managed services
Work with Socialscale and trusted agency partners to run and scale all your creator activities.
What the other two options assume
The first two platform options — activating your own creator network, or tapping into Socialscale's creator network — both assume someone on your team is going to run the collaboration day to day: reviewing applicants, briefing creators, chasing deliverables, reviewing content. That's the right setup once you have the bandwidth and the process to do it well.
What Managed Services is for
Not every team has that bandwidth, especially early on or during a scale-up push. Managed Services is the option for when you want the outcome — active creators, content flowing in, a working storefront program — without staffing the day-to-day operation yourself. Socialscale and agency partners run recruitment and campaign operations on your behalf.
Pro tip
This is a per-collaboration choice, not an account-wide setting. Nothing stops you from running some collaborations yourself and handing others to Managed Services — for example, keeping your core always-on storefront program self-run while using Managed Services for a one-off seasonal push you don't have the internal capacity for.
What doesn't change
Choosing Managed Services for a collaboration doesn't change anything about the rest of your setup — your Product Center, Creator Hub branding, and Socialscale Pixel work exactly the same way underneath it. The choice at step 1 is about who's operating the collaboration, not how the underlying platform functions.
Deciding
A reasonable rule of thumb: if you're not confident you can review and respond to creator applications and content within a couple of days consistently, that's usually a sign to lean on Managed Services rather than let a self-run collaboration stall out from lack of attention.
Note
Reach out through Contact customer support if you want to talk through whether Managed Services fits a specific collaboration before you commit to it.