Coordination Tax Curve

The Coordination Tax Curve holds that every added client account raises the hidden cost of running social work faster than it raises publishing output. Scheduling is cheap; the expensive part is routing drafts to the right approver, chasing revisions, and reconciling permissions across brands. Agencies feel this as revision load: a platform that publishes in seconds but requires three approval round trips per post has a higher real cost than its seat price suggests. The practical move is to measure coordination time and revision count on a representative client set before treating any platform as a margin improvement. Channel breadth compounds the curve, since each new network adds its own formatting and moderation rules. A 2026 review of social strategy notes TikTok now needs its own content pillars and KPIs rather than sitting inside a generic short-form bucket, which adds review steps per client. White-label reporting and approval routing matter more than raw scheduling speed once an agency passes roughly ten retained accounts.