Social Media Management Pricing: What Are the Costs in 2023?

With social media often dictating the news agenda, a company can ride the wave of publicity for weeks – or longer. This means it's essential to invest in social media management, or you could risk letting your business reputation run out of control.

If your team includes social-savvy specialists, you can invest in free or premium tools to support them. Alternatively, you can hire specialists to create tailored strategies that engage your target audiences, and drive referrals and conversions for your business.

If you outsource your social media management, you can expect:

• Posting of original content, such as videos
• Responses to customer comments
• Monitoring of social channels for mentions of your brand

Your agency or freelancer will be your business presence online, ensuring you're influencing the conversations about your industry and brand.

In this article, we'll explain how much social media management costs while breaking down the price of various services and tools to fit your budget.

Social Media Management Pricing: Overview

A standard social media management package will cost $750 per month and it will cover Facebook and Instagram. Hiring a freelancer to manage your social media will cost between $35 to $350 per hour, depending on the level of expertise and volume of work you're looking for.

If you're willing to bring the work in-house, Planable is a low-cost DIY social media management tool. Using it will cost you either $0, $11, or $22 per user, per month. Custom enterprise pricing is also available on request.

Mid-range professional social media management tools include Sprout Social (around $250-$500 per month) and HootSuite (around $100-$740 per month). For an additional $200 or $350 per month, you can add another staff user to your Sprout Social plan.

How Much Does Social Media Marketing Cost?

You have two options here. You can either work with a social media management company, which typically charge monthly, or you can hire a freelancer, who will usually charge by the hour. Below, we outline the average cost of both options.

Social Media Marketing Company Costs

Social media marketing should be a key pillar in your digital marketing cost strategy because you need it to deliver measurable results like improved conversions and more website traffic. You'll often pay for social media marketing services on a monthly retainer, ensuring you have a regular set of services for a fixed, predictable rate.

Below we've outlined some examples of monthly costs for social media marketing companies with good reputations:

The above table outlines general monthly fees. However, there are likely to be extra costs involved. Don't say we didn't warn you…

Hidden Costs of Social Media Marketing Agencies

In an ideal world you'd know exactly what your monthly marketing costs would be. However, some additional charges may apply if you choose to hire an agency to handle your social media.

• Setup fees: Also known as onboarding fees, you may have to pay a one-off charge to cover the introduction and training it takes to get your account started. Lyfe Marketing charges $300 in onboarding fees.
• Ad spend: If your marketing strategy includes paid post promotion, you'll have to pay each platform. These costs are never included in agency retainer fees. Depending on your campaign goals, this could call for an extra $50-$100 per day or $1,650-$3,000 per month.
• Premium customer support: Some partners offer basic support as standard, with the option to upgrade for quicker and more direct assistance.
• Additional channels: Look closely at your service agreement because only some social media channels will be included. You can typically pay $150 for each extra channel (for instance TikTok, LinkedIn, or Pinterest).
• Influencer fees: If you want your brand name-dropped by a content creator with an audience that trusts their opinions, this will cost extra. You may be asked to pay per piece of content or negotiate a longer-term agreement that includes multiple posts over a period of time.

Social Media Marketing Temp, Part Time, and Freelancer Costs

It has become easier to find peer-reviewed social media managers through platforms like UpWork and Fiverr. When researching prices, we included top-rated and vetted freelance professionals endorsed by their respective platforms as reliable for quality and punctuality.

Highly-rated social media managers can charge anywhere between $35 to $350 per hour, though most fall between $50-$85 per hour.

You can always find someone willing to do the work for less money, but beware of poor quality marketing that could actually harm the reputation of your business.

Specialist agencies offer a more thorough level of vetting and will match you to a specific pool of professionals according to your business' needs. For example, MarketerHire's requirement is a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.

Across industries, marketing leaders most frequently named Facebook (22%) as the social media channel that delivered the best return on investment (ROI). That was followed by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (16%) in joint second position. LinkedIn was the best investment for just 7% of respondents.

What It Would Cost To Do Social Media Marketing In-House

The first cost you need to consider if you choose in-house social media marketing is staff time; the upkeep of one social media channel requires a minimum of one hour of concentrated work per day. Realistically, you should plan to create useful, educational, or entertaining new videos at least twice a week. This is in addition to answering questions, queries, complaints, and participating in general industry discussions.

You can do all this with free or relatively cheap professional-grade tools. For instance, Planable provides clear channel oversight and makes it easy for colleagues to work together to create branded posts. You can start for free, and the premium plans cost $11 monthly per user or $22 per user for more social media pages and more post approval types.

Alternatively, Hootsuite offers a free 30-day trial and comes with a comprehensive set of tools. Pricing is $99 monthly for one user, $249 monthly for three users, or $739 monthly for five users. We'll go into tool pricing comparisons more in the Cost of Social Media Marketing Tools and Software section below.

Cost of Hiring a Social Media Manager vs a Social Media Agency

Social media manager salaries can vary wildly, although agency fees tend to remain in a narrower range. The tech platform Built In puts the average base salary for a social media manager at $72,834 per year.

This works out to about $6,000 per month to hire an in-house social media manager. This is noticeably higher than the $1,500-$3,000 bracket we've outlined above for agency costs. There are also the extra costs that include onboarding, training and development, space in the office, and equipment.

However, there are also extra benefits from having your own dedicated staff member. A social media manager who is loyal to your company will know your business thoroughly. Frequent contact with internal stakeholders will ensure each post aligns strongly with your business strategy and values.

On the other hand, hiring a social media agency is likely to be far more affordable for most small businesses. You'll have to rely on your instincts to judge how well your chosen agency's staff are able to understand and interpret your requests.

What Social Media Services Will I Get for my Money?

Here's the question you really want answered: “What exactly will I get in return for $X,000?”

Here's a list of basic social media management services you can expect to receive:

• Optimize or create social media profiles from scratch
• Develop a content calendar
• Publish custom branded content (i.e. posts and tweets)
• Responding to customer questions, reviews, and complaints across social platforms
• Connect with influencers to broaden the reach of your content

If you choose to pay for social media advertising services, these should entail:

• Lead generation (attracting the right clients or customers to your business)
• Driving website traffic through paid-per-click advertising
• Precise audience segmentation and targeted advertising
• Managing your brand's reputation through positive narratives

How Can I Ensure Good Return on Investment (ROI)?

You may now be wondering whether clicks, hearts, shares and follows actually translate to increased sales, turnover, and ROI. It's true that having more followers doesn't automatically mean more customers, and adding more followers is not a good enough exchange for your marketing budget.

You should draw up concrete business goals based on your particular industry. Here are some examples:

• Increased website traffic of at least x% – consultancy and services
• More customers through the door at lunchtimes – food and beverage vendors
• Uptick in sales – ecommerce, designers, resellers, and physical stores
• More bookings – medical and personal services
• Better attendance at events (x% more visitors than previous event) – B2B, weddings or events-based businesses

What to Ask When Hiring a Social Media Professional

Before you hire anyone, we recommend you ask any potential social media managers how they will achieve your specific business goals. You must also examine evidence of their past campaigns.

• How well do you understand my target market/industry?
• How will you approach content strategy and planning?
• What tools do you use to track performance?
• How will you ensure I get the best value for my advertising budget?

Brand Reputation Benefits of Social Media Marketing

It is worth noting there will inevitably be more intangible benefits to polishing up your social media presence. Although it is harder to measure, you may want to consider the potential knock-on effect of these when it comes to improved investment opportunities, hiring and retaining talent, and responding better to market changes. To name a few:

• Widen brand awareness
• Strengthen customer loyalty
• Increase opportunities to define yourself as a company (including beliefs and values)
• Position yourself to engage with potential clients using ABM and ABX strategies
• Better communication with customers, building rapport and understanding
• Manage customer dissatisfaction, concerns, and complaints

Cost of Social Media Marketing Tools and Software

If your staff are skilled with utilising social media platforms, and can dedicate at least 15 hours a week, using social media tools could be a good option for your business. Their knowledge will allow you to replace the manual effort of tasks, such as being online to post at desired times and logging into various accounts one by one.

As this is being done on company time, you'll only need to pay the monthly fees for the tools. This saves you the agency's retainer fee. General pricing for social media management tools is dependent on the number of users and the number of social channels you're posting across. This is why costs are as wide as $0-$3,600+ per month.

Here's a summary of some top social media marketing tools:

Cost of Social Media Advertising

We've mentioned briefly above that you'll need to pay additional fees to each platform for your posts to reach additional users. Because its free to create an account on many social media platforms (like Facebook), paid content promotion is a major revenue stream for social media companies. You're paying for the access to the social platform's audience.

This means there are two costs to running paid social media advertising campaigns: the cost of content creation and the cost of promoting it on each platform.

The cost of promoting your post depends on the individual platform and whether you're using an agency or doing your own marketing.

If you're using an agency or hiring a freelancer, you won't necessarily know the exact budget that's allocated towards promoting your content. This is because social media professionals may prefer to agree to provide certain services for a fixed fee or achieve certain goals rather than provide an exact breakdown of how every penny is spent.

How Does Facebook Charge for Promoting Content?

When you run an ad campaign on a Meta platform, like Facebook, you'll set a certain maximum amount you're willing to spend. However, you'll only be charged for each impression (view) or click from a user. This is known as “cost per click” or CPC. This means you can set a campaign budget of $1,000, but you may only billed $700.

Facebook algorithms actually calculate which ad is likely to achieve the most engagement from certain users and allocate ad space based on an auction system. There are dedicated bidding strategies that can boost your chances of winning ad visibility. It's complicated – and that's why most business leaders delegate these calculations to paid marketing or “biddable” specialists.

How to Calculate ROI on Social Media Ad Spend

For example, let’s say you pay $0.97 – the average cost for Facebook PPC (pay-per-click) ads – for each time a customer clicks on your advert link. Now let's say you get 1,000 clicks. That costs $970 in total.

Don't forget to factor in the cost of content creation and social media management fees, which may be rolled into one package if you hire an agency. Say this is $350 in graphic design fees plus $400 in social media management fees. Your total campaign spend is $1,720.

You’ll then need to figure out the total revenue earned from the campaign. You'll need to track user behavior once they land on your site or store from the social ad. Say you calculate $3,200 in sales from customers who clicked on the social ad.

Next, subtract the costs of the campaign from the total revenue, and that's your net profit. In this case, $3,200 – $1,720 = $1,480.

It's not a minus number, so that means you're doing well! However, you may not find every campaign is profitable – and this is normal. It's better to look at the bigger picture and measure all your paid social campaigns together. Try to analyze how you could improve on your results, either with better targeting or higher quality ads.

How Much Do Businesses Spend on Social Media Marketing?

According to the Content Factory, the average company in the US spends between $200 and $350 per day on social media marketing. This means total costs can end up somewhere between $6,000 and $10,500 per month, equating to anywhere between $72,000 and $126,000 annually. 

There's no denying that social media marketing can be expensive, but the results of an effective campaign will pay dividends: helping your business find new customers and boost sales. So, in the end, the rewards you’ll gain can make it a worthwhile investment.

How Much is Social Media Marketing Worth?

The majority of businesses and marketers agree that social media marketing is a worthwhile investment. According to current research, 73% of marketers report that their social media marketing efforts have been effective, and 90% say it has increased their business' exposure.

We also know the popularity of social media marketing has an upwards trend. Social media ad spending is predicted to increase to $207bn in 2023. Impressions are on the rise as well, with social media users spending more time on platforms that continue to show them content that's tailored to their tastes. Social netizens are viewing 20% more advertising than they did the year prior.

How does this translate into meaningful figures for your business? One way to calculate your ROI (return on investment) of your social media marketing campaigns is to measure your quantifiable goals, such as the number of online form submissions or product purchases you gain, compared to the amount of money you spend on your social media marketing.