The surging popularity of social media management has attracted countless individuals and businesses, all eager to leverage its promotional and branding potential. However, despite the widespread enthusiasm, many organizations remain uncertain about the associated costs of social media marketing service provider campaigns.
Understanding social media management pricing is crucial, as it allows organizations to plan their investment expenditures and venture into growth territories.
However, the actual cost of social media management can vary significantly depending on several factors, including the service provider (agency, freelancer, etc.) and the specific services being acquired.
Let’s delve deeper into the details of social media management costs.
Social Media Management: In-House vs Agency vs Freelancer
Organizations can leverage various approaches: in-house hiring of dedicated staff, outsourcing to agencies, and engaging freelancers. The pricing for each approach depends on the specific services acquired and the level of expertise offered by the chosen resource.
In-House Hiring
Hiring professional staff who are experts in SMM is one of the ways an organization can execute its social media management operations. For in-house hiring an organization has to hire staff such as:
- Social Media Managers: 50k-82k USD/Yearly
- Content Strategist/Managers: 56k-96k USD/Yearly
- Content Writers and Copywriters: 40k-80k USD/Yearly
- PPC Specialist: 60k USD/Yearly
- Graphic Designer: 49k-73k USD/Yearly
- Community Manager: 62k USD/Yearly
In-house hiring is often expensive especially for those businesses that are newly founded, have restricted capital and investment expenditures, or only require SMM for short purposes. This brings us to our next medium, the freelancers.
Freelancers
Organizations looking for a in-expensive medium for SMM can avail the service of freelancers. Also those organizations that only require SMM for short term purposes can hire freelancers on contract. Freelancers are paid on hourly rates, instead of one shot salary payment, these media rates are as follow:
- Social Media Managers: Entry Level $20-50 per hour/ Mid Level $50-100 per hour
- Content Strategist/Managers: $50 per hour
- Content Writers and Copywriters: $25-32 per hour
- PPC Specialist: $13.9-34.13 per hour
- Graphic Designer: $25-102 per hour
- Community Manager: $27-30 per hour
Freelancers are viable for small and medium-scale businesses that have restricted marketing budgets. Besides this freelancers, services can be easily acquired through freelance marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork, and People Per Hour. Having said that, finding competent freelancers and assembling a virtual connected team is a hassle for organizations.
Agencies
Outsourcing your social media management operations to SMM agencies is among the best options for businesses. These agencies have teams with core competencies in SMM, moreover these teams have in-depth technical knowledge of SMM. These agencies can be acquired for the services such as digital and social media marketing.
The service cost of SMM agencies varies from $500 to $5000 per month; these agencies often provide various service packages. The benefit of availing SMM services from agencies is that businesses can easily allocate their budgets and opt or tailor the services packages according to their requirement.
Social Media Management Tools
Organizations can also opt for social media management softwares these are SaaS and web applications with different functionalities and features to optimize and streamline the social media management of an organization. The pricing of these tools is cost-effective and is charged on subscriptions based models which could be either monthly or annually. Some of the famous SMM tools and their subscriptions are as follow:
- Social Sprout: It is one of the best SMM tools for business with wide services availability. Social Sprout has features for content management, integration of customer relationship management tools, social media analytics and reporting. The services can also be increased if an organization opts for premium packages.
Pricing: $249/ monthly Standard package, $399/ monthly Professional package, $499/ Advanced package monthly, and +$499 customized plan for enterprise level package.
- Buffer: One of the most affordable SMM tools for organization of any size is Buffer. These tools provide numerous service features such as publishing and panning tools, landing page builder, analytic and reporting tools to track engagements, and draft collaborations.
Pricing: Free plan: $0, Essential plan: $6, Team plan: $12, and Agency plan: $120.
- Hootsuite: In terms of service offerings for a full scale social media marketing Hootsuite fits best for any organization. TThe service features of Hootsuite includes publishing and scheduling, social media analytics, post timing recommendations, social advertising and listening.
Pricing: Professional package: $99, Team package: $249, and Enterprise package: the prices are dependent on customized services required by an enterprise.
- Sprinklr Social: Organizations that enhance their social management should place bets on Sprinklr Social. This tool has amazing features that enhance various operations such as social advertising, social media campaign planning, content marketing and analytics.
- Oktopost: A one stop SMM solution for B2B organizations is Oktopost. This platform is feature-rich, and encompasses numerous functionalities such as: social media publishing, social analytics, social listening, and community management.
- Brandwatch: Organizations that want a full–scale social media management of their social media channel can choose Brandwatch. This tool offers A-Z of SMM which includes: content management, influence marketing, and social media marketing.
Choosing a social media marketing tool for in-house management of social media operations is a good option considering the affordability but it is only recommended for those organizations that have marketing-savvy staff.
Conclusion
The decision of acquiring resources for social media management is one of the essential factors that has to be taken after considering numerous factors such as services required and more importantly the investment expenditure allocated. Although all the options for social media management have their pros, cons, and different prerequisites; one that stands as the best option is hiring a specialized agency for social media management. Hiring a SMM agency is best for organization as it is both affordable, offers numerous services, and the service package can be tailored according to organization’s need.