Why does social media marketing costs as much as it costs?

Every service has its price. When determining the cost of a particular service, you need to take into account the ones which are visible (the work which is visible to clients), as well as the ones which are not visible (support, communication…). The service of running a profile or various profiles on different social networks (social media marketing) is a relatively young “profession”. However, the prices that the professional agencies charges for it on a monthly basis are already clear.

Based on our experience and knowledge, the price for social media marketing is charged from 260 € (freelancers, students…) to 4-5 times more, which is the amount larger agencies charge (of course, everything depends on the size of the project, on the number of profiles and most of all, the country you’re in…). Let’s not fool ourselves; you can get social media marketing services even for 50-100€, that is if you know some “kid from the neighbourhood” who’s on his computer 24/7 and will, now and then, write some status on Facebook. The same kid mentioned can, for an additional 50€, make you a web page as well. However, in this article, we’re not dealing with the “kid from the neighbourhood” but with prices of professionals, either individuals or agencies.

What does the price of social media marketing campaign consist of?

• Writing the content for social networks is, for many people, something they see as the only work agencies do in their client’s behalf. Therefore, they consider the price of few hundreds of Euros to be too much for, let’s say, one post daily. From my personal experience, I can state that writing posts are less than 10% of the total amount of work the agency has with its client. In addition to that, if you think that writing a post is easy, you need to take into consideration that every day a post needs to be written (of course, here we are talking about 1 post per day, but it can be more or less than that), which is 30 posts monthly. Every single post needs to be interesting, fresh, needs to aim for engagement, it needs to be carefully composed and be grammatically correct, published at the right time… Now you see it’s not all that simple.
• Support and answers to inquiries and comments. On a daily basis, you write much more comments and responses to questions and comments than the posts. That’s also a part of the job which demands a lot of time, concentration and the ability to provide the right reaction at the right time. The user expects to get an answer in a 2-3 hours maximum, and very often users can get furious if they are not answered in a 15-minutes time. Consequently, someone from the agency needs to be on duty all the time, to monitor the profiles and to react in time to any situation. Regarding our company, we provide our clients with support from 9 in the morning to 23 in the evening, 7 days a week, separated in two shifts. Once, at 22 o’clock, when I was about to leave my office, I noticed how some user wrote something terrible about my client (in this case, it wasn’t justified) on his fan page. While I was walking down to my apartment, now and then I stopped on the road trying to type the answer on my phone and occasionally called my co-workers to consult. These are the things most people don’t see, but it’s included in the price of social media marketing agency.

• Strategy. For each month it is necessary to elaborate and make an arrangement about the plan we’re going with on social networks and determine which topics we’ll be communicating.
• Monitoring of the brand on the Internet is still one of the things that are included in the price, and it consists of tracking the publications, news and comments about the brand.
• Communication with the client takes a lot of time as well. Considering that we’re working as an external agency, we can’t know all that’s happening inside the company. That’s why we need to constantly be in touch and communicate with the person who is responsible for talking with us from the company. That way they can update us regarding any new events and that we could transfer all of that to their fans. This type of communication includes physical meetings, e-mail conversation and consultations on the phone.
• Facebook & Instagram advertising is the essential part of every social media marketing campaign. Taking care of ads on a monthly basis takes a lot of time as well.
• Reports are written and sent once in a month, for some clients even a week. It is necessary to collect all the quantitative data about the campaign in the previous month, write down all the steps that were taken and make the plan for the upcoming month. That’s why we call the 1st of the month the “report day“. 🙂

Once you see all of the things mentioned above, it’s probably clearer why professional social media marketing service can’t cost 100€. The prices charged are covering all the company expenses, the equipment with which we’re getting the job done, the needed software, education of the employees…

Be extremely cautious with various “agencies” that has 1 to 3 employees, and, besides their 18 other services (design, web, programming, branding, AdWords…) are offering you the service of managing your profiles on social networks. Question the people you’re trusting with your accounts on social networks and be careful about their competences and references for the job they’re doing. Don’t fool yourself and think how, a person who designs your web page, do the programming and banners, could be in charge of the communication with your fans too.

The price of community management?

We want to hear your opinion on that. Do you agree with the way I’m thinking? How much should the price for social media marketing be and do you think there are agencies out there who can do quality social media campaign for less than 200-300€?