Find a Social Media Marketing Expert near you
The average rating for Bark Social Media Marketing Experts is 4.88, based on 16,290 reviews
5/5
based on 16,290 reviews
Want to build your brand with the help of a social media marketer but unsure how much it’ll cost? Read our handy guide to find out how much a social media marketing agency or a freelancer will charge for the management of your social media pages.
Social media marketing is the practice of promoting your business or cause online, through social media platforms. The most common platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Though Pinterest, Tik Tok, Snapchat and Reddit are also highly used too.
The purpose is to share content that will help you to grow your audience and connect with them meaningfully. Social media marketing agencies or freelancers will plan content, schedule it and monitor the results. By looking to see what works for your platform, a social media marketing expert can streamline your goals with the content that gets put out across your social media channels.
Their expertise can also create successful paid advertising campaigns. This can help you reach a wide audience quicker versus organically building traffic across your pages.
The cost of Social Media will vary depending on your goals and how much content needs to be created, but as a ballpark figure, here’s how much social media marketers charge on average for their services:
| Average cost (per month) | $500 - $900 |
| Minimum cost (per month) | $180 |
| Maximum cost (per month) | $18,000 |
The first step is knowing what issue you are hoping to resolve through social media marketing.
That way, you can align your needs with the correct expert.
The quality of the posts and the expertise required will all affect the price. Some social media marketing agencies have copywriters, designers, developers and statisticians who may all work together on each client. On the other end of the scale, it’s also possible to find someone who attempts each of these attributes themselves, which may work out cheaper if budget is your main concern.
As you can see from the above breakdown, the cost of social media marketing can vary quite a bit! Let’s take a look at some of the key cost factors:
The scope of the job
Hourly rates versus packages
Professional’s experience
The amount of social media marketing you pay for will ultimately depend on the scope of the job. Most business owners opt for an average monthly package, which ranges between $500 - $900 a month. This would include the generating of content and some feed support, but wouldn’t be as in-depth as what other packages can provide.
Though, the beauty of social media marketing is it’s customisable to your needs. So, it’s possible to start small and build up the level of support you need, or even scale back services that aren’t needed.
The frequency of posts also has an impact on cost, as the more you require, the longer it will take to generate and schedule.
Most social media companies or freelancers will charge their services at a monthly cost or per hour. Let’s take a look at the differences in cost depending on the pricing structure:
| Type of social media management (hourly) | Highest average price (per hour) | Lowest average price (per hour) |
| Basic | $35 | $25 |
| Average | $50 | $35 |
| Comprehensive | $90 | $70 |
| Type of social media management (monthly) | Highest average price (per month) | Lowest average price (per month) |
| Basic | $350 | $180 |
| Average | $900 | $500 |
| Comprehensive | $18,000 | $1,800 |
Less experienced professionals could charge as little as $25 per hour. Whereas social media marketers with years of experience under their belt could charge up to $90 per hour, especially if it's an area of expertise for them.
Depending on their experience, your professional may be able to offer a wealth of services, including feed management, and expert level design and copywriting.
If you’re unfamiliar with the world of social media, here’s some food for thought when planning your social media strategy:
Your social media marketing goals
Social media channels
Monthly content creation
Customer service
Feed management
Paid advertising
Compiling stats and generating reports
If used well, social media is an affordable and powerful tool for reaching a greater audience and building your brand. Identifying your goals will help streamline your efforts. For example, do you want to increase page followers? How about boost sales of a particular service you offer?
Most businesses have multiple goals, which may change depending on the time of year or the needs of the business itself. Each goal will require a particular strategy to be developed to be able to reach it.
If you’re a startup, your business might not have any social media channels set up yet. Or, you might be unsure which platforms would suit your business, and allow you to reach your target audience the best.
Social media marketing can help you get started, or pick up from where you’re currently at. Price-wise, the more content that needs to be generated in terms of platform types and frequency, the more expensive it will be. But it’s a worthwhile investment, as with the right content your social media could produce a healthy ROI.
Facebook has 2.7 billion users, and that number keeps growing, so it’s a pretty powerful place to launch your social media marketing strategy. The expert you choose should be well versed in Facebook as a whole, but more specifically Facebook Ads, as managing digital advertising budgets is very important.
Engagement is a huge part of how Facebook works too. Aside from replying to customers, you need to be liking and sharing content, and getting your users to do the same with your content. This can only happen if the content your page puts out is engaging and relevant to the audience.
Twitter is all about succinct messaging and clever use of imagery. People can either like or retweet anything you post. Using hashtags strategically can significantly increase the reach of your tweets.
Twitter also has an ads platform. It’s not as complex as Facebook but still requires a knowledgeable approach to hit the right audience. You’ll need to consider the content of your messaging and the time at which it goes out to achieve success.
Instagram social media marketing is all about eye-catching image and video content. Plus, each post requires an engaging piece of copy underneath, that also makes use of hashtags and tagging.
It’s also possible to sell products through Instagram and build brand pages. This can be facilitated through the ‘promotions’ function. You can arrange to promote particular products or services, that your social media marketing expert will launch and monitor for you.
Users are increasingly consuming more and more video content. As a business, it’s one of the best ways to promote your services. For example, a mechanic could upload a ‘how-to’ guide on how to change a tyre. The video itself can be monetised, meaning you’ll earn money for each view. However, you can also leave your contact details in the description box so that customers can find you.
YouTube videos can be shared on social media or embedded into your blog pages. Though creating, editing and sharing engaging video content isn’t as easy as it seems! It requires a keen eye for detail and a bit of time to get it right.
Elements of SEO also come into play here, which is why it’s best to leave your YouTube videos to a social media marketing expert.
The primary role of a social media marketer is to create, schedule and publish recurring content.
Depending on your business, you may want a post to go out across all feeds every day. Though some businesses increase this to every hour throughout the day. Your agency or freelancer will help you work this out, by checking your analytics to see when your followers are most active.
The content needs to be relevant to your business, but also be something people, in general, will want to engage with. From decisive polls to humorous posts, there’s a lot more to getting social media right than is first apparent. That’s why your monthly content needs to be on point.
If you own an online business or eCommerce store, then you may require customer support as part of your social media marketing package. This includes replying to customers who message you, and those who leave comments on your page. Unless you have a dedicated customer service team this can be very time consuming, which is why many businesses prefer to leave it to a social media marketing expert.
It’s important to remember that social media is a public platform. People are free to post almost anything, which may include spam or offensive content. That’s why you must have somebody closely monitoring your feeds to remove such content before it has the chance to negatively impact your feed as a whole.
This also extends to aspects such as negative reviews, which all businesses will encounter to some degree. Such issues require a thoughtful approach to how the situation is dealt with, as an unprofessional reply could cause more harm than good. Social media experts are well versed in all aspects of feed management, which will help protect your business image and work to resolve any issues constructively.
Most social media platforms have paid advertising options such as Facebook Ads. Understanding how to create campaigns successfully takes a fair bit of technical knowledge, not to mention mathematical ability. Otherwise, you could throw large sums of money on advertising that doesn’t work or even gets rejected by the platform.
Therefore, understanding paid advertising is an important aspect of social media marketing. Your expert will be best placed to help you devise a suitable audience and budget. The costs for paid advertising are agreed in advance, and you can tailor the reach by your budget.
As well as generating content for your social media, your chosen freelancer or agency will need to compile stats and generate reports about the progress of your campaigns. For example, how many followers you have gained since they took over your feeds. Or, how many users your paid advertising reached and how many conversions this generated for the business.
This type of service is more comprehensive but is the best way of determining what is working for your social media feeds and what isn’t. It’s also a great opportunity for them to share ideas about what could work for upcoming posts based on insights from previous content.
If you lack the time or knowledge to market your business successfully through social media, then getting an expert on board is well worth the investment. They will plan your monthly content, schedule it and monitor how successful each post is. Social media marketing also involves launching paid ads from your platforms, which requires a specialist approach to get right.
Given how important social media is for building a meaningful relationship with your audience, it pays to have yours taken care of by someone who not only knows what they are doing but is genuinely passionate about it too. That’s why social media marketing experts are well worth the investment.
See your social media stats skyrocket and boost your conversions as a result, when you find Social Media Marketing experts for your business on Bark.
The average rating for Bark Social Media Marketing Experts is 4.88, based on 16,290 reviews
5/5
based on 16,290 reviews
