How Much to Charge for your Social Media Services

Many people who start managing social media or become social media consultants aren’t sure what to charge. This is a VERY difficult question – especially since most existing social media consultants don’t want to share their secrets.

I’ve reviewed countless social media plans from agencies of all sizes over the years, and have seen lots of different pricing models.

There isn’t a “one price fits all” solution to the complex issue of pricing.

Your price depends on a number of factors:

• Your background and experience (more experienced professionals can typically demand more).
• What is included in your package/offering (are you just posting updates, managing the community, using designers, running contests).
• The amount of time the client will take in communications (some clients will call every day, others trust you to execute and aren’t very hands on)
• The size of the client (larger clients usually take more time, require more approvals and expect higher quality delivery)

• If you are posting vs community building (simply posting updates takes less effort than partnering with a client to build community)
• How much content you will create (some clients will give you tons of images and ideas, others expect you to do it all)

The bottom line is: from a high level, you’ll want to essentially figure out how much time managing a client will take to manage and price accordingly on the pricing scale.

So what is the pricing scale and range?

In Launchest we give you a number of complete pricing guides and packages that match market rates, but here are some general numbers:

• The cheapest social media management will generally cost $500/month. This is usually either a small firm or a low-end management company that does no community management or like-building and only focuses on posting generic status updates. This will usually only include 1 social network or just posting the same thing on multiple social networks.
• Most social media management costs $2,000 – $7,000 a month. Most companies that manage social media professionally will charge in this range to manage a few social networks. It is a big range, and depends on the factors mentioned above.
• For comprehensive social media and online marketing management, $10,000 a month +. This is the range for large companies or agencies that are managing multiple aspects of online marketing (like inbound marketing, blog posts, etc).

The bottom line is that there are pretty big ranges. Consider packaging your services in a way that both makes you money and at the same time provides good value to your client.