This is a controversial topic because Lord knows anyone who has a social media account thinks they know what it takes to manage social media accounts. It is also one of the top questions we get asked by potential clients. When we get to the pointy end of the discussion and we need to talk about how much social media management is, the only people who seem to baulk at our prices are the ones who don’t understand how much work is involved.
Many business owners are still in need of education on what is actually involved in delivering a robust social media strategy. You would be surprised at the number of business owners who think social media is merely posting a pretty picture and writing a witty or informative caption. There’s so much more to it than that!
We’re going to break down what’s involved and some of the questions we get from prospective clients.
So what’s involved with social media management?
When we first sign up a client, if they don’t have social media management set up, we will need to figure out what platforms best suit their needs. To do this, we will need to know your target audience. For example; if you are targeting the teenage audience, you’re unlikely to find them on LinkedIn or Facebook. Tik Tok and Snapchat/Instagram would be the social media platforms you may need to consider.
If you already have social media channels, our team will conduct a social media audit. This involves a complete analysis of the social platform, past performance, ad history, competitors, things that could be improved upon, frequency of posting, and ensuring all the contact information is up to date and correct.
After discussing our findings with our client, we’ll need to set up a way to communicate on a regular basis. This may be through a group chat app such as Whatsapp or Signal. We’ll create an Instagram theme, a strategy mapping out content pillars and a plan for the month ahead. We’ll look at what’s trending, potential celebrity jacking, and what type of sale events are coming up such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, End of The Financial Year etc. Taking into consideration all these things in conjunction with the client brief, we’ll construct a plan of how best to obtain the client’s goals. They may want more website traffic, to generate more sales leaders, increase brand awareness or even sell products.
We assess the best times to post dependent on each channel and use special third-party scheduling software, so even if it’s outside of office hours, posts are going live at prime viewing times.
We don’t simply write captions like the many Instagram and Facebook cowboys who are advertising themselves as social media managers. You know the type of captions, we’re talking about. The ones that say “Monday morning vibes with coffee”, “Good morning world” and “Let’s just do this!” Every caption has a hook and a call to action.
At the end of each week, we’ll take a look to see what performed well, what went better than expected and what was a flop. According to our findings, we’ll tweak our strategy and continue to tweak and amend until we are seeing improvements in insights, Meanwhile, we will be researching hashtags, staying up to date with the latest changes across all social media platforms and applying them to each network.
If the client doesn’t have any branded images, we have to search out stock photos or organise a photographer or videographer (optional extra). As you can see it’s not simply posting a pretty photo and waiting to see if it’s successful. A lot of thought and calculated decisions are part of our process.
So keeping this in mind, how much should you be paying for social media management?
Your social media costs will depend on a range of different factors. The average business owner spends on average $900 per month to $20,000. Even if you’re paying the bottom package and you think it seems like a lot, you need to look at it from a different perspective.
If you were to hire a full-time person in-house to undertake your social media management, the average wage in Australia according to talent.com is $90,510 a year. Add to that superannuation, sick leave, and maybe even maternity leave. If you were to outsource your social media marketing to Boost Social, you’d have access to an entire team of professionals to rely on. More brains are better than one. When you’re reliant on one person and they get sick, you get stuck! Even if you were to take the most basic Boost Social Media packages, you’d only be paying around $10k. That’s a potential saving of $80,510 each year!
You might be thinking now that $10,000 sounds like a lot, but in a digitally saturated market where every business is striving to stand out, can you afford not to have your social media in the hands of an expert?
