Social Media Marketing

One of the questions I’ve been getting quite a lot from clients and friends is how much does it cost to hire a social media manager. Usually, this question comes from someone who owns a local business who is a bit behind the times with what a social media manager does.

When I dig a little deeper, it often turns out what they are really looking for is not purely a social media manager.  Instead, they’re looking for someone to either do lead generation or build brand awareness in addition to basic social media management. With that said, I will break down my response to the cost to hire a part-time social media manager into four categories.

  1. Pure social media managers
  2. Social media managers who do lead generation
  3. Social media managers who do brand awareness
  4. Social media managers who do lead generation and brand awareness

Cost break down for each role based off multiple local freelance sites and recruiters

Pure Social Media Mgr

Part Time up to 10 hrs/wk
$ $25-35/hr
  • Content Curator
  • Proofreader
  • Moderator
  • Based on these basic responsibilities, you will entrust this person with the passwords to multiple sites that represent your brand, and this person will also be entrusted to speak for your business in a variety of situations. In addition, a high turn-over of personnel would increase your cost of training and add additional risk of your brand being compromised.

Lead Generation

Part TIme 10-20hrs/wk
$ $50-100/hr
  • It’s unreasonable to expect to pay the same amount for someone who is versatile enough to do both social media management and lead generation. If you want your social media manager to also do lead generation, then the right candidate for the job must be able to not only do the pure social media manager role, but also:
  • Create original high-quality content
  • Create “call to action” campaigns
  • Edit graphics- Creation of unique graphics expect to pay top rate
  • Deploy landing pages that are integrated with your email marketing system and/or CRM system
  • A/B Testing
  • Basic html, css, and javascript
  • This is a unique skill set that doesn’t come cheap. Therefore, you should expect to pay a part-time social media manager who also does lead generation a rate of $50.00 to $100.00 per hour for no-less than 20 hours a week of work.

Brand Awareness

Part TIme 10hrs/week
$ 45-60/hr
  • For those businesses who don’t do sales through lead nurturing, and/or depend mostly on word of mouth, they look at social media mainly as a tool to build more awareness around their brand. These businesses generally measure the success of their social media manager by the number of new likes, shares, and comments. These businesses may also seek an increase in their search engine ranking as a result the branding done by their social media manager indirectly leading to more back links. In this case, this type of social media manager must be able to do the pure social media tasks, as well as:
  • Marketing strategy and research
  • PR/Influencer Outreach
  • Community building
  • Create original high-quality content

Lead Generation & Brand Awareness

Part TIme 20hrs/week
$ 100/hr
  • It’s rare to find someone who is willing to work part-time and who does all of the above when it comes to social media management. So you can expect that this person will need to work for you a minimum of 20 to 30 hours per week to accomplish all the tasks necessary to manage your social media pages, as well as generate leads and increase the brand awareness of your business.