Social Media Pricing: How much do social media management services cost?
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Social Media Marketing Services Pricing Strategy
Facebook Marketing Services Pricing
With more than 1 billion daily active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social channels. When you market your business on Facebook, you have a good chance to reach at least a portion of your target audience.
It costs absolutely nothing to set up a business account on Facebook. However, if you want to connect with more customers, there are a few paid options for advertising on Facebook.
So how much does it cost to market your business on Facebook?
Facebook ads
When you create paid ads on Facebook, you can optimize your ads to achieve a number of goals including:
- Page likes
- Clicks to website
- Website conversions
- App installs
- And more
Facebook also offers options for managing your ad costs. For example, you can ask Facebook to give you the best conversions at the best prices, or you can set a budget for your campaigns. In addition, you can choose between CPM and CPC models.
With the CPM model, you pay for every 1000 views of your ad. In other words, every time 1000 Facebook users see your ad, you will pay a specific amount, even if they don’t click on your ads. On the other hand, the cost per click (CPC) model allows you to pay only when people click your ads.
Typically, CPC prices are higher, but you will only pay for interested users — people who click your Facebook ads.
CPC for Facebook ads varies, depending on your goals and the audience you want to reach. In 2015, the average CPC for a Facebook ad was $0.27.
Facebook likes
When creating ads on Facebook, a lot of businesses want to earn more page likes.
Buffer, a social application company that helps companies manage their social accounts, ran some Facebook tests to determine the cost of Facebook likes. The results? Buffer found that they paid an average of $0.57 for each Facebook like. So if you’re looking to boost your following on Facebook without going over your budget, this is a great option for connecting with more users.
Boosted Posts
Facebook also allows you to “boost” existing posts to show your posts to more users, based on the targeting options you choose.
The cost for boosted posts depends on your target audience, as well as the number of people you’re trying to reach. And Facebook uses the CPM model to charge for boosted posts. On average, you can expect to pay $6.35 per 1000 views for boosted posts.
Twitter Marketing Pricing
Like Facebook, it’s completely free to set up a business account on Twitter. But if you want to reach more people, you do have the option to pay for Twitter ads. Let’s take a look at a few options.
Promoted tweets
To get your tweets in front of more people, you can choose to promote them. When you promote your tweets, they will show up as “promoted” in user’s timelines.
Promoted tweets operate on a bidding system, and you will pay based on the engagement they earn for your business like clicks, replies, retweets, and favorites. On average, you can expect to pay $1.35 to promote a tweet.
Promoted accounts
You can also promote your account, in addition to individual tweets. If you’re looking to boost brand awareness and earn more followers, this is a great option.
Instead of bidding on engagements, you will enter a bid based on how much you’re willing to pay for every new follower. This amount will vary depending on your targeting, but you can expect to pay $2.50- $4 per follower.
Promoted trends
If you have a larger marketing budget, you can also choose to promote trends on Twitter. Twitter lists “Trending Topics” to alert users of the most popular hashtags and topics. And promoted trends appear at the top of the list, usually labeled as “promoted.”
For around $200,000 per day, you can place a bid on specific keywords so your promoted trend appears at the top of the list.
You can also use a combination of promoted tweets, accounts, and trends to reach even more Twitter users and help them learn more about your business.
Snapchat Marketing Pricing
Snapchat has the lowest ad prices of its peers, according to 4C, a marketing technology firm that's one of Snapchat's biggest sources of demand for ads.
Snapchat ads
Snapchat ads in the first quarter of the year cost an average of $2.95 per thousand impressions, compared with $4.20 at Instagram and $5.12 on Facebook's app, 4C says.
Snapchat provides a free way for brands to set up and manage their ads – the Snapchat Ads Manager.
To use this you first need to set up an ad account. Once you have done this you can go to Ads Manager / Get Started.
You can use Snapchat Ads Manager to
- create a new campaign
- choose your audience (geographically and demographically), and set your budget
- create your ads
- follow how your ads perform
Snapchat users are young, fun, and cynical. They will respond, however, to short ads that pique their interest. They also respect the views of their influencers, so you might also consider working with influencers to spread your message to Generation Z and Millennials. However, don’t crowd their style. They know how Snapchatters think.
Snapchat can be a highly effective marketing tool for relating your message to youth. Just don’t bother, if your main target market sprouts gray hair, or has reached the grand old age of 30.
LinkedIn Marketing Pricing
Just like Facebook and Twitter, it costs nothing to set up a profile for your business on LinkedIn. However, you have several paid options to help you boost connections and brand awareness.
LinkedIn ads
With LinkedIn, you can create sidebar ads that display next to users’ feeds and pages they visit. These brief ads include a thumbnail image, and they are designed to encourage people to click to visit your website. You can create up to 15 different LinkedIn ads, each including a 25-character headline and 75-character description.
LinkedIn advertising also allows you to target your ads based on a user’s company size, industry, name, job title, category, and seniority.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers both cost per click (CPC) and cost per 1000 impressions (CPM). With the CPC model, you pay every time someone clicks your ad. While the minimum bid is $2, LinkedIn recommends that you bid at least $5.55 - $9.33. You can also set a daily budget of at least $10 and set your ad to run indefinitely or until a certain date.
If you decide to use the CPM model, you must submit a minimum bid of $2, but LinkedIn suggests you bid at least $2.85 - $4.62.
Sponsored updates
Your business can also sponsor updates on LinkedIn. This feature is very similar to Facebook’s sponsored posts and Twitter’s sponsored tweets.
Sponsored updates show up with other posts in users’ feeds, but they are tagged with the label “Sponsored” under your company’s name.
To sponsor an update, you will first need to choose an existing update from your LinkedIn. The targeting options are the same as regular ads.
For sponsored posts, the pricing model is similar to pricing for regular ads, but the suggested bids are slightly different.
If you choose the CPC option, you will pay a minimum bid of $2.50, but LinkedIn suggests you bid $5.67 - $10.09. On the other hand, you will pay a minimum of $10.50 for the CPM option with a suggested bid of $18.55 - $28.91. You must also have a daily budget of at least $10 for sponsored updates.
Instagram Marketing Pricing
It’s completely free to set up an Instagram page for your business, but you can create Instagram ads that appear as “Sponsored posts” in users’ feeds.
At first, these ads were only available to big brands. However, you can now access Instagram advertising options for your business via the Facebook ad manager.
On average, you can expect to pay $6.70 for every thousand views of your Instagram photo ad. You can also create video ads on Instagram, and you will pay around $3 for every thousand video views, with some businesses reporting paying $0.02 per view.
Youtube Marketing Pricing
Google owns YouTube. Therefore you advertise on YouTube using the Google AdWords network. As with any other type of Google AdWords campaign, the price of YouTube ads involves you bidding for ad placement. Therefore it is impossible to say how much YouTube ads cost definitively.
YouTube ads have an average cost-per-view of $0.10 – $0.30, and the views that you generate will count towards your overall YouTube viewer count.
The average cost of reaching 100,000 viewers is around $20.000.
