How to set a smart social media budget (and get it approved)

Ah, the social media budget. For many social media managers, putting together (and justifying) financial asks is an anxiety-inducing annual event.

However, budget time is also an important chance to prove the value of your work. Creating your budget highlights the scope of your ambitions for the year ahead – and should also highlight the return on investment from the budget invested the previous year.

If you’re feeling stressed over what you’re asked to accomplish with your budget for social media, know you’re not alone.

Key Takeaways

1. Your social media budget should include more than just ads. Remember to factor in content creation, tools, and even influencer partnerships to cover a well-rounded strategy.
2. Stay flexible. Leave room in your budget to adapt to trends. Social media is fast-moving, and you’ll want the flexibility to pivot when necessary.
3. Don’t forget about tools.  Social media management and AI tools can help streamline your efforts and boost productivity. They’re an investment that pays off in efficiency, so make sure to budget for them.

What is a social media budget?

A social media budget is a document that specifies how much you plan to spend on social media over a specific time. It’s usually annual, but could also be broken down by month, by quarter, or even for a specific campaign.

Budget information is typically presented in a simple spreadsheet, but it’s not uncommon to see social media budgets in project management tools. Whatever tool you use, make sure that the data is clearly presented and easy to understand. It should allow you to track expenses over the course of the year to help you analyze where you’re spending money and measure your return on investment.

What expenses should your social media budget include?

Your budget for social media is not just the amount you spend on paid ads (although that may be a significant line item!). Here are all the factors to consider when planning your budget.

Content creation

Content is and always will be king. Many social marketers spend more than half of their social media campaign budget on content creation.

Here are some line items you might want to include in this budget section:

• Photography and images
• Video production
• Talent, i.e., actors and models
• Production costs, i.e., props and location rentals
• Equipment, such as microphones and lighting
• Graphic design
• Copywriting, editing, and (possibly) translation

Costs will vary significantly depending on how custom you want your project to be.

For example, you can get started with photos and graphics from a free stock photography site, in which case you can budget $0 for photos. However, if you want a more custom approach, or you want to show off your specific products, you’ll need to hire a photographer.

Likewise, your video production costs will vary significantly depending on whether you shoot quick Reels from your phone or hire an agency.

This is one area where AI tools can have a significant impact on your social media budget. They can’t take over your content creation tasks completely, but they can help speed up content creation tasks and boost your team’s creativity.

If you haven’t tried AI for content creation yet, we suggest doing so before planning your next content creation budget. Hootsuite’s free AI content creation tools can help you understand the potential impact of AI on your content budget.

Keep in mind that you do not need to create content for every single social platform. (Although, if you want to, tweaking content for various platforms is one task you can assign to AI.) Brands are focusing their social budget on the platforms where they see the best ROI, and you should too.

Source: Hootsuite Social Trends Report

Social advertising

When planning your social media ads budget, remember that the goal is not always (or maybe not ever) an immediate sales conversion. Social ads bring people into the top of your sales funnel so you can convert them to customers through a combination of organic and paid future posts.

Source: Hootsuite Social Media Consumer Report

For this reason, social ads are a valuable budget line item for many businesses. If you haven’t yet tried them, it’s worth experimenting to see how they impact your results.

We recommend starting small and scaling vs. budgeting thousands of dollars for paid campaigns when you’re not fully sure of what works and what doesn’t.

To get you started, here are the minimum spend amounts required to run a campaign on each of the major social networks. The minimum spend won’t get you access to all advertising options or a lot of exposure, but it does give you a sense of how little it can take to get started.

• Facebook: $1 per day
• Instagram: $5 over 6 days
• TikTok: $20/day for ad groups or $50/day for campaigns
• LinkedIn: $10 per day
• Pinterest: $0.10 per click
• X (Twitter): No minimum spend
• Snapchat: $5 per day

To calculate how much you should spend on your next Facebook ad campaign based on your revenue goals, try our free Facebook Ads social media budget calculator.

Pro tip: For more tips and insights on combining paid and organic, read Paid vs. Organic Social Media: How to Integrate Both into Your Strategy.

Software and tools

To run effective campaigns on social media, you need a tech stack. A social media management dashboard is a must for anyone running campaigns on more than one channel. Hootsuite plans start at $99/month.

Beyond that, there are a LOT of options for tool categories that can make your life easier and improve results.

Costs for these tools range from free to hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars per month. If you’re adding new paid tools to your budget, include a cost analysis to show how the tool will pay for itself. Increased productivity is a great place to start.

Don’t go overboard here. Look for tool categories that align with your most important strategic social goals.

• Design and editing tools
• Social video tools
• Social media collaboration tools
• Social media management tools
• Social media monitoring tools
• Social listening tools
• Social inbox tools
• Social media scheduling tools
• Sentiment analysis tools
• Competitive analysis tools
• Social media advertising tools
• Social customer service tools
• Social media analytics tools
• Content marketing tools
• Content curation tools
• AI content creation tools
• AI marketing tools
• Social media automation tools
• Social media security and risk management tools

Agencies and contractors

It can be tempting to tackle everything yourself, but that’s often not realistic. Whether you’re short on specific expertise or simply don’t have the person power to implement all your strategies, agencies and freelancers can be a good way of expanding your team without additional headcount.

Agencies and freelancers also allow the flexibility to ramp up when needed without committing ongoing resources to a staff position. Since you hire for specific skills, you can save time on training and onboarding.

How much should you budget for freelancers and agencies? A good guide to freelancer rates in 2024 can be found on the Editorial Freelancers Association website:

• Graphic design: $47.50–$85/hr
• Copywriting: $62.50–$100/hr
• Copy editing: $50–60/hr
• Translation: $50–70/hr

Influencer marketing

Working with influencers (aka content creators) is an easy way to expand the reach of your social media campaigns.

How much budget you allocate to influencer marketing will depend on the type of partnership with the influencer, the size of their following, and the campaign you’re running (format, channels, goals, etc.).

Influencer rates vary, but in general the minimum to work with a nano-influencer (up to 10,000 followers) is $2–25, while the minimum to work with a mega-influencer (1,000,000+ followers) starts at $1,200 and goes way up from there.

Some nano- or micro-influencers might also be willing to use an affiliate commission structure.

Don’t forget to include budget for boosting influencer posts.

Contests and giveaways

Social media contests and giveaways can be an effective way to build brand awareness, increase engagement, and grow your following. They can also help you bring in a library of user-generated content. But you need to dedicate some budget to the rewards you’ll offer for participation.

The best case scenario here is to offer your own products or services as a prize. It limits your budget commitments while also exposing people to your offering and potentially getting additional social content after the prize is rewarded.

Partnering with another brand can provide a way to offer a larger prize without a larger budget expense, like Porter Airlines and Visit the USA did here:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Porter Airlines (@porterairlines)

When budgeting for giveaways, don’t forget to include rewards for internal contests and rewards. Employee advocacy is a budget-friendly way to dramatically increase your social media reach. A little healthy competition (or random giveaways) can help increase uptake in your advocacy program.

Training and development

Social media changes fast, and your team’s roles can change and grow equally quickly. And your team is likely figuring a lot of things out on the fly. Colleges and universities are just now starting to offer social media training, and most social media managers have no formal education in the field.

If your team members are ready and willing to invest their time in developing new skills, it’s a good idea to enable that through your social media budget. You’ll be the beneficiary of everything they learn.

Depending on your team’s skill levels and campaign needs, these are a few training options you should consider including in your social media budget:

• Hootsuite Academy. A catalog of certification courses taught by industry pros and tailored for businesses. (Cost: $99 to $999)
• LinkedIn Learning. A library of more than 18,000 expert-led courses with the ability to create custom learning paths for employees. (Cost: $379.88 per seat/year for small teams.)

You could also consider allocating an education budget to each employee per year so that they can select the training that makes the most sense to them.

Social strategy and management

Social media management is not all about execution.

Beyond the obvious tasks of creating and scheduling social posts, your social team engages with social fans, provides social customer service, and manages your social community. They use social listening to learn about your target audience and alert you to potential threats and opportunities. They create a social media strategy and — yes — manage social budgets.

All of this requires an experienced social media manager.

When building this role into your budget, consider that the average salary for an in-house social marketer is US$72,133. A freelance social marketer earns $72,929 on average, and an agency social marketer earns an average of $83,328.

  5 tips to get your social media budget approved 1. Align your social KPIs with business goals

It’s all well and good to say that you want to grow your follower count or increase engagement, and that you need to spend money to do it.

But how do those goals relate to the larger business strategy? It’s much easier for stakeholders to approve your budget request if they see that your social goals align with business objectives as a whole. Especially since those stakeholders might not have a great understanding of how social works.

Demonstrate that you follow the SMART goal-setting framework. This ensures goals are both relevant and achievable – important factors in any budget negotiation.

Make sure to include relevant KPIs in your budget request. These show that you’ve intentionally aligned your social goals to the overall business plan.

2. Understand your performance and ROI

The old saying goes that you have to spend money to make money. Showing that your social team is a profit center rather than a cost center makes it easier to justify further investment in your work.

When looking at your social ROI, be sure to consider factors beyond straight sales conversions. Social is often about growing brand awareness and loyalty, thereby increasing lifetime customer value.

If you’re struggling to understand and achieve ROI, embrace a performance marketing strategy.

3. Share case studies and success stories

Be prepared to highlight your biggest wins. Use your analytics tools to find campaigns that exceeded expectations. Look for spikes in conversions or revenue and track them back to specific content or campaigns.

Think creatively here. Successes to highlight could include new partnerships formed, new influencers identified, or shares from major social media profiles.

4. Include a competitor analysis

Understanding how your brand’s social efforts compare to those of competitors is important for budget decision-makers.

First, a competitive analysis shows how much effort your competitors are putting into the various social platforms. It also allows you to highlight the kinds of content they’re creating. If they’re posting at levels or standards you just can’t match, you may be able to justify greater budget for content and campaign creation.

A good competitor analysis also includes the results your competitors are seeing from their social efforts. This can also help to rationalize the additional resources you’re asking for.

All of this also shows decision-makers that you’ve done your homework. You’re not just pulling numbers out of thin air – you have studied the competition and understand what it takes to compete in your field.

5. Be specific — but leave some room for unexpected expenses

An effective social team is nimble. Leave some room in your budget to respond to social trends.

For example, it’s a good idea to ask for an overall social ads budget rather than to lock budget into specific platforms. You can include amounts per platform as a guideline, but ensure your team has the ability to reallocate budget on the fly based on real-time performance.

Average social media budget in 2024 General marketing budget

Let’s start by looking at the average marketing budget as a whole. Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets as a whole fell 15% this year to 8.4% for B2B brands, 7.9% for those with an even mix of B2B and B2C, and just 5.7% for B2C brands.

Source: Gartner

So for a company with $1 million in total revenue, the total marketing budget would be as follows:

• B2B: $84,000
• B2C: $57,000
• Even mix: $79,000

Social media marketing budget

CMO Survey found that in Spring 2024, 11% of the marketing budget on average was dedicated to social media. However, this also varied between B2B and B2C brands.

Source: CMO Survey

Let’s apply that math to the numbers for the total marketing budget above, again assuming $1 million in total revenues

$1 million revenueMarketing budgetSocial media budget B2B Product$84,000$6,132 B2B Services$84,000$7,476 B2C Product$57,000$9,234 B2C Services$57,000$9,633

It’s interesting to note that while B2C brands have a smaller overall marketing budget, they actually have more to spend on social media than their B2B counterparts.

It’s also worth noting that CMO Survey expects the percentage of budget dedicated to social media to increase substantially across all economic sectors within the next five years.

3 tools for social media budgeting 1. Hootsuite’s free social media ROI calculator

Source: Hootsuite

Calculating ROI is a critical part of budget negotiations. It can also eat up too much of your time doing math. This free tool calculates ROI for you. If you’d like to take a different approach to ROI, check out our post on how to calculate ROI.

2. YNAB

Source: YNAB

Originally developed as a personal budgeting tool, YNAB can also work well for small teams that need a simple way to plan and track social media expenses. It allows you to create your own categories and track expenses as you go.

3. Hootsuite Analytics

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics provides organic, paid, and web metrics in one dashboard – including ROI and conversions reports. You’ll always have access to total spend and total return, broken down by network and even day of the week. This makes it easy to understand which strategies are working and where you should adjust your budget.

It also includes robust competitor analysis features so you can understand how your results compare to the industry average and specific other brands.

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your audience, measure results, and more — all from one dashboard. Try it free today.

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