Social Media Management
Summary:
- We’re taking on new clients.
- Social media management costs €420–1,500 a month.
- The media budget is paid separately, from €300 to €10,000 (global clients pay as much as €150K a month)
- We work in the SK/CZ/EU markets, but also globally (US companies)
- Michaela Gallee (founder of wooacademy) is a Facebook Marketing Partner
- We have direct FB support
- We’ve developed our own Facebook plugins (CAPI / Pixel / domain verification, etc.)
- Advanced FB reporting is free when we work together
Why hire someone to manage your social media?
Thinking about presenting your company on social media? How do you know you’ve reached the stage where it’s important to move your communication onto social networks? As a guide, here are the most common situations our clients are in when they come to us for social media management:
- A brand-new brand that has just launched its shiny new website and wants people to know about its products or services, because people won’t buy what they don’t know about.
- A brand that has been on the market for years but has so far communicated only through traditional advertising or word of mouth, and has reached the point where it wants to move its communication online too and expand.
- A company that has managed its social media in-house so far and wants to take its presence to the next level, either because it wasn’t bringing results or because the company is growing and there’s no time to give social media full attention.
- A company that is already active on social media but isn’t happy with the agency or freelancer currently managing it.
- A company that wants to expand into foreign markets and has no experience yet with social media promotion abroad.
Whatever stage you’re at, handing your social media management over to professionals can help you:
- increase sales
- find new customers
- or expand into foreign markets.
At the same time, it’s important to understand what social media management involves and what to watch out for.
Why social media?
Still not sure whether social media makes sense for you? Let specialists decide, people with experience across different segments and types of business in Slovakia and abroad.
If we compare, in simple terms, search advertising (Google Ads) and social media ads, we can say that Google Ads responds to demand, while social media lets you create demand. That’s the magic of social media.
Google Ads and SEO respond to demand, while social media lets you create demand. That’s the magic of social media.
What matters is choosing the right social network and focusing your allocated budget on the one that brings you the best results. Depending on how you communicate, who you target and how you set up paid campaigns, you can create demand for your products or services even if nobody has ever heard of you.
Besides the fact that social media can bring you:
- revenue
- new customers
- greater brand awareness
- or help with expanding into other foreign markets
social media also gives you a wealth of information about your potential customers, which you can then use to optimize your social media management so it delivers the most efficient results possible.
Which social network should you choose?
I’m a fan of Larry Kim’s unicorn marketing theory. His message is basically very simple: find the unicorn in your marketing that brings you the best results. Then “feed” that unicorn the biggest budget and reap the rewards.
How do you identify your unicorn? Without experience and data, it’s very hard.
For us, as a marketing agency, this task isn’t that difficult at all. Since we have a lot of experience with paid social media campaigns, we can define that unicorn for you. But that’s far from the end of our work.
Besides choosing the right social network, there’s still a lot of work ahead with:
- campaign optimization
- specifically, choosing the ideal audience
- placements
- creatives
- or defining the most successful buying cycle (sometimes time-limited discounts work on the target customers, other times we achieve higher revenue by offering exclusive new products).
As standard, we recommend a specific social network to clients along with a proposed budget. If we see potential in other social networks, we test them with a minimal budget.
LinkedIn campaigns?
One common mistake, for example, is that B2B companies (those offering products or services to other businesses) often think LinkedIn is the ideal social network for them. At first glance that may seem sensible, since LinkedIn is considered a professional network where people show off their work achievements rather than kittens and kids.
What you learn in practice, though, is that clicks on this network cost several times more than on Facebook, for example. Specifically, on Facebook you can get a visit for €0.10, while on LinkedIn a click can cost you as much as €1–1.50. That’s a really significant difference.
Many companies also don’t realize that companies are made up of people, and people are on Facebook and Instagram too, while they spend much less time on LinkedIn. But if you work in human resources or want to change jobs or careers, LinkedIn is the ideal social network for you.
Instagram for young people?
Another common misconception is that if you sell products or services to younger age groups, your ads will work best on Instagram.
But is that really the case?
Do you have lots of numbers, tables, results, clients, products and services that you can track and evaluate day after day? I’m guessing not for conclusions like that.
Is Facebook dead?
Another common misconception is that Facebook is dead. If that were true, we wouldn’t be bringing our clients revenue in the thousands every month through Facebook campaigns, and I could pack in my career and take up writing books.
So be careful about what you assume or what bombastic news you pick up from blog articles, and always turn to someone who can give you recommendations straight from practice.
Types of promotion on Facebook (on social media)
In general, you need to distinguish between two types of promotion:
- organic
- and paid.
If you have a Facebook page or an Instagram business account and have ever published a post or a story, we’re talking about unpaid, so-called organic promotion. It means you haven’t yet used paid space on Facebook or Instagram for your social media promotion; you haven’t paid a media budget to be shown.
Paid promotion, on the other hand, means you pay for your ads (and sometimes posts or stories) to be shown to more people. If you’ve tried something like this before, you may have come across the blue boost or promote button right in a post you published, you may even have used it, so you have at least some minimal experience with it.
Of course, we can’t consider that full-fledged paid campaign management, since it’s a very primitive way of promoting. The principle, though, is that even in this case you’re paying for your ads to be shown to more people.
Social media management can include producing organic content as well as creating and managing paid campaigns.
Organic promotion
These are the posts or stories you publish on your social network’s timeline. You may already have experience with it and see for yourself that it doesn’t have much reach. Maybe you’ve been doing it for 10 years and still have 800 fans on your Facebook page and a post reach of 200. Unfortunately, that’s standard, because unpaid posts are only shown to your page’s fans and have very weak reach.
In practice it may cost you nothing except the photo and the text you come up with for your posts. If you delegated this work to an agency, for example, you’d be paying for photo or graphics production, copywriting, publishing the posts and of course a content plan (someone has to decide what will be communicated on the social network).
Since it would be organic promotion, you wouldn’t pay a media budget (what you pay the social network to distribute your content).
We don’t usually recommend this to clients, because organic posts rarely bring a real return. If you take the work of a specialist you might pay, say, €600 a month, and the posts aren’t sponsored at all, so they’re only shown to a minimal number of people, it’s not a good deal.
I recommend this option as a complement to paid campaigns. Paid campaigns should be launched first, because they have the biggest effect on winning potential customers.
What are social media campaigns?
Has a particular handbag you put in your cart ever followed you around Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and everywhere else you went? That’s the magic of paid campaigns, which you can set up and mix so they bring you sales.
Paid social media campaigns have the biggest effect compared with organic posts. Besides paying for the work of a social specialist, which includes setting up campaigns properly, strategy and technical setup (for everything to work as it should, technical setup is needed before campaigns launch, often with a developer involved), you also need to think about producing professional graphics.
On top of the specialists’ work you also pay the media budget, which can range from €300 a month up to €100,000 (depending of course on the type of business: a luxury car dealer will have a different media budget than a small florist).
WATCH OUT – producing organic and paid content don’t have to be related at all. If an agency or freelancer offers to produce posts and then also sponsor them, that’s not full-fledged creation and management of paid social media campaigns.
What social media management means
Social media management can include a range of activities, from strategy, creative and graphics production and paid campaigns to replying to comments and messages, producing stories and so on, but you and your company won’t necessarily need all of them. Every segment is different: some don’t need organic content at all and are fine with ad campaigns alone, while for others we recommend building an organic base too.
Your social media management needs also depend heavily on the competition, your market position, your online presence, the strength of your brand, the product or service you offer, links to brick-and-mortar stores, the market situation, your goals, which countries you want to operate in and whether you’re planning to expand.
Based on these criteria and taking your financial means into account, we put together a proposed strategy and a proposed media budget. With us, you always know exactly in advance how much you’ll pay and for what.
What social media management includes
Social media management can include, for example, these activities:
- creating organic posts
- creating stories
- communication strategy
- producing photos and graphics
- copywriting
- creating paid campaigns
- technical setup
- setting up and connecting Business Manager
- setting up FACEBOOK CAPI, the PIXEL and domain verification
- catalog campaigns
- and more…
Not every activity is essential for your company, and we often see various combinations: for example, a client pays for paid campaign management while keeping organic content production in-house.
The social media management process
What happens once you decide to hand your social media management to an agency? It goes without saying that we clarify your goals, go through your existing communication and analyze the technical setup: what you already have set up and what needs to be set up or fixed.
While the technical setup is being handled, we work on the strategy and on producing the graphics. Once the strategy, copy and graphics are approved and all settings are in place, organic posts are scheduled and paid campaigns are launched straight away.
Next, we set up an analytics report that the client receives regularly, daily or weekly depending on their needs.
Social media audit
A social media audit means analyzing your social media activities to date. The audit includes analytics of your results so far, an analysis of why those results were achieved, and specific recommendations for improvement.
Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s impossible to propose a suitable strategy for a new engagement without one.
An experienced, senior social specialist can estimate a strategy for any company and any segment at first glance. They need to look to the future instead and find out your goals and possibilities. What happened in the past may have absolutely no bearing on the new engagement, because we know from experience that when management wasn’t done professionally, it’s as if it wasn’t done at all, so we start from zero.
So we only recommend a social media audit in exceptional cases, for example when a client has been managing their social media in-house and would like an analysis of the results of their activities so far. Or it may be a client who wants to verify whether the activities of the agency managing their social media are bringing the desired results. Or a company with in-house marketing staff that would like both an evaluation and suggestions for improvement.
So if you have an impressive history of social media activity, with work on both organic posts and paid campaigns, a social media audit may cost you around €800 excluding VAT on average. If nothing much has been done on your social media, we don’t recommend an audit at all.
Competitor analysis on social media
Do you think it’s important for you to have checked out your competitors and to know exactly how they communicate, what services they offer, what creative they’ve come up with, what graphic templates they use and so on?
Knowing how your competitors behave and communicate can be a double-edged sword. It often happens that clients show us competitors from the same segment they operate in and want to resemble them in both communication and visuals.
In the worst case, they also have almost identical products or very similar services at almost the same prices. That’s probably the worst possible approach to making your mark on the market. Not only is the new brand not original in the slightest, it also drowns in a sea of ten other imitators. It can easily end up completely indistinguishable from its competitors.
That won’t lead to you doing as well as your competitor, though; it leads to you being left with nothing but crumbs from the whole pie, because the competitor you’re imitating has been on the market for several years and has a strong position there.
If the competitor is aggressive enough, it won’t even leave you the crumbs. So if you really want to take inspiration from competitors, try looking at competitors in foreign markets or at companies in completely different segments. Otherwise your brand, product or service may become just another average, widely available brand that people barely remember and often confuse with a competitor.
So you’d better not do a competitor analysis before starting your social media management.
Analysis of the technical setup
I consider analyzing the current technical setup very important. If everything is created and set up by us, Business Manager, the ad account, pixels, verifications, catalogs, Facebook CAPI, we can be sure that everything is set up correctly and that everything works and communicates 100%. But if we’re taking over work from someone else, it’s essential to verify that the setup is correct, make the necessary fixes or set everything up again from scratch.
Unfortunately, I’ve never once come across a well-configured account. Usually, as soon as I see the setup, it’s clear to me why the campaigns couldn’t succeed so far. The setup is critically important for paid campaigns. It often needs a developer too, for example when building custom product catalogs, setting up conversions for iOS 14 or setting up Facebook CAPI.
So don’t underestimate this step: without the right setup, your campaigns can hardly succeed.
Preparing graphics and creative
Before you publish any posts or dive into paid campaigns, you should get clear on your visual communication and prepare the graphics.
Don’t underestimate the visual side of your communication, otherwise Facebook may consider your ad to be crap and you’ll pay more for advertising than you would with professional creative. I also recommend preparing several versions, color variants or styles so you can test several visuals at once. With multiple visuals, Facebook can achieve better and cheaper results.
As standard, when we manage clients’ social media, we create at least 10 banners in different variants, precisely so that we achieve the best possible results.
If you need photos or graphics produced for your social media, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
A content plan for social media
A content plan for organic posts can be a simple spreadsheet or a presentation, and it shouldn’t be missing the publication date, the social network the post will be published on, the graphics, the copy and of course the link if the post is meant to lead somewhere.
I also recommend defining the goal: whether it’s introducing a service or product, simply entertaining the audience, a poll, inspiration or behind-the-scenes photos. It then helps you lay out the plan better and strategically distribute different types of posts so your timeline doesn’t feel monotonous.
How to choose a media budget
The media budget relates to paid campaigns. If you have no campaign history or experience with paid campaigns, I recommend choosing €300 a month (that’s €10 a day) and then, once the campaigns are profitable, increasing the budget until you hit the ceiling of demand.
Increasing the budget doesn’t mean sales will keep increasing forever. So don’t forget to keep a close eye on campaign profitability. A good metric for you may be ROAS (return on ad spend). To track it, you of course need the right setup, specifically a Facebook pixel and/or Facebook CAPI, conversions marked as “purchase” and the “value” parameter.
That way Facebook (and you too) can calculate the return on investment (ROAS), since ROAS is the ratio between the value of purchases you gained thanks to the campaigns and the money invested in advertising.
If ROAS confuses you, simply compare your investment in paid campaigns with the revenue they bring and work out whether the ads are profitable for you. If they are, increase the budgets; if not, work on optimization.
What gets measured in social media management
The most important metrics for you are always those that show some activity from the audience you’ve reached. These could be interactions, clicks, conversations started, followers or purchases, add-to-carts and so on. Reach and impressions are secondary for you; after all, you shouldn’t care how many people saw your post or ad if nobody clicked on it.
For paid campaigns, for services for example, the important metrics are things like the cost of acquiring a potential customer; depending on the campaign objective, this may be the cost per lead, the cost per conversation started or the cost per call.
For conversion campaigns for online stores, it’s essential to track return on investment, purchase value, cost per purchase, cost per click and so on.
For brand campaigns, interactions or cost per video view may be key. For informational websites, it’s cost per click.
Which metrics you choose depends heavily on your goals, your customer’s buying cycle and the stage you’re at right now (are you a brand-new brand that entered the market yesterday, or a well-known brand that has been on the market for years?).
How much does social media management cost
There are several ways to handle social media management:
- do it yourself
- hire an in-house marketer
- hire a freelancer
- have a marketing agency manage your social media
Managing social media yourself – cost
If you decide to manage your social media yourself, definitely consider quality training. Not only will it speed up the whole process, you’ll also get plenty of recommendations straight from practice. After the training you can continue with regular consultations, for example, which will steer you and advise you on how to optimize your overall strategy.
In this case you only pay for training; how much training you need to manage your campaigns is of course very individual. It may be an investment of €200–800, plus regular monthly consultations of around €150–300.
Social media managed by in-house staff – cost
If you wanted to hire a junior marketer, their salary might be around €1,300–2,000 a month. With a junior position, of course, you have to bear in mind that you’ll get junior results, so don’t expect results that bring in real revenue.
That’s why I recommend giving your employee training or regular consultations with an agency that can point them in the right direction.
If you wanted to hire a top social media marketer, their salary could climb as high as €3,500 a month.
Keep in mind, though, that the marketer you hire may not be a top social media specialist; they may be a marketing specialist who knows a bit of everything. It’s naive to assume your marketing specialist will be top-notch at social media, SEO, website editing, Google Ads, email marketing and so on.
Social media management also requires photo production or professional graphics, and it’s very unlikely you’ll find someone who is both excellent at social media and a professional graphic designer or photographer.
At the same time, it’s not just about creating and scheduling posts for Facebook or Instagram; you also need to master paid campaigns and know how to evaluate them properly (that is, know analytics and metrics).
An inexperienced employee often has no idea whether the results they’re achieving are optimal. That’s mainly because they lack experience. While a social specialist at an agency has a range of diverse clients from different segments and with different market positions on their desk, an in-house employee has only one client: you.
Once the metrics have been evaluated, you need to know how to read them and decide on the next steps.
So if you’re considering an in-house employee, only choose a narrowly specialized one (a social specialist) with experience, and let them regularly attend training or consultations.
Social media managed by a freelancer – cost
Having a freelancer manage your social media can cost from €420 to €1,200 a month. A common argument from freelancers is that they’re cheaper than a marketing agency. But that may be far from true.
That’s not what I see as the main problem with freelancing, though. Managing social campaigns often requires a professional graphic designer or photographer as well as a developer or someone who is very technically skilled and can set up your accounts perfectly from a technical point of view.
I’ve come across talented graphic designers who also managed social media many times. While everything was handled exceptionally well on the graphics side, the campaign setup and optimization were genuinely below average.
I very often come across the opposite as well. The campaigns are set up fine, but the graphics are a sheer horror, so the campaigns can’t deliver optimal results. Why is that? Because a social specialist isn’t a top graphic designer at the same time, and vice versa.
I’d rather not even mention the technical setup.
It’s precisely a high level of technical knowledge, or a developer on the team who fully understands setups such as the Facebook Conversion API, the Facebook API configured at server level, that gives us as an agency an incredible competitive advantage.
Another disadvantage of a freelancer is that when they get sick or go on holiday, there’s nobody to cover for them.
Social media managed by a marketing agency – cost
The main argument against choosing an agency is often that its services cost more because it has to pay employees, office space and so on. Or that your accounts will be handled by junior staff or temps.
That can of course happen. At an agency you often don’t even know the name of the person running your campaigns. So if you work with an agency, it’s important to know exactly who has access to your accounts.
As for office costs, it’s of course worth stressing that an agency has to pay for its premises from something, and naturally it pays for them out of what you pay it for its services. Some agencies, however, now work from home or choose their premises so they don’t have to inflate their prices unnecessarily.
The advantages of an agency can of course be experience and a whole team working for you. Not only does a social specialist look after your social media, but a top graphic designer prepares the graphics, a developer or technically skilled colleague takes care of the technical setup, and so on.
The whole team collaborates on the part each member is an expert in, and if someone gets sick, goes on holiday or is out for a while, there’s always someone to cover for them.
An agency can also cover other services, such as Google Ads, SEO, website creation and management, blog writing, graphics production and so on.
Agency social media management can cost from €420 to €1,500 a month.
