How much to charge for social media management, by platform.

How much to charge for social media management depends on how many accounts you run and what goes on them, so build the monthly fee from three lines: an upkeep price for each platform, a price for each post and video, and the planning and reporting the whole account needs. Multiply the hours by your agency's rate, quote the total as a monthly fee, and charge the setup month once on its own. For the furniture maker worked through below, two platforms carrying twelve posts and two short videos come to 39.5 hours at $110, or $4,345 a month, while a quote built from per-post prices alone would have charged $2,750 for the same month.

The platform line is the one most quotes skip, and it's also why published price ranges stretch from a few hundred dollars to several thousand a month for what sounds like the same service.

What goes into a month of social media management?

Three kinds of work go into every month, and only one of them is the posts. Each platform needs looking after whether you post on it twice or twenty times, which means comments and messages answered inside the hours you've agreed, every post resized and recaptioned for that platform, the scheduling, and a look at its numbers. The posts and videos themselves are the second kind of work, and the planning that holds the month together, meaning the calendar, the client's approval round, a short call and a report, is the third.

Cobbleford Furniture Co. makes solid wood dining tables in a workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and sells them direct and through interior designers. It wants an agency to run its Instagram and Pinterest accounts with twelve feed posts and two short workshop videos a month. The agency's floor is $110 an hour, worked out the way our piece on pricing a website from an hourly floor does it, and here's the month at that rate:

Fourteen and a half of the 39.5 hours go to platform upkeep, planning and reporting, which is $1,595 of the $4,345 and a little over a third of the fee. Instagram gets twice Pinterest's upkeep because that's where Cobbleford's customers ask about lead times and wood species in the comments, while a pin mostly needs a good image, a description and the right board. Your own split will differ from client to client, so time the upkeep on two or three accounts you already run before you trust ours.

Why does a per-post price undercharge?

Because a post price only pays for making the post, and the account keeps needing work in the weeks between posts. Price Cobbleford at $165 a feed post and $385 a video and the month comes to $2,750, which sounds reasonable and even matches the content lines in the table to the dollar. The agency still answers the comments, adapts every post for Pinterest, plans the calendar, chases the approval and writes the report, so it works 39.5 hours for $2,750, which is $69.62 an hour or 63% of the rate it needs.

Per-post pricing also makes the next conversation harder. A client who has learned that a post costs $165 hears a request to add a third platform as free, since no extra post gets made, and the agency ends up arguing against its own price list. A monthly fee built from platforms and content keeps each account visible as something that costs money to run, and that visibility is most of the case for pricing this way.

How much should a second or third platform add?

It should add whatever the upkeep hours on that platform cost, which is rarely the same figure twice. Cobbleford's Instagram takes 6 hours a month at $110, so $660, and its Pinterest takes 3 hours, so $330, even though both accounts carry the same twelve posts. A platform where people talk back costs more to run than one where they mostly save and click, and a flat price per platform would overcharge the quiet account to cover the busy one.

StoryChief's pricing guide puts managing Instagram alone at $1,000 a month and Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter together at $2,500 or more, which works out to roughly $750 for each added platform, though it doesn't say where the gap comes from. Building each platform's price from its own hours supplies that reason, and it lets the client see what they'd save by dropping an account, which is a fairer conversation than haggling over a package total.

Should you charge separately for the first month?

Yes, because the first month holds work that never comes back, and folding it into the monthly fee either loses it or inflates every month after. Cobbleford's setup takes 13 hours: three to audit both accounts and what's already been posted, four to write a short voice and content plan the client signs off, four to design reusable post and pin templates, and two to sort out access and the scheduling tool. That's a one-time fee of $1,430, invoiced with the first month.

Spread across a six-month term, $1,430 would add about $238 to every month, and a renewal in month seven would then quietly carry a setup cost for work finished half a year earlier. Charged once, it's also paid for before anybody can leave at the end of the minimum term. Over six months Cobbleford pays $1,430 plus six months at $4,345, which is $27,500, and our marketing proposal template makes the same split between opening a channel and running it.

What do other agencies and freelancers charge per month?

Cloud Campaign, which sells software to agencies, puts basic social media packages at $500 to $2,000 a month and mid-tier retainers at $2,000 to $5,000, with freelancers charging $35 to $150 an hour and agencies $75 to $300 or more. Planable gives $500 to $5,000 a month as its rule of thumb, and StoryChief quotes $50 to $150 an hour. Cobbleford's $4,345 sits near the top of Cloud Campaign's middle band, which is roughly where two platforms, fourteen pieces of content and a monthly report ought to land.

The spread inside those ranges comes mostly from platform count and content volume rather than from any real disagreement about rates. One account with eight posts and four accounts with daily video both go by the name social media management, so a range wide enough to hold both can't tell you which one you're quoting. Use the published figures after you've built the fee, as a check that your hours aren't wildly off, rather than as the place the fee starts.

Should you charge hourly, per post or a monthly fee?

Charge a monthly fee for running accounts, built from the platform and content lines above, and keep hourly billing for work with no fixed shape, like a one-off audit or a weekend when something goes wrong in the comments. A monthly fee is what clients expect for ongoing work, and as long as it's built from units it tells them exactly what they're paying for. Our breakdown of the monthly retainer covers what happens to unused and extra work inside that month, which matters more on social media than almost anywhere else because the calendar fills and empties every four weeks.

Performance pricing comes up often enough to deal with. StoryChief's example is $1,500 a month plus $300 for every 1,000 new followers, and that kind of deal only works when the client's own approvals and product don't decide the result, which on social media they nearly always do. Paid ads belong on a separate line too: Cloud Campaign's guide puts ad management at 10 to 20% of the monthly ad budget, and we'd keep the ad spend itself on the client's card so your fee never includes money you only pass through. For the wider trade-off on defined pieces of work, see time and materials vs fixed price.

What happens when the client adds a platform halfway through?

You price it from the same upkeep hours and it joins the fee from the month it starts, as long as the rate was written down before anyone asked. In month three Cobbleford decides it wants LinkedIn to reach interior designers and architects, and asks whether the agency could simply share the same posts there. The posts already exist, but LinkedIn still needs captions rewritten for a trade reader, a company page kept current, replies to the designers who comment and its own numbers in the report, which the agency had timed at 4 hours, so $440 a month.

From month three the fee becomes $4,785, and over the four months left in the term that's $1,760, which takes the six months to $29,260. Without a written platform rate, the likeliest outcome is an agency saying yes to keep a new client happy and running a third account for 16 unpaid hours across the rest of the term. Our social media management contract template writes rates like these into the agreement itself, next to the approval deadline and the hours comments get answered.

Price the account before you price the post

Cobbleford's Instagram and Pinterest cost $990 a month to keep running before a single post goes up, and that's the line most social media quotes leave out. Every other line in the fee grows with the content, which clients understand without being told, while this one grows with the number of accounts, which they tend to assume is free. Put a price on each account first, then add the content, then the planning, and the fee you send will describe the month your team actually works.

Docket is built for the day Cobbleford's LinkedIn message arrives: the agency answers it with $440 a month, Cobbleford approves that in one click, and the change sits in the project log with its date before the third account goes live. Our notes on handling scope creep without losing the client cover the habit of pricing requests the week they arrive, and the marketing scope of work template shows how to write monthly counts into the document the client signs.

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