Stop Overpaying. How Much Does a Community Manager Cost?
Last update: 4 May 2022 at 09:46 am
5.00/5How much does it cost to hire a community manager? For what tasks and for what quality of output?
These are the questions that many companies ask themselves, because it is not easy to correctly evaluate the cost of a community manager. This is due to the diversity of the missions that are offered, but also to the great diversity of profiles.
What Is a Community Manager?
The term community manager is defined as the person or persons in charge of promoting a brand on social networks. The missions of a community manager are therefore multiple, ranging from :
- Publishing on social networks,
- Responding to comments,
- Organizing competitions,
- and so on.
To hire a community manager, it is possible to call on freelancers, but also on community management agencies of different sizes. The latter offers advantages over freelance community managers.
In this article, we will look at the advantages of using a community management agency, but also how these agencies set their prices.
The Advantages of Community Management Agencies
There are many advantages to using a community management agency.
Manage your social networks efficiently
A community management agency is surrounded by community managers with multi-tasking profiles, who have both operational and strategic skills.
From an operational point of view, a community management agency will be able to help you on different points:
- Creating content in different formats: photo, video, GIF (…) in order to diversify your social media content strategy;
- To make your brand known to as many people as possible, but also to create close links with your customers and prospects to generate sales;
From a strategic point of view, a web agency is able to :
- Identify the social networks that represent an opportunity for your company, both in terms of your competitors and your objectives;
- Give advice on the posture to adopt on social networks, both on the content creation part, but also on the posts;
- Create a content strategy adapted to each social network,
- Develop a publication schedule that takes into account your competitors, your needs, your field of activity, your news;
- Choose the performance and activity monitoring indicators (KPI) to measure the progress linked to the strategy previously set up by the agency;
- To set up thematic monitoring on e-reputation or competition for example, in order to offer more visibility to the different functions of your company.
As you can see, a community management agency offers a complete service that will enable you to make the most of your presence on social networks!
An agency will offer you its strategic expertise to define an action plan to meet your needs. An agency will offer its strategic expertise to define an action plan to meet your needs, which it will put in place with its operational skills in graphic design and community management.
Outsource Your Community Management to Save Time
Community management is a time-consuming task that requires a lot of attention.
If you do your own community management internally in your company, this means that you will have to hire someone or redirect an existing employee to this task.
However, this requires a considerable amount of time, as it involves a reflection phase (creation of the strategy) and an operational phase (publication and animation of social networks).
Moreover, community management is a very broad function that requires specific skills. It can therefore be complicated, if not impossible, to internalize this function within the company. If you want your community management to be properly carried out.
However, the community management function can easily be outsourced to an agency that will be able to meet the requirements of this task thanks to its staff. So why not take the plunge?
Do you need |
Discover the most relevant agencies for your project based on your own specific requirements.
Find an agency!How Do I Draw Up My Budget?
The elaboration of your budget varies according to several factors such as the number :
- The number of social networks to animate,
- Of posts to publish,
- Or the frequency.
However, all these variables are measurable in time and this is what will determine the scope of the mission. Indeed, depending on the scope of the mission entrusted to the agency, the cost will not be the same.
Save $170,000 A Year On Your Marketing Team With This Top Tip
Sortlist recently published a 2021 Marketing Survey on budgets, trends, and inspiration for SMBs. We asked almost 500 owners and general managers of small and medium-sized businesses across five European countries for their marketing strategies in 2021. Our goal in this article is to evaluate these trends and whether the intended budgets would benefit from […]
For example, for some activities, social networks are a way to work on their branding in the hope of becoming better known, with the aim of selling more.
On the other hand, for other activities, especially those related to e-commerce, social networks represent a real acquisition and sales channel, and sometimes even the main channel.
As a result, the time spent on the service will not be the same for a brand that wants to work on its brand image and a brand that wants to make all or part of its sales on social networks. The price will therefore be higher in the second case.
The nature of the mission also impacts the budget to be allocated to its community management.
For example, if you want the agency to define at least a social media strategy or even a marketing strategy, then the price will be impacted because it will include the reflection phase but also the application phase.
With this principle, you can now easily build up your budget based on the tasks that the social media agency will be asked to carry out, here everything depends on the number of services provided:
Monthly animation:
- Definition of the strategy to be carried out, at the beginning of the service
- Development of a line and editorial calendar (at the beginning of the service and then updated regularly)
- Creation of visuals and videos
- Publication of more or less frequent posts
- Moderation of comments and messages
- Analysis of statistics according to the KPI’s defined during the development of the strategy
- Monitoring of your brand and that of your competitors
Exceptional services:
- Setting up advertisements on social networks (Facebook Ads for example)
- Creation of a shop (on Facebook or Instagram)
What Are the Unavoidable Costs?
Social media strategy: essential for a good start
The essential step before embarking on operational work with an agency is to ensure that you have a reliable plan to achieve results quickly.
During this phase, the communication agency will be able to draw up a report by asking you a multitude of questions:
- What is the brand’s current level of visibility on social networks?
- What role do social networks play in selling?
- Who are your main competitors?
- Are you seeing a reduction in traffic on your social networks?
Drawing up a publication schedule
It is important to identify a publication rhythm and key dates for your posts on social networks. However, each social network has its own algorithm.
Without a strict publication rhythm that conforms to the algorithm, all your efforts on social networks will be in vain.
Therefore, a sustained and regular rhythm of publication will allow you to gain an audience and subscribers. But it will also lead your current and future followers to interact with your content. It is therefore essential to leave this step in the hands of experts.
The almost daily operational phase
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to community management. It is the creation, publication and interaction with the community.
Indeed, if we strongly recommend delegating the elaboration of the strategy and the publication planning, it is natural to leave the operational phase to the agency that set up the strategy.
This will firstly allow you to outsource this function of your business, which will not cost you any more time, but may give you a return on investment with probable future sales.
In addition, it will give you access to the expertise of a specialist social media team:
- What hashtag to use,
- What tone to use,
- What time to post,
- etc.
Community Manager Rates
Community management agencies can offer you different formulas such as packages ranging from 1 hour per month (“starter” packages) to 30 hours or more per month.
In most cases, these packages are based on a subscription that is tacitly renewed every month.
This pricing varies according to your needs, your budget and the number of social networks to animate. In addition, you have the possibility of including additional options such as
- Writing articles to boost your SEO,
- The creation of visuals,
- SEO optimisation of your site
- etc.
Thanks to Sortlist you have access to more than 500 agencies specializing in social media in France! Even if they all have their own specificities, here are some examples of social media agency pricing:
- La Bise, which offers to accompany you on your social networks with the creation of editorial lines, post writing, community management, live streams, after-sales service, and chatbots. Price of a project share: 1,000€.
- Public Actif which is an agency specialized in digital marketing and social media was created in 2010. Starting price for a project: €1,000.
- AURA 360 offers services in community management, social strategy, writing, and content creation… Starting price for a project: 1,000€.
- Snack will help you deploy your social media strategy. Price of a share of a project: 3,000€.
- RnD is an agency based in Paris and Limoges, which offers its expertise on social networks from 1,000€ per project.
As you can see, the starting price for a community management project is set at around €1,000.
This varies, of course, depending on: the agencies, the options taken, the demand, the amount of work to be done, the package chosen…
What Makes a Good Community Manager?
A community manager is someone who is very versatile. Indeed, as we have seen before, a community manager must be able to deal with numerous prerogatives and missions, all of which are very different in nature.
Curious and self-taught
The job of a community manager requires the mastery of many skills that are often very quickly obsolete.
Indeed, a community manager must constantly develop new skills. For example, in graphic design to keep up with the latest trends, in web culture to better interact with the community…
Passionate
A good community manager must also be passionate about his job.
Indeed, the job of community manager is a job with responsibilities. Through his words and publications, he represents a brand whose reputation sometimes depends on advertising and content produced on social networks.
Patient and moderate
The community manager is also a moderator, as one of his or her tasks is to interact with the brand’s community.
A good community manager must therefore show composure, and diplomacy and must leave his personal opinions aside to react to the sometimes strong interventions of the community.
Organized
The CM must also have a great sense of organization. The mission requires very regular interventions, over a wide and varied time span.
Without good organization, a CM can quickly become overwhelmed by the tasks at hand. Especially since many of these tasks require the regularity of a metronome.
Conclusion
There are many factors that go into the pricing of a community management service, such as: the fixed price, the duration of the collaboration, the frequency of the work, the support for community management services such as the development of a social media strategy, for example.
However, the figure of €1,000 can be put forward as the price of a “basic” package without extras and without a high frequency of work.
