Ad Agencies: 6 Quick Tips for Pricing and Servicing Social Media

$125 an hour seems a lot to charge for interns playing on myspace, facebook or tweeter.

Dev.

Michael

Enjoyed the piece, and the timing of it. We recently created a social media proposal for a client, and (amazingly) covered five of your six points (we don’t have junior staffers — we’re all “executive grunts”).

Probably the hardest thing was for the client to appropriately “get their hands around” social media in terms of metrics and key deliverables. While some in the business expected a rise in awareness and ‘digital touches’ for their brand, others expected lead generation. Defining the expectation early and determining key agency deliverables will ultimately refine the scope of work and investment in certain social media resources, along with making efficient use of our most precious asset — agency time.

Thanks again for the blog post. Well done.

Rob

I would be careful to who you give the “grunt work” until you fully understand social media yourself. Nasty can of worms and scope creep could be painful if the grunts don’t understand what they are doing.

We base the costing on the effort of FTE’s, just like any other production job, front end and back end and creative. Different initiatives that are covered by retainers are handled by accounts for the most part, if they need some creative, it’ll be made, skinned and handled to them. If they got issue, we bring in a tech to help.

Hello Michael, great topic you started here. We have been struggling with how to incorporate social media into our SEO consulting. We went as far as writing an Ebook on the top five social medias we suggest to join. It was bad enough we were getting calls that lasted over an hour trying to explain why and how therefore, the solution was show them how to join the top five. Then we realized, they know how to join… Now what? We decided to come up with a worksheet this is something I would be more than happy to share with you. This breaks things down even further. In my opinion this will not only HELP THEM tracker their efforts but give them a better understanding of how a base line metric can result in identifying the success therefore changing their strategy. Seeing numbers with dates and other information always adds more value. I hope that helps.

Can you share more on how you defined key deliverables, and especially the metrics to measure them?

Thanks!
Debbe

For establishing a base line metric, there are a few steps involved. What is it you are trying to do? Is it reputation control, is it Branding, Improved SEO…? One, add some kind of analytic tracking to your website. We prefer Google Analytics, but there are others. Second, let it run for a month. Once the month is over, start an excel sheet and put the information you have at this moment on your site. You might add the links to your site, your site traffic and the keywords traffic is using to get there for a start. Once you know where your website is at and have all the information recorded on the excel sheet, start another tab for social media. Each time you tweet, post a blog somewhere, or anything else, add it to the excel sheet. Every two weeks, look at your statistics to find out which efforts are bringing in traffic, and which aren’t. Add that information to the excel sheet. In this way, you have an established base line (your current website statistics), but you also have an excellent way to keep track of any SEO and social media efforts to see which are working. You can better focus your efforts if you know where you’ve been, where you’re going and how you’re getting there.

Zack, it takes me about 5 minutes to update my excel sheet. As soon as I post a guest blog, or article, etc. I have my sheet open in order to log the information in there. Hey working for yourself is not an easy undertaking that’s for sure. But it’s a necessary evil

Besides looking for ROI (time spent) in social media is an arguable discussion at best. I mean really, do you look for ROI from your iPhone, laptop? No but it sure does connect the dots when you make a sale or address issues a client is having. It’s all part of doing business.
Gabriella

Some great points Michael. Getting Jnr staff to do the grunt work is a great idea as they most of the time have a better understanding of how to use social media, but it is important that some guidlines are set regarding what they tweet or mention on facebook so they stay focused at the goals and inline with the brand of the client they are representing.

We price out SM in a three column worksheet.

Column one – Barebones deliverables that are a MUST if you’re seriously considering jumping into social media. This is the baseline cost. If you’re not willing to spend this, you might want to reconsider “going social”. This would include up front services like social channel setup/branding, monitoring setup and keyword creation, etc. It also includes weekly/daily recurring tasks like community management (community engagement, brand monitoring, content creation, reporting), quarterly reviews/exec presentations, etc.

Column two – All MUST haves, plus a list of “nice to have” deliverables. Nice to haves might include employee and external policy creation, running your existing email list through RapLeaf, creating a weekly blog digest email. We also might recommend devoting more hours to daily/weekly recurring tasks. e.g. Under column one, we recommended 15 hours of community management a week, however it would be really great to be able to devote 20 hours a week.

Column three – Combination of columns one and two. Populated by determining what will be the most effective solution that stays within budgetary constraints.

Hours and costs, based on a blended rate, for every deliverable are listed. We typically recommend a one year retainer.

Great post and some good replies from everyone! I’m 21 and just starting my own business but I agree with passing on the ‘grunt work’ wholeheartedly.

Does anyone outsource? This is something I have been paid for in the past and has worked well.

I think a lot of people are over complicating social accounts. Many small businesses I know are simply happy with a University student on a low hourly rate. They can set up the accounts and drive hot leads to a website with only a minimal amount of maintenance required through the week.

Thanks for the post,

Rich Burns

Hey, how about if you don’t know how to price and service social media work, you leave it to someone who does?

This post is on the right track, and pretty useful for people who can’t figure things out for themselves. Do you really want those people handling your social media?

If after reading Michael’s instructions, you’re still not sure how to handle this, feel free to reach me at http://www.rebelindustries.com and I’ll give you our price for handling social media for you.

Everyone gets hung on the economics. What I enjoyed was the subtle foreshadowing to modern ad agencies who try to figure out how to price social media when they get back to the office. Ha!