What’s Your Social Media Program Costing You?

by | Jul 26, 2011

I’m amazed by people who say social media is free! Obviously they haven’t dove into it or they don’t value their time or the time that others invest. While outside costs are minimal usually compared to traditional marketing campaigns, what it lacks in outside costs, it makes up with internal costs.

I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, How to Calculate Social Media Costs, that I thought was worth sharing. Highlights include:

  • People – The most obvious and often the most overlooked because they are already in the budget. Your staff monitors, creates, manages and responds to social media.
  • Content – This drives everything in social and you need to constantly create new stuff. Who’s doing it and if you’re not doing it in your own department and get sales or engineering involved, how do you calculate their time?
  • Support media – What are you doing to promote and drive traffic? E-blast, landing pages, creative and paid advertising.
  • Brand monitoring – Software and tracking fees to keep up to speed on what’s being said about you and your competitors.
  • Technology – You need support which normally comes from your IT department or creative to support your website, blog and server capacity issues.

What are some other costs that you’ve identified?

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