If you are already active on social media with your brand, then you understand that it takes time (and financial resources, most likely) to maintain your hold. A social media presence that suddenly goes inactive can quickly atrophy, making it much more difficult to recover and return to its former glory. Some brands and business may struggle in this area, which can make the process of utilizing social media much less effective than it otherwise would be. Understanding the true costs associated with social media is vital in determining how much time needs to be put into it, and how much effort can be allocated. Below, we’ll discuss three important metrics that break down the true nature behind costs associated with social media.

Content

This may be the biggest part of social media success, but is likely a smaller amount of the overall effort you’ll spend creating specifically for social media. Content creation is a major task in how it relates to your online brand: pinging for SEO, driving traffic to your site and encouraging social media engagement are all potential benefits from its use. Nevertheless, you will spend time creating social media status updates, tweets and other blurbs when it comes to promoting this content on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. To understand the true cost of this element, you should track how much time you spend creating this additional type of content for each day, week and month of social media use. You can then compare this overall amount of time with what you assess your time to be worth.

Preparation

Many successful social media managers plan their blurbs as mentioned above in advance, keeping them on-hand for later use or scheduling them for publication in the future. If you use multiple social media networks, then you can streamline the process and save time by scheduling each post across multiple networks at once. When dealing with dozens of updates to be planned in advance, this can quickly add up – even if you have streamlined the process as mentioned above. The amount of preparation that goes into your social media presence is critical in determining the true cost of social media.

Marketing and Promotion

The final aspect of social media management that you’ll need to assess for cost considerations is the time and resources spent on marketing and promoting your content. In many cases, it isn’t enough to simply publish content: you need to make sure it is seen, shared and enjoyed by those who will appreciate it. We see similar strategies used by those who are pinging for SEO; the initial act is easy, but the follow-up is strenuous. Paid marketing campaigns on social media can be one way that traffic is driven to your social media hubs and websites, but interactive discussions, and sharing can be a money-free way to also increase promotion. In either case, time and money are equally valuable, so understanding what you allocate in both dollars and hours is crucial in assessing your social media costs.