Marketing budgets are experiencing a major shift towards social media. According to The 2025 Impact of Social Media Marketing report, 87% of marketing leaders are planning to increase their paid social spend, and over 80% will also be increasing spend on influencer marketing and organic social.
And much of these budget increases are reallocated funds. Eighty-one percent of marketers are reallocating budgets away from traditional SEO and into organic social, paid social and influencer marketing.
Social media is playing a more significant role than ever before across marketing departments. Over half of brands already have a SOSEO (social search engine optimisation) strategy in place, and 43% are experimenting with social search. As the way people use and interact with social media continues to evolve, marketers need to rework their budgets to cater to these new behaviors.
We break down exactly how an effective social media budget should work today. You’ll find details on how to create one, what it should include and guidance on how to get it approved by shareholders and business leaders.
What is a social media budget?
A social media budget is a list of all the funds you allocate to your social media marketing activities within a specific span of time.
Social media budgets vary based on your company’s size, industry, goals and other factors. These can include:
- Content creation (total amount and separate amounts for each network)
- Paid ads (total amount and separate amounts for each network)
- Social media tools expenses
- Agencies or contractors
- Influencer marketing campaigns
- Internal social marketing team salaries
Some of these items will be more or less important depending on your strategy and available funds.
How to create a social media budget
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to create your social media budget. Make sure to rely on insights from your existing social data and your strategy when building a budget for your team.
Use goals as your foundation
An effective social budget should be goal-driven; you won’t know how to allocate your budget until you know your overarching social media goals. For example, if you’re hoping for more conversions, you might invest more heavily into paid lead-generating campaigns and less into awareness efforts.
To help you set goals, ask yourself questions like:
- Did you meet previous goals?
- Which strategies were successful, and which weren’t?
- Did you have budget left over or were you stretched thin?
- Do you want to increase resources to drive new strategies or expand previous ones?
In addition to considering your social goals, think about what goals your audience may have for following your brand on social media. Your goals need to align with your audiences’—otherwise, the disconnect may lead to poor engagement.
Your social goals should also be informed by your broader organisational goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Understand your team’s needs and historical data
Gather your previous social budgets, strategies and performance data from the last two to three years to develop a baseline for your upcoming budget.
Social marketers often use their previous year’s budget as a starting point and adjust it based on the company’s upcoming goals for social, as well as current financial performance. This is a good way to begin, but it’s not the only data to use when developing next year’s budget. Also consider:
- Past performance: Highlight what worked and what hasn’t in previous years to determine the social strategies you’re planning. From this information, you can determine campaign and resourcing costs. Analyse your paid performance alongside organic to see how they compare, and to see where your budget was best used. Also, research any changes in social costs across platforms, as these may have increased since your last budget. Compare this data to figure out the most efficient, cost-effective strategies in this new budget.
- Social network distribution: According to Sprout’s Impact of Social Media Marketing report, Facebook (70%), YouTube (68%) and TikTok (64%) drive the most business impact across all types of brands today. Review performance metrics like reach, engagement, conversions and ROI (Return on Investment) from each social network you use. See which networks have seen growth and which haven’t to inform your network distribution and resources in the coming year.
- Internal skills and expertise: Do you have enough people and resources in 2026 to execute your campaigns in-house, or will you need to hire new employees and/or contract external resources? The answers to this question can greatly affect your budget.
- Existing tools and technology: Social media marketing tools streamline digital marketing efforts and save you money in the long run. Make a list of all the tools you’re using, and how much they cost. Then, list the benefits they provide, and calculate a monetary value for each benefit. This list will identify which tools are essential for your team, and which could be upgraded or switched out.
- Factor in experimentation: Successful social content marketing often involves experimentation. This could include starting a new account on an emerging network like Bluesky, or trying out different types of content. Always assign a monetary value to how much experimentation you plan into your next budget. Look at how much time is needed to experiment properly and track your results. This will help you decide which experiments can become a core part of your strategy in your next budget.
- Contingency plan: Social marketing can be unpredictable; networks might get banned in certain regions, or paid ad prices might increase without warning. A contingency plan helps you react to the market and unexpected emergencies. If you’re lucky, you won’t need to dig into your contingency plan budget at all, but if you do need to, you and your shareholders will be glad you assigned it.
Take into account current economic conditions
Marketers are always asked to do more with less—and you may be asked to do the same with your upcoming social media marketing budget. When determining how much to spend on social in the coming year, factor in the following macroeconomic conditions as they may affect your organisation’s purse strings:
- Economic outlook: Factors such as inflation, interest rates, geopolitical news and consumer confidence play a large role in both marketing strategies and budgets. Stay informed about the overall economic outlook for 2026 and how it may affect your industry.
- Industry trends: Research industry-specific trends in social and identify potential opportunities for your brand. How does your target audience feel about brands on social media? What formats interest them the most? If your target audience values video formats, your creative production costs might be higher than if they preferred static images. Gather more insights into your industry, as well as the sentiments of your current audience, by using social listening tools. Social listening can uncover trends you might not have considered and provide greater insight into your audience’s expectations.
- Competitive landscape: Analyse your competitors’ social media presence. What networks are they prioritising? What types of campaigns do they run? Check their brand profiles, and consider using a dedicated tool like Sprout Competitive Analysis to benchmark your performance against your competition. For example, you might see your Instagram channel is performing better than your competitor’s, but you’re not doing as well on TikTok; this could mean increasing your TikTok budget and keep your Instagram budget the same.
What should a budget for social media marketing include?
Now that you know what to consider when developing your social media budget, let’s dive into how to budget for social media marketing. Here are some factors to consider as you do so.
Employees and training
To excel on social—and keep your marketers from burning out—businesses should invest in recruiting, hiring and retaining social marketers. Per the 2025 Impact of Social Media Marketing Report, three-quarters of all marketing leaders have anticipated increasing social team headcount in the next year. And more than 50% anticipate needing to hire for specialised roles.
If you’re looking to hire new staff, factor their salaries and other costs of employment into your budget, such as recruitment costs. Include time spent reviewing resumes and onboarding staff. The more you factor in at this stage, the less hiring will impact your overall budget plan.
Keep in mind that adding new members to your team isn’t the only option. Sometimes, a reorganisation of existing team members may do the job. The majority of social teams are structured by network, while others are structured by audience engagement, content distribution and internal functional support. Consider what structure may work best for your team.
No matter how big your team is, training will always be part of your budget. If you don’t learn or adjust to new features, you risk falling behind your competitors. If your training costs are adding up, consider how you could offset them by relying more on contractors, agencies or freelancers instead of internal hires.
Content creation and production
Social media has accelerated business competition, but developing creative, informative content helps brands stand out in a crowded landscape. Consistently publishing and investing in content—emphasising quality over quantity, according to The 2025 Content Benchmarks Report—is imperative for achieving social goals.
Whether you produce content in-house or you outsource, it takes money, time and lots of planning. On average, video production costs organisations between $880 and $1200 per video but can vary by location. But given that video is a top content format for social, you should definitely include it in your strategy. And don’t forget post-production—editing, audio and graphic design work also takes time and money. Don’t let your content fall flat because you forgot to budget for post-production effort.
Brands publish an average of 9.5 posts per day across social channels, but the number can vary depending on industry. If your content strategy requires a higher volume of daily posts, your budget in this area might be much larger than that of a brand that posts a few times a week.
One way to alleviate costs is to build a user-generated content strategy to supplement some of your content calendar while also building brand loyalty. It’s something social media users crave, along with authentic, non-promotional content, according to The 2025 Sprout Social IndexTM. Keep in mind that while user-generated content can reduce some of your content creation costs, you’ll still need to allocate resources to managing it.
Another idea is to repurpose your existing content across multiple channels and media types. Can you edit a video into a GIF? Or turn article quotes into graphics? This is a great strategy to stretch your budget while reinforcing your brand’s value proposition with consistent key messages.
Software, subscriptions and AI tools
Social media software can transform the productivity of your social media department, helping you drive revenue and make a business impact.
Plenty of social teams use resources that come with recurring monthly or annual costs. They include subscriptions to social media management and analytics tools or customer support and email platforms.
Relying on native social networks to manage all the moving parts of your social strategy can hinder your progress. Social media tools enhance efficiency, empower creativity and generate data that benefits your whole business. Some of our favourites, which range in price, include:
Whatever keeps your social marketing running smoothly should be included in this area of your budget. If you are considering changes or new software in the coming year, consider including some padding here.
If you’re not sure when to upgrade your enterprise level social media management software, check out this article where we walk through considerations to think about before committing to a tool.
Within your software budget, make sure to consider AI tools. If used appropriately, AI-powered tools expedite nearly every social media management task, from data analysis to content creation to customer engagement and more.
Consider which tasks your social team spends time on each week that could be made more efficient by artificial intelligence tools. For example, triaging customer support requests is a cumbersome manual task that can take up a lot of time from a social media manager’s day. AI and automation, such as found in Sprout Customer Care, can triage customer requests and give your agents data about previous interactions to speed up responses, helping your team focus their time on other priorities.
Advertising and paid campaigns
Advertising is another big-budget area for social, and for good reason. For companies executing multichannel campaigns, you’ll need to decide how much to allocate for each channel. If Facebook is your biggest channel, for example, it makes sense to devote more money there. The average Facebook ad cost per click hovers around the $0.6 mark, but fluctuates based on industry.
If you want to grow your Instagram audience, invest more of your social media campaign budget in Instagram ads. Thankfully, you can manage Instagram and Facebook ads from one location, and even serve the same ad across both networks.
If you’re just starting out with social media advertising, we suggest learning the basics first and experimenting with different platforms, targeting options and content approaches.
Influencer and creator partnerships
Partnering with influencers and creators can have a massive impact on the success of your social marketing. Data from the 2025 Q1 Sprout Social Pulse Survey found that 83% of marketers say sponsored influencer content performs better in terms of conversion compared to organic content posted on their brand accounts.
It’s no wonder among brand collaborations, the booming creator economy and influencer marketing campaigns, brand partnerships are everywhere on social media. They effectively increase your brand presence and get new customers to your virtual door, but they do cost money to implement, especially depending on the reach of your partner.
When it comes to working with content creators, marketers cite budget as their biggest challenge. For example, almost half of all influencers charge between $250 to $1,000 per post, which can be too costly for some brands. Do your research and decide which channels and content types to prioritise early to make a better case for your creator-focused budget. When budgeting for content, consider outlining your own influencer rate card as a guidepost.
Look at Influencer marketing as an investment. The Q3 2025 Sprout Social Pulse Survey found 32% of consumers bought a product or service through an influencer’s sponsored post in the past 12 months.
Whether a celebrity or an influencer, it’s important to research to choose the right partner for your brand to reap the greatest ROI. The cost of your partnerships can depend on content type, as well as the platform you’re requesting content for. While you’re cementing your contract with brand partners, make sure to incorporate a mutually agreed-upon social reporting plan so both parties can track how well the partnership performs.
If you’re unsure how much of your budget to dedicate to influencers, use this handy influencer marketing budget template. Use this template to strategically allocate resources to high-value partnerships and control costs by setting clear spending limits.
Social customer care
Budgeting for customer care should be a priority for any brand, as positive customer support can build stronger relationships between you and your customers. According to the Q2 2025 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, when brands are unresponsive to social customer service questions, 68% will never or only sometimes reach out to the brand again on traditional channels. To retain customers and provide a memorable brand experience, it’s vital to embed a customer care budget into your wider social media budget.
One of the biggest challenges brands face when providing customer care over social media is that they are inundated with customer requests and inquiries, making it difficult for them to resolve issues promptly.
Social customer care solutions that streamline processes and increase efficiency are a great investment for brands that want to create memorable customer relationships. Look at investing in tools like Sprout Social that can help you streamline social inbox management, or hiring new team members who are directly responsible for customer care requests. With this investment, you can better cater to your customers and build lasting relationships with them that benefit you in the future.
Agencies and contractors
Investing some of your budget into agencies or contractors frees up time for your internal team, and enables you to work with experienced partners. Outsourced teams can bring a new creative direction to your content strategies, which helps with experimentation. It also helps you branch out into different content types or onto new platforms.
The age of AI has only increased the relevance of contractors. Sprout’s Impact of Social Media Report found that 71% of leaders have upped their investments in agencies and contractors since adopting AI.
To determine your outsourcing budget, first assess the capabilities of your internal team. Look at where they’re excelling, and where they need more support. Then, search for agencies and contractors who specialise in filling those gaps, whether it’s content scheduling, video creation or managing influencer partnerships. Compare their prices against the time and costs you’d need to pay if you did it yourself. This should determine how much you can afford to spend on contractors in a given quarter.
Finally, make sure you value the work of contractors. By building long-term relationships with them, you won’t need to engage in a recruitment or sourcing process again in the future; you can instead go to them directly. Working regularly with the same partners also allows them to get to know your brand, which can result in superior content with improved results.
Tips for getting your social media budget approved
You’ve just finalised your new social media budget, now what? The next step is to get it signed off by your internal leaders.
According to Sprout’s Impact of Social Media Report, social practitioners frequently identified internal collaborators as vital to their success. Here’s some guidance on how to not just get your budget signed off, but encourage shareholders and business leaders to actively support your social strategies to boost your ROI even further.
Connect performance to ROI (return on investment)
Measuring social media performance through social media ROI is perhaps the best way to prove what you’re doing is working.
To calculate social ROI, input key metrics like your impressions, reach and engagement against the total cost of content creation, paid ads, tools and others. You can calculate an overall social ROI, as well as ROIs across different platforms. It’s worth doing both so you can hone in on what’s working, and explain why your strategy focuses on certain channels.
Connect every proposal in your budget to an ROI calculation, and then explain why you need a budget increase (or decrease) based on this calculation.
This clearly shows C-suite leaders what you plan to achieve with your budget. It also means you have trackable metrics you can use to see whether your budgetary plans are actually working and refine over time.
Align your social media goals to business impact
Alongside ROI, it’s also worth linking your social media goals to wider business objectives. This might include:
- Recruitment and employee retention increases
- Increased lead gen
- Increased press coverage
- Stronger brand reputation
- Increased product or service sales
- Expansion into different regional markets
Your business objectives will vary significantly depending on your company. Social media doesn’t operate in a vacuum; everything you do on social should positively impact your business online and off. Link your budget proposal to key business outcomes to show senior leaders how your budget directly impacts the future of the company.
Demonstrate the value of social intelligence
Social media intelligence refers to how the data you’ve gained from social media can be turned into detailed, actionable information about your customers and their expectations. It’s a uniquely powerful process, and one that you need to communicate to your stakeholders.
Tools like social listening enable you to collect social intelligence information which simply wouldn’t be possible if you weren’t investing in social media reach. Show leaders how you can use this information to refine sales conversations, audience segmenting, product feature updates and more.
By connecting social intelligence to other departments, you can prove how improvements made to your social strategy can benefit the entire company. This can help justify budget increases, or any planned experimentation across your channels.
Highlight competitive gaps and benchmarks
Social insights can reveal competitive gaps that you can use to your advantage. Identify exactly what your competitors are doing online and benchmark your performance against theirs.
This reveals industry-wide insights into what’s working and what isn’t, and the makeup of your competitors’ social presence. Use this data to find ways to outperform them.
Make sure to visualise your benchmark data, so leaders can clearly see performance figures. Explain that by continuing to invest in your social media, you can obtain even more detailed information on your competition over time. This can further improve your social output, as well as guide companywide objectives and support differentiation strategies.
Create a new social media marketing budget to set your team up for success
Social media budgets should be evaluated regularly. At a minimum, you should aim to review your social media budget annually. This means you can adapt to new trends, platforms and content types, and gives you plenty of data to learn from across your prior performance.
Get started with Sprout’s free annual social media budget template. Use this template to track costs related to content production, paid ads, resourcing, and software, so you can re-evaluate and prepare for a more cost-effective future for your social team.
Social media marketing budget FAQs
How do you choose the advertising budget for social media ads?
Your social media ads budget should be guided by your goals (including KPIs), the number of platforms you’re using, and the size of your overall marketing budget. Use this data to determine your upcoming budget, and refine this over time based on previous performance.
Which tools help track the effectiveness of a social media budget and identify areas to increase investment?
Sprout Social allows you to identify the performance of your social platforms (down to individual posts), which can help with budget allocation. Sprout’s reporting tools also show which areas of your social strategy are overperforming, and which need reworking.
What steps should I follow to set up a competitive social media budget for a new product launch?
First, determine your launch goals and who your audience is. Then, decide on the ideal social channels to reach them. Define a content strategy, and then allocate your budget based on this strategy. Make sure to perform some competitive analysis so you can compare your plan against your competition.
