What percentage of your company’s marketing spend goes to social media? This question has more layers and complexities than it may first appear, especially when you’re trying to balance broader digital marketing budgets, content marketing initiatives and other revenue marketing priorities against the need for a focused budget social media plan.
The key issue: It’s easy to undervalue social media as a marketing tool, and there’s a very simple reason why. Using social apps like Instagram and TikTok for personal rather than work reasons is typically free. This creates the impression that these networks don’t have monetary value, and that assumption can, in turn, cause marketers to limit their budgets — or fail to allocate budget strategically at all.
When your company overcomes the temptation to see these platforms through a casual, free lens, however, you can turn social media marketing into a featured part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Paid social media marketing can increase your ability to reach your target audience where they are, delivering content perfectly designed to capture their attention and contribute to tangible business goals such as brand awareness, lead generation and, ultimately, return on investment (ROI).
See how social media budgeting fits into the paid marketing puzzle. You’ll also discover why aligning paid social with content creation, digital advertising and other marketing activities is crucial for both short-term wins and long-term growth.
What Is a Social Media Budget and Why Is It Important To Create One?
A social media budget is simply the part of your overall paid marketing spend allocated to social media. In other words, it’s a specialized slice of your broader marketing budgets that ensures social media advertising, social media management and related marketing activities receive the resources they need to thrive. The term encompasses all platforms, as well as all types of spend — everything from labor costs to technology expenses and direct spending on promoted posts, influencer marketing initiatives and audience-targeted campaigns falls under this umbrella.
Social media budgets can vary widely from one business to the next, as can the appropriate size and organizational structure of the marketing teams involved. Despite this variability, setting a budget specifically for social media marketing is a consistent best practice — and one that savvy business owners revisit frequently as part of their ongoing budget allocation process.
By setting an official social media budget, rather than assigning funds to social spending ad hoc, your organization gains several advantages:
- Including social media in your marketing budget demonstrates its importance, encouraging executives to commit to ambitious marketing campaigns that drive measurable brand awareness.
- When you account for social media through a dedicated line in your digital marketing budget or marketing budget template, it’s possible to track ROI, attribute revenue marketing wins to specific activities and benchmark key performance indicators (KPIs) over time.
- These calculations can act as the fuel for consistent tuning and optimization of your brand’s social media performance.
Social media marketing isn’t just about posting content. It’s also about related practices like analyzing the reach and impact of the content. Activities such as social listening — studying the impact of your posts — and engaging directly with your community of followers are useful additions to your social strategy. The employee time that goes into these processes is part of the social media marketing budget.
Learn how to optimize your brand’s use of social media.
How Do You Make Your Social Media Budget?
As with any kind of marketing budget, the process of spending on social media is shaped by your needs and by the overarching digital marketing strategy you’ve committed to. Partnering with social media ads agencies can help refine these strategies and ensure your budget is used effectively, while a clear marketing budget template will keep spending transparent and accountable.
Incorporating strong business budgeting practices will help ensure that your social media strategies remain aligned with overall financial goals, optimizing resource allocation for maximum impact and preventing scope creep that can balloon marketing expenses.
Once you narrow down your objectives, you can determine which platforms, media types and outreach styles are right for your organization. As you plan a marketing budget, remember that a single social post can support multiple marketing strategies — from content marketing amplification and lead generation to nurturing customer loyalty — if it’s mapped to the correct funnel stage.
Some of the most important goals for social media marketers to aim for include:
- Awareness: Do you want to raise your company’s profile among a large target audience? Social media is useful for this purpose, providing a platform to show off consistently branded visual assets that will increase recognition and accelerate top-of-funnel discovery.
- Engagement: Social media is a two-way street, with your customers able to communicate directly with your employees. Social media budgeting can go toward salaries and technology that enable these conversations with your audience, powering effective social media management that humanises your brand.
- Conversions: Not every business makes sales directly through social media marketing. As social platforms add more advanced features, however, this merger between e-commerce and marketing is becoming more common and worth investigating, especially for organizations seeking predictable revenue outcomes.
- Site traffic: Social media posts are great promotional tools for other forms of marketing content. Linking to extended blog posts, videos and other deliverables through well-targeted social posts is a way to boost traffic, strengthen SEO and increase the value of that content.
Budgeting Priorities: Customized and Refined
Setting your objectives and defining your target audience will help you select platforms and determine how much to spend on each. Researching each network and determining the alignment with your goals will help your team achieve maximum results for your level of investment and safeguard your ROI.
This process of finding an optimal spend level may take some time. Because your audience and goals are unique to you, you may have your own definition of success. Rather than referring to universal benchmarks, it can pay to try out various levels of social investment, build a data-driven forecast in a budget template, then settle on the version that makes sense for you.
The 70/20/10 Budget Allocation Rule
A practical framework many marketing teams use when they plan marketing budget allocations is the 70/20/10 Rule:
- 70% for proven, top-performing campaigns: Allocate the bulk of your social media budget to the tactics and channels that have consistently delivered results. These tried-and-tested initiatives keep your marketing engine running and maintain baseline revenue.
- 20% for high-potential growth initiatives: Dedicate nearly a quarter of your spend to emerging formats or audiences that show strong promise. Think new platform features, expanding into adjacent demographics or doubling down on seasonal content marketing opportunities.
- 10% for experimental, new approaches: Reserve a small slice for bold experiments — for example, an innovative TikTok challenge, a fledgling social audio room or a cutting-edge AR filter. This controlled experimentation fuels innovation without jeopardising core performance.
This model encourages disciplined spending while giving teams the freedom to test, learn and scale what works.
Check out our social media advertising benchmarks. These figures can complement the insights you glean from your own key performance indicators, giving you a holistic view of how your marketing efforts stack up against competitors.
What Is Included in a Social Media Budget?
When you define your social media budget, what processes and deliverables do you need to set funds aside for? The most direct way to spend money is on purchased media, using the various platforms’ tool sets to put your posts in front of audience members. You will inevitably have other needs, however, including spending on employees’ salaries, creative content creation and the tech tools they use to do their jobs. All of these items belong in a marketing budget template so stakeholders can see the full picture at a glance.
Ad Spend, Platform by Platform
Buying paid media to extend the reach of your social media posts can mean different things, based on your social media platform of choice. A rough breakdown of top platforms for social media advertising includes:
- LinkedIn: The gold standard for business-to-business communication, LinkedIn is home to numerous professionals across industries. Paying to expand your reach on this no-frills site is a way to attract eyes in your field and fuel lead generation.
- Facebook: This Meta platform boasts a large user base and can help you reach a more grown-up audience. Note that Facebook ads do have to overcome a recent flood of AI-generated content designed to game the system and earn impressions. Smart budget allocation and precise audience targeting can mitigate wasted spend.
- Instagram: With more of a consumer focus but a strong business presence, Instagram ads can help you place a still image or short-form video in front of a wide general audience. In recent years, the platform has encouraged the use of Reels, its TikTok-like video offering, and Threads, designed to emulate the former Twitter. Investing in Instagram ads is a cost-effective tactic that can boost brand awareness and feed your content marketing engine.
- X / Twitter: This platform is popular for breaking news and is suitable for both business and consumer communications. Spending here is risky, however, due to unpredictable changes to the platform and the erosion of its user base from its peak, so marketers should test small media advertising budgets before scaling up.
- TikTok: With a tendency to break new trends, TikTok remains a very popular platform among consumers. Buying ad space on TikTok could be a way to reach out to the niche communities that spring up here, such as the literary-focused BookTok, and to experiment with influencer marketing collaborations that slot neatly into a digital marketing budget.
- Snapchat: This app, which rose to prominence among millennial consumers, has seen its cultural footprint among that group decrease as other platforms such as Instagram have emulated its functionality.However, Snapchat ads can help connect you with a new generation of young consumers and diversify your marketing strategies beyond the usual suspects.
- Pinterest: Boasting a community willing to engage with brands as they search for inspiration around fashion, crafts, decor, beauty and more, Pinterest can help you win direct conversions by selling your products.
- Bonus — Influencer partnerships and fees: Regardless of platform, collaborating with creators and influencers can generate outsized returns — but it does come with its own cost structure. Influencer fees vary by follower count, engagement rate, content format and industry niche. When you plan marketing budget allocations, factor in flat fees, performance-based bonuses and product seeding costs so that influencer marketing spends don’t blindside the rest of your media marketing budget.
Human Capital
Buying ads across platforms isn’t the only focus for your social budget. You can also allocate spend for dedicated employees who will take ownership of your brand’s social media strategy. While there’s an obvious need for people to run your strategy, some business leaders overlook the need to dedicate employees to the task, leading to hidden marketing expenses and unmet expectations.
Workers contributing to a social media advertising strategy can include:
- Creative personnel to create the images, text, videos and other media that become parts of compelling social media posts. Their efforts also support wider content marketing initiatives, ensuring consistent messaging across channels.
- Strategists to plot out social calendars, using their expertise to direct budget toward the most impactful projects and priorities for the brand. These professionals often rely on a central budget template to keep every stakeholder aligned.
- Communications personnel to serve as social media managers and engage directly with customers through companies’ official accounts, strengthening relationships and driving engagement metrics.
- Analysts to measure the impact of posts, A/B test the latest releases and propose new approaches based on quantitative results, ensuring your marketing efforts contribute to tangible ROI.
Technology Tools
Creating a social media account is free across most platforms. That doesn’t mean, however, that businesses shouldn’t spend on social media technology. Social suites and tools (e.g., Hootsuite or Sprout Social) to help businesses manage their posts, measure results and post consistently across platforms and networks can provide ROI by improving results significantly. In many cases, the monthly subscription fee for these platforms is a fraction of what you’ll save through streamlined workflows and smarter budget marketing decisions.
Learn more in our social media marketing guide.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Budgeting
There are so many moving parts in a social media marketing campaign; it’s natural to have more questions. Below, we’ve pulled together some of the most common marketing budget FAQs so you can find quick, actionable answers:
- How Much Should You Spend (Total) on Social Media Marketing?
Average spending on social media is at 14.3% of marketing spend in the most recent CMO Survey. Marketers expect it will rise to 17.1% in the year following the survey, and 23.1% in five years. The amount your brand spends is entirely dependent on your goals, audience preferences and brand values. Using a flexible marketing budget template makes it easy to test different forecast scenarios.
- What Goes Into Ongoing Management of Paid Social Campaigns?
Managing long-term social media campaigns can include content moderation, community engagement, ongoing content creation, continuous optimization of digital advertising bids and creative refresh cycles, along with consistent data analysis to track key performance indicators.
- How Do You Measure the Success of a Social Media Campaign?
The success of a campaign depends on your objective. Your goal — conversions, engagement, awareness, traffic — will determine what to measure. Map each KPI to a clear dollar value wherever possible to see the true impact on revenue marketing and justify future budget allocation.
- When Is It Time To Change Course With a Social Campaign?
The relative impact of a social media campaign is unique to your brand. By testing paid advertising efforts over time and measuring them, you can set benchmarks and become adept at determining when campaigns are failing to live up to your standards. Many marketing teams establish monthly or quarterly budget marketing review meetings to analyse performance against the digital marketing budget and adjust tactics accordingly.
Read more about setting a paid advertising budget that makes sense for you.
Ready To Get Started on Your Social Media Marketing Budget?
If your brand doesn’t have a dedicated budgeting guide for social media — whether that means only using free apps or drawing resources from general marketing spend ad hoc — you can unlock new opportunities by becoming more intentional about your spending. Paid social media ads can reach new audiences based on your targeting parameters, and they integrate seamlessly with broader digital marketing strategy elements such as SEO, email nurturing and content marketing.
With a budget, you can track, adjust and optimize your spending. This level of focus may pay off as you achieve deeply held marketing goals, from heightened brand awareness to predictable lead generation pipelines.
Editor’s Note: Updated April 2026.
