What is the Cost of Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising packages from the best social media marketing companies typically cost between £300 and £2,000+ per month, depending on the number of posts and variety of channels you’d like to advertise on. Meanwhile, freelancers offer rates from £15 to £60 per hour, depending on their experience and the project’s complexity.

The exact cost depends on your specific needs, which makes it hard to pin down a price. However, for an idea of how much you’ll actually pay you can use our free social media cost comparison tool to compare real quotes from leading agencies.

Alternatively, keep reading to find the latest costs of social media advertising, and get to grips with which factors are at play when it comes to your final bill.

What influences social media advertising costs?

The price you pay for social media advertising depends on many factors:

How many channels you use and which ones

The more social media platforms you use, the more you’ll pay. Also, the specific channels you use will affect the cost of your social media advertising – different platforms come with varying fees, which we’ll break down in the following section.

Number of posts and images

Most social media advertising packages come with a ‘posts per month’ fee. For example, a basic plan may include 10 posts per month, while a more advanced option will include 50 posts per month.

Like any packaged service, the more you want, the more you’ll pay. You’ll also pay more for customised images, as opposed to stock images, because they take longer to create.

Number of promoted posts

Some platforms, like Facebook, allow you to boost your posts to reach a wider, specific, targeted audience – for a fee. This is known as ad targeting, which will add to the overall cost of your social media advertising.

The size of your bid

‘Bidding’ is part of paid advertising. Your bid is how much you’re willing to pay for a specific action, whether it’s cost-per-click (CPC) or cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). Competing with other online businesses, your bid is placed in an auction to help secure your advert placement on the social media platform.

With CPC, you pay the social media platform each time a user clicks on your promoted link, post, or image. Across all platforms, this costs on average from £0.75 to £1.06 per click. In CPM, you pay every time your ad is seen by 1,000 users, which can cost between £3 and £8 per thousand impressions. For both methods, your ads will be deployed evenly over time, until your overall budget is reached, which you can as low as £1 per day on Facebook and Instagram ads.

Social media marketing strategy

When using a social media agency, your social media posts will form part of an overarching strategy. These strategies typically include an audit of your social platforms, which includes analysing your performance, deciding on metrics, and creating end goals. Agencies can charge anything from £150 to £3,000+, depending on the size of your business.

Social media advertising costs per platform

Below, we’ve included the average amount that businesses spend on paid adverts for different platforms, along with the minimum budget required by each platform.

With so many prices to consider, it’s difficult to know how much social media marketing will cost your specific business. But don’t worry, the easiest way to get a clear price is through our free cost comparison tool. Simply answer a few questions, and we’ll match you with the UK’s top agencies who’ll offer you direct, no-obligation quotes. It couldn’t be easier.

Facebook advertising costs

With 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular platforms for social media advertising and offers lots of growth opportunities. The bidding model you go for depends on your objectives.

For example, if you want to drive traffic from Facebook to your website, you’ll measure your costs in CPC. Alternatively, if you want to increase brand awareness, then you’ll adjust your budget based on CPM. This is because, unlike CPC, the main aim of CPM is to have your ads seen online, not necessarily clicked on.

Remember, the prices above are estimates. The following factors impact the cost of Facebook advertising:

• The size of your bid
• The target audience
• Relevance score – Facebook’s evaluation of the quality and relevance of your advert in relation to your targeted keyword or phrase
• Estimated action rates – which is whether a social media user engages or converts from your ad
• The competitiveness of your industry

On Facebook, you can set a low budget and still get decent results. In the example below, it shows you can bid just $5 and run a campaign for 7 days, and still reach 1,300 people per day.

Instagram advertising costs

Instagram and Facebook are owned by Meta and use the same Ads Manager. But their costs vary.

Facebook is older, bigger, and has more data, which means it’s often less expensive than Instagram. But like Facebook, you can set a very low budget and gain exposure for your brand via Instagram advertising. Meanwhile, the bidding model you choose also depends on what you want to achieve.

The cost of Instagram advertising is typically impacted by:

• The size of your bid
• The size and demographics of your audience
• Relevance score – Instagram’s evaluation of the quality and relevance of your advert in relation to your targeted keyword or phrase
• Estimated action rates – which is whether a social media user engages or converts from your ad
• The competitiveness of your industry
• Ad placement – whether it’s the main Instagram Feed, on the Explore page, or via the Stories feed.

Twitter advertising costs

Twitter is a little different from the rest. Typically used for news, brand updates and real-time conversations between users and businesses, Twitter is ideal for promoting new products or services.

When it comes to social media advertising costs, Twitter is generally cheaper than other platforms. One of the reasons for this is Twitter’s broad definition of ‘impressions’ for its CPM bidding model.

In Twitter’s eyes, an impression is ‘any time your ad is shown to users’, which implies that an impression is merely when any part of your ad is shown on screen.

On the other hand, LinkedIn quantifies an impression as having your ad visible for at least 300 milliseconds with at least 50% in view on the user’s screen or browser window. With Twitter’s relative ‘open door’ policy on CPM impressions, it’s clear why it’s generally cheaper. In terms of CPC bidding, Twitter operates in a similar way – you pay for each click on your link.

The main factors affecting the cost of Twitter ads are:

• The size of your bid
• The size and demographics of your audience
• Quality score – Twitter’s evaluation of the relevance, recency (how fresh is your ad?), and resonance (how engaging is your ad?) of your ad, combined with the value of your bid
• Estimated action rates – which is whether a social media user engages or converts from your ad
• The competitiveness of your industry
• Ad placement – whether it’s the main Instagram Feed, on the Explore page, or via the Stories feed.

LinkedIn advertising costs

LinkedIn calculates CPC and CPM differently. As of 2018, LinkedIn classifies an impression of Sponsored Content as whenever the ad is at least 50% in view on a device screen or browser window for at least one second on desktop, or 300 milliseconds on mobile. This is far more specific than Twitter’s description, which is why you can expect to pay a little more for LinkedIn’s CPM.

Another reason for LinkedIn’s relatively high costs, particularly for CPC, is its business-focussed audience. On LinkedIn, you’re advertising to a professional, B2B (business-to-business) audience that is more likely to be making high-value, business decisions.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn’s CPC model charges your business for clicks on your ad content, company name, or company logo, rather than charging for just clicks on the link.

The main factors impacting LinkedIn advertising costs are:

• The size of your bid
• The size and demographics of your audience
• Ad relevance – how well does your ad meet each user’s needs?
• The region and country
• The competitiveness of your industry – how many other advertisers also want to target your audience

TikTok advertising costs

TikTok is the youngest platform on this page, but also one of the most popular. It has one billion active monthly users, which is mightily impressive considering it was founded in 2016.

TikTok’s meteoric rise makes it one of the best platforms for growing your business via social media advertising. It’s also the best platform for driving engagement, with TikTok users 1.5 times more likely to immediately go out and buy something they discovered on the platform. TikTok adverts appear as you scroll the Feed, or they can pop up when you open the app.

However, TikTok normally ends up more expensive than any other platform. This is because its ads start with a minimum daily budget of £50 when creating campaigns, and a £20 minimum budget when using the Ad-set budget.

The main factors impacting TikTok advertising costs are:

• The size of your bid
• The goals of your campaign
• The size and demographics of your audience
• Ad format – whether it’s a Hashtag challenge, brand takeover, in-feed ad, or brand filters/lenses

Average CPC and CPM for social media ads

Cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-mille (CPM) are the two most common types of bidding models. Below, we’ll show you how much you can expect to pay for these bidding models across the biggest social media platforms…

Average CPC for social media ads

The CPC bidding model means you pay the social media platform for each click on your ads, setting a maximum budget for each campaign. Unless you set bid adjustments, your budget is the highest amount that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad.

Average CPM for social media ads

The cost-per-milled bidding model, meaning cost per thousand impressions, means you pay the social media platform every time 1,000 social media users see your ad. The definition of an impression may differ between platforms. The costs are generally higher than CPC, because you’re paying for 1,000 views of your brand, not just a single click on a link.

Verdict: What will social media advertising cost my business?

On average, you can expect to pay between £300 and £2,000+ per month for social media advertising. The cost depends on many factors, including the number of posts, how many platforms you advertise on, and how much you bid. Let’s recap the ballpark figures…

Facebook advertising typically costs £0.86 per click, or £6.37 per thousand impressions, while Instagram costs on average £3.15 per click, and £6.99 per thousand impressions. Then with TikTok, you need to spend a minimum of £50 per day for campaigns, but you can also pay up to $150,000 (or about £125,000) per week for a hashtag challenge.

With so many factors, it can be difficult to know the exact cost of social media advertising for your business. The easiest way to find out is by comparing real quotes from leading social media agencies, using our free comparison tool.

Simply answer a few questions about your business, and we’ll match you with the most appropriate social media experts. They’ll then contact you with free, no-obligation quotes. Our tool is quick, easy, and totally free to use.