Social media management packages, line by line

If you run a business and you are holding two proposals that both say twelve posts a month, this page is for you. If you are a social media manager building a price list to sell, this is not, and about one in eight searches on this phrase is yours rather than theirs.

Here is what a social media management package contains, what sits outside it, and the four questions that make two proposals comparable. For what the market charges overall, we already published a full cost breakdown with sources. This page is about specification.

What is inside a social media management package?

Three tiers, sold under roughly the same names everywhere. This is how Google summarised them for this exact search on 8 September 2026, drawn from the pages it cites at the top of the results.

Hourly pricing runs alongside it. Freelancers are quoted at $25 to $75 an hour and senior agency strategists at $100 to $250 an hour and up, on the same summary.

Read the tier names as marketing rather than as specification. Every provider draws the lines in a different place, which is why the next section matters more than this table does.

Why do two packages with the same number of posts differ eightfold in price?

Because the post count overlaps across tiers and the format does not.

Look again at the middle column. A starter package covers 8 to 16 pieces a month. A growth package covers 12 to 25. Twelve to sixteen pieces a month sits comfortably inside both, and those two bands are priced $500 to $1,500 and $1,500 to $4,000.

So a business asking for fourteen posts a month can be quoted $500 by one provider and $4,000 by another, and both are quoting their standard package honestly. The count is the same. What differs is whether those fourteen pieces are template graphics assembled from photos you send, or finished videos somebody produced.

That is the single most useful thing to know before you compare two prices. Fix the format first, then compare counts, then compare money. In that order, the difference between two proposals becomes obvious in about a minute.

What gets billed on top of the monthly fee?

The line most often missed is the channel add-on. Adding one platform beyond what the package covers is quoted at $500 to $2,500 a month on top, on the same summary read on 8 September 2026. An extra channel can therefore cost more than an entire starter package.

Four other items are commonly outside the monthly fee, and each one is worth asking about by name before you sign.

What is inside ours, and what is deliberately not?

We publish the whole specification rather than quoting it on a call, so it can be compared against anything above.

Every piece in every tier is a finished, captioned, branded video published to your channels. There is no tier here where the deliverable is a template graphic, which is why the entry price sits below the $500 floor of the market summary above rather than beside it.

Two things are outside the fee, and we would rather write them here than let you find them in a contract. We do not manage paid advertising or ad spend, and we do not reply to comments or messages as you. If either matters to you, you need somebody in addition to us.

The reason the price can sit where it does is the production method rather than a discount. You record with us once at the start, we build a model of your face and voice from that session, and everything after that is produced without you on camera. There is more detail on how the process runs and the full specification on the pricing page.

How do you read two proposals that use the same words?

Four questions. Ask them in this order and the proposals stop looking alike.

1. What format is each piece? A written post, a template graphic, and a finished video are three different purchases sold under one word. Get the split in numbers.
2. Who supplies the raw material? If the answer is you, price your own hours into the quote before you compare it to anything.
3. Who approves before it publishes in your name? In a regulated trade this is not administrative. It decides whether a claim you never saw goes out under your licence.
4. What happens in a month you send nothing? This is the question that predicts month four. Most social retainers a small business buys die because the owner stopped sending material, not because the provider stopped working.

If a proposal cannot answer those four in a sentence each, it is selling hours rather than a deliverable. For turning the answers into a comparable number, the cost breakdown has the arithmetic.

Which package size makes sense for a business like yours?

The tier you need is set by what one customer is worth to you, not by how big your business feels. Divide the annual package cost by the value of one new customer, and the answer tells you how hard the package has to work.

A law firm clearing one case a year from a $200 package has already paid for a decade of it. A studio selling memberships needs the package to work considerably harder, which is an argument for starting at the entry tier rather than for skipping it.

Is this term worth writing about at all?

Worth saying plainly, since we sell what this page describes. Searches for social media management packages in the United States averaged 390 a month over the year to July 2026 and ran at 480 in both June and July, up 23% on the year and 50% on the quarter. A click costs $10.62, and Google scores the advertiser competition at 0.13 out of 1.

Roughly 140 of the 1,100 monthly searches across the whole phrase family ask for a PDF, a template, a sample or an example. Those are the phrasings somebody types while assembling a price list to sell, which is why the first line of this page sends them elsewhere. The rest are owners holding proposals, and every one of them is being quoted a number that starts at $500 because nobody in the results publishes anything lower.

We publish $200. The specification for it is above, and the pricing page carries the rest.