How Do You Allocate Social Media Spending?

Lately I’ve been reading a marketing book that was written in 2006/2007. It seems like that was just yesterday, but just think about how much has changed in marketing since then. Twitter was no more than a teeny tiny idea back then. Facebook was still JUST a place for friends to connect. A LOT less people were talking about how traditional advertising is dead (it still isn’t). Yet, it’s sort of fun to read marketing books written even 20 years ago to see what remains true as well as what has changed.

The book I’m reading was talking about e-commerce (wow, haven’t used that term much lately, have we?) It talked about how you can invest 100% of your money into building your site, and if you have none left over, you can’t expect to be very successful. It suggests using the rule of thirds: allocate 1/3 of your online marketing budget to developing the site, 1/3 of it to promoting your site, and 1/3 of it to maintaining the site.

I like to think of it as a brick and mortar store. If you spend 100% of your marketing money on building a sweet physical store, and save none of it to promote it or maintain it, then good luck. You need people to actually run the store. You’re sweet design won’t be sweet after a week or so when it starts looking like a mess. You need to pump some money into actually letting people know about the store.

So, since the ultimate goal of (most) using social media is to start rolling in some mad dough, does this rule of thirds still hold true?

First of all, I don’t like thinking of this as an exact formula. Every business situation calls for a different approach, especially when it comes to allocating money to different areas. Yet, the principle of the rule of thirds, that you must realize that you need to allocate your budget to different areas in order to be successful. As we know, social media isn’t free. You will have to spend time and money (and time is money anyways) to be successful. So, how would you break it down?

DESIGN

Personally, I think that we’re fortunate that with most social tools, we are given a pretty standard framework to work under so that we don’t have to worry too much about design compared to an entire e-commerce site. Sure, your blog should look good (but that isn’t too expensive, you can get someone to hook you up pretty cheaply), or maybe you want some sweet custom work done on your Facebook Page that requires forking out a bit of money. Basically, you can spend a lot of money here, but it’s by no means necessary for success.

PROMOTION

Wait, what? Promote your social accounts in traditional mediums? Who would ever think to do that? The cool thing about this is that you can sorta borrow money from the budget of the traditional marketing/advertising group if you choose this route. You may want to go crazy spending money on some legit e-mail marketing services to help promote, you may buy up a bunch of Facebook Ads, you may fork out some money to Google and company until you can improve on SEO and get organic traffic. Again, you can really go wild with promotion, much more so than the design, but you can also use some of the free promotional tools out there to get off the ground.

MAINTENANCE

This, my friends, is a pretty darn important area. You may need to hire new staff to be able to split up or take full responsibility of maintaining each of your social presences. You can’t expect someone who already is at 90% capacity to use that extra 10% of their time to do a stellar job of this account maintenance – the quality will suffer. Furthermore, you may want to spend a little cash on some tools that will help streamline your social media efforts. Programs like Basecamp, Salesforce (both of which aren’t limited to social media, so you can see benefits in other areas using them too), CoTweet (free for now), etc. will help you get the most out of these efforts and keep everyone on the same page. I guess the two sub-areas here are content creation and process optimization.

Now, I’m not entirely sure which of these areas monitoring tools like Radian6 or BuzzMgr (my company’s offering) would fit in. Maintenance would probably be the best fit in this framework, but that’s not to say that we can’t add an entirely new category, right?

So to summarize. I think that design may deserve the least amount of money, while maintenance may deserve the largest allocation of your budget. Either way, the key takeaway here is you need to realize what social media is really going to cost you in order to execute it very well.

I’d really be interested in hearing your thoughts on how to prioritize spending in these three areas. Also, do you think these three buckets are the best way to separate where the budget should be going, or do we need to create new ones with the arrival of social media?

Image by Jeff Belmonte

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