Social Media Management Packages: What to Include and What to Charge

What social media management packages are

Social media management packages are fixed monthly fees for a defined amount of social work. Instead of quoting each request, you sell a bundle: this many platforms, this many posts, this much community management, a report at the end of the month, for one price.

Two people search this phrase and they want opposite things. One runs an agency and is trying to decide what to charge. The other runs a business and is trying to work out what a fair price looks like before a call. This page answers both, because the honest answer to each is the same set of numbers.

If you are buying one, the prices are in what packages cost and the questions to ask are in per-platform and add-on pricing. If you are pricing one, start at how to price your own package and come back for the market check.

What is inside a package, tier by tier

Six things turn up in almost every published package. The tier decides how much of each, not whether it appears at all.

Strategy, even if it is only a kickoff and a quarterly review. Content creation, which is where most of the cost sits. Scheduling and publishing. Community management, meaning somebody answers comments and messages. Reporting, monthly at the low end and more often higher up. And an account manager, or at least a named person who replies.

What changes between tiers is the count. Platforms, posts, video, and how fast somebody answers.

If you sell a content mix such as 70:20:10, or an engagement habit such as 5-5-5, put a number on it in the scope. Five comments a day and thirty comments a day are the same promise and very different amounts of work.

Starter tier: $400 to $800 a month

One or two platforms and around twelve posts, usually static graphics rather than video. Somebody watches the comments. A report lands at the end of the month. This is what a local business or a solo founder actually buys, and below about $400 something is normally missing, most often original content or anybody replying.

Growth tier: $750 to $1,550 a month

Two to four platforms, twelve to twenty posts, and short-form video enters the scope. Community management becomes daily, boosted posts get managed, and there is a monthly strategy call with a named person. Where a Growth package drops to eight posts, as CrunchGrowth's $1,000 tier does, you are paying for production rather than volume. This is the busiest part of the market.

Full service tier: $2,000 to $5,000 a month

Three or more platforms with the strategy leading the content rather than following it. Custom research, a content calendar agreed in advance, video production, real campaign management rather than boosting, and reporting more often than monthly.

Two details separate a package that holds together from one that does not. Say whether video is included, because a reel costs several times what a static graphic costs and most disputes start there. And say who writes the copy, because captions look small until somebody has to write sixty of them.

What packages cost, from published prices

Two vendor guides published in 2026 give the same band. Sprout Social says $500 to $5,000 a month; WebFX says $500 to $5,000 a month. HoneyBook does not use a band at all, and prices per platform at $800 to $1,200 each. Identical round numbers from two marketing blogs are weak corroboration rather than strong, which is why the published packages below matter more.

Below that band sit real published packages, which are more useful because each one names what you get.

Between $400 and $800 you are buying one or two platforms and about twelve posts. Between $750 and $1,550 you get two to four, and the top of that band is buying video rather than extra networks. Full campaign management, as opposed to boosting the occasional post, does not appear until around $2,000.

Per-platform and add-on pricing

Packages get sold per platform more often than per post, because platform count is the thing a client already understands. HoneyBook publishes $800 to $1,200 per platform per month, and that is a reasonable anchor for a package built by addition rather than by tier.

Platforms are not equal, and video is the single biggest cost line in social. A LinkedIn-only package published at $2,497 a month sits beside a Facebook-only one at $400, and neither is mispriced.

Price the extras separately, and publish the price rather than negotiating it each time:

• An extra platform. Cheaper than the first one, because the strategy and much of the content already exist.
• Extra short-form video beyond the included count. This is the add-on clients ask for most and the one that costs you most.
• A photo or video shoot. A separate line, quoted per shoot, never folded into a monthly fee.
• Paid advertising management. A percentage of spend, described below.
• Onboarding or setup. LYFE Marketing publishes a one-time $300 setup fee alongside its packages, which is a reasonable shape: the first month costs you more than the twelfth, so charge for it once.

Advertising is the important one. Managing ad spend normally sits outside the package fee, billed as a percentage of that spend. WebFX puts social ad management at 10 to 20 percent in its 2024 guide, and WordStream reports the same band for paid search. LYFE Marketing calls 15 to 20 percent a fair market rate, though its own published ad management fees are flat monthly figures starting at $500, which is worth knowing before you assume the percentage is universal. Larger budgets tend to slide down the scale, and a floor such as a minimum monthly fee or the percentage, whichever is greater, is common for small accounts.

The five pricing models, and which one wins

They are not equally good businesses.

Monthly retainer. A fixed fee for a defined scope. Promethean Research, which surveys agency leaders at scale for its annual industry report, puts 7.5 of 10 digital agencies on the retainer model, with the most common retainer under $5,000 a month and almost half of them under $10,000. This is the model this page is about.

Per platform. A fee per network. Easy to sell and easy to expand, but it prices the container rather than the work, so a demanding single platform can be underpriced.

Per post. Around $40 to $150 a post for content creation, by WebFX's 2026 figures. Honest for one-off work and a poor fit for ongoing management, because the parts clients value most, replying to comments and thinking about what to do next, produce no posts.

Hourly. Sprout Social puts freelance social media managers at $20 to $150 an hour. It survives audits and strategy work. As a retainer it punishes you for getting faster.

Performance based. Paid per click, per lead or per sale. It reads well in a pitch and it hands your revenue to somebody else's landing page, their sales team and their product.

The retainer wins for the same reason it wins everywhere: it is the only one of the five where a good month for the client is also a predictable month for you.

Agency, freelancer or in house

Before the price comes the choice of who does the work, and the cheapest hourly rate is rarely the cheapest outcome.

The number that decides it is volume. One platform and twelve posts a month does not justify a salary. Four platforms, video and paid campaigns usually does, and at that point an agency is buying you speed rather than saving you money.

How to price your own package

The published numbers tell you what the market bears. They do not tell you what your package should cost, because they do not know what it costs you to deliver.

Start from delivery hours. Track one real client for one month, everything: creation, scheduling, replies, the call, the report, the revision nobody scoped. Multiply by what an hour actually costs you rather than what you bill. Our blended rate calculator does that sum across a mixed team, and the billable hours calculator shows what share of the week reaches an invoice.

Add the non-billable share. Onboarding, the account manager's attention, the strategy nobody counts. If your package price only covers the hours that produce posts, the account is unprofitable and the reason will be invisible.

Then check the number against the market. If your cost-based price lands at $2,400 for one platform and twelve posts, the table above says you will lose those deals. That is not a signal to discount. It is a signal that the scope is too generous for the tier.

Promethean Research puts average agency net margin at 13 percent in 2025, so there is less room in this business than most pricing conversations assume. And AgencyAnalytics, surveying more than 220 agency leaders in 2025, found that 67 percent of agencies do not rely on discounts to win business, and that among those who do offer an incentive, 24 percent make it volume-based on larger retainers. Holding your price is closer to normal than it feels.

The line that stops a package losing money

Packages rarely fail on price. They fail because nobody wrote down what happens when the client wants more than the package includes.

Month one the package says twelve posts and the client gets twelve posts. Month four they ask for a thirteenth, and it is one post, and saying no over one post feels absurd. By month seven the package is nineteen posts at the twelve post price and nobody can point at the moment it changed.

The fix is one line in the proposal, agreed before anyone is annoyed.

Clients almost never object to a cap. They object to finding out there was one at the moment they hit it. Naming the overage price up front turns an awkward conversation into a line item, and it quietly gives the client a reason to upgrade.

Running the package once it is sold

The operational problem with packages is not the social work. It is that the fee, the included counts, the usage and the invoice live in four different places, so nobody knows in week three whether a client is over.

In AgencyKit a package is set up once on the client: the monthly fee, the currency, the billing day, and how much of each service it includes, for example twelve designs and eight posts. When a task tagged with one of those services is completed, it consumes from the allowance, so the usage figure is a consequence of work delivered rather than something anybody maintains.

At the end of the period a daily job drafts that month's invoice as unpaid and tells the owner. It is never sent automatically, because an invoice that goes out before anybody looks at it is a support ticket waiting to happen. On the Agency plan and above you are notified the moment an allowance is used up, and on Agency Pro the overage can be billed onto the same invoice automatically at the client's rate for that service.

A client can hold one package at a time, so tiers are something you move a client between rather than stack. On the Agency plan and above, invoices are paid by card through the client portal in USD, EUR, GBP, EGP, SAR or AED.

AgencyKit runs the commercial side of a social media package: the scope, the usage, the invoice and the paperwork. It does not schedule or publish posts, and it is not a replacement for whatever you use to do that.

When a client says yes, the paperwork is the next step: the social media proposal template covers the pitch, and the social media retainer agreement template covers the terms you sign.