How to create a social media budget and spend smarter in 2025

Fully 60% of marketers feel that the way they spend their budget – and the ROI they get from it – is being scrutinized more today than in the past.

So it’s no wonder you’ve landed here to find out how you can better optimize your social media budget this year.

As a content professional (and former social media manager), you’ve come to the right place. Let’s talk about what a good social media marketing budget looks like, who should be included, and how to power your approach with data.

Table of contents

What is a social media budget?

A social media budget (or social media marketing budget) is a specific amount of money that a company sets aside for social media marketing activities such as content creation and campaign analysis.

The most comprehensive social media budgets cover:

• Strategy and planning: This includes Setting goals and objectives, conducting audience research and competitive analysis, selecting priority channels and setting KPIs.
• Content development and publishing: This includes setting a content cadence, creating a content calendar, writing content and creating multimedia content (e.g. audio and video), and planning/publishing content.

• community mAdministration: This includes building and maintaining online brand communities, tracking brand mentions, and monitoring conversations via hashtags, comments, and direct messages.
• Data analysis and reporting: This includes evaluating post-level metrics (e.g. reach, impressions, engagements), creating reports and optimizing content performance.
• Tools and software: This includes publishing, reporting, campaign management, social listening and monitoring, and other social media management tools. (If you want a one stop shop option, HubSpot’s social media management software does it all for free.)
• SOcial Commerce, Sponsored Content and Advertising: This includes managing on-platform product sales and promotions, collaborating with influencers or creators, and running paid advertising campaigns. (And if you need help planning your ad strategy, this kit is great for that.)
• Learning and development: This includes training new employees, offering continuing education courses, and upskilling based on AI best practices or other emerging trends.
• Other expenses: This includes social media giveaways, contests and other promotions that have monetary value or require additional resources.

Importance of Creating a Social Media Budget

From marketer to marketer, I know that our budgets are often limited. A well-thought-out social media budget allows us to set realistic goals, understand our priorities, organize our activities and ultimately spend our money wisely.

Without a budget, you risk overspending on frivolous activities, leaving little or no funds left to support your core goals. It’s like wasting your paycheck on clothes and travel before realizing you haven’t paid your mortgage.

A social media marketing budget also ensures that everyone in your company is aligned with your strategy. And by “everyone” I mean…

Social media budget stakeholders

Here are the usual suspects involved in the social media marketing budget process:

• CMO and Marketing Manager+: Responsible for setting strategy, communicating requested budget to leadership, and directing execution of activities.
• Social media team (all levels): The doers who understand which areas require the most investment and which activities are worth spending money on.
• SEO and data analysts: Provide insights based on previous campaigns and predict trends that could impact future budgets.
• Finance team: Track historical forecasts and spending patterns and enforce budgets across the organization.

Pro tip: It wouldn’t hurt to run your plans through the sales team either. Our data shows that one of the biggest challenges marketers face right now is sales and marketing alignment. Alignment starts with shared data and extends to shared goals.

How to create a social media marketing budget

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I spoke to a few marketing and social media experts about the most important factors to consider when creating a social media budget.

Here’s what they said.

1. Start by understanding what you want to achieve.

John KaweckiMarketing Manager at F1 Blast, stressed the importance of taking a step back and figuring out your goals before crunching the numbers.

Kawecki says, “I learned to first ask, ‘What are we actually trying to do here?’ Because if you are not aware of this, you will just end up wasting time and money.

For us it was about building a community where F1 fans can socialize, talk about racing and find out news. So I focused our budget on platforms where we would actually find those fans, primarily Instagram and Twitter.”

It’s easier to allocate your budget to categories and activities when you know what you want to accomplish.

2. Know your audience’s social media habits.

Wisia NeoContent Marketing Manager at ViB, argues that knowing your target audience is the most important factor when creating your social media budget. Kawecki also hinted at this when talking about how he found F1 fans on Instagram and Twitter.

Neo says: “It’s easy and tempting to pour money into social channels because they’re popular with other big brands. But if your audience isn’t engaging on (these platforms), that investment won’t pay off.”

She continues: “Make it a habit to survey your customers regularly. Understand how they use social media in everyday life and how it influences their purchasing decisions. Combine these insights with data like traffic sources, conversion rates and engagement to ensure your budget is focused where it will have the greatest impact.”

I think I can speak for all marketers when I say that we’re not about throwing money away. Make sure your efforts actually meet your audience where they are.

3. Set realistic spending milestones.

There’s no point in setting up a budget that you can’t stick to. (I also have to tell myself this every time I create a personal budget.)

Mushfiq SarkerCEO of LaGrande Marketing, points out that a realistic assessment of your budget requires understanding that each goal requires a different allocation of resources.

“If my goal is to increase brand awareness, I may invest more in ad spend on wide-reach platforms and engage in creating content that highlights my brand’s story and values,” says Sarker.

“On the other hand, when my focus is lead generation, I prioritize my budget for targeted ads and landing pages that are designed to convert.”

If your budget is limited, prioritize the most important activities knowing that you can’t do everything. And if you have some wiggle room, add some cushion to the budget categories where you tend to overspend based on your spending history (or your future projections).

Pro tip: Social media trends change with the wind. When determining the breakdown of your expenses, consider setting aside a pot for what I like to call an “unpredictability fund” – basically a budget that allows you to be flexible as needs and circumstances change Changing consumer interests.

How to distribute your social media budget

According to the current CMO surveyThe share of marketing budgets in company budgets has continued to decline over time, and companies are roughly spread out 10.1% for marketing average. If you look at marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenue, that number drops to 7.7%.

In this sense, Marketers spend 17% of their total social media budget – and that share is expected to rise to 26% over the next five years.

Let’s go into more detail. We also asked over 1,400 global social media marketers how their budget is allocated. The image below shows a breakdown of their top five priorities:

However, depending on your business type, target audience, and goals, you may choose to allocate more money to certain areas than others.

For example, when I was moonlighting as a social media contractor for a national healthcare organization, our Super Bowl was Healthy Vision Month every May.

We dedicated a large portion of our social media budget to planning, executing and evaluating this specific campaign as it was a major community builder for us. We also focused most of this space on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) to get the most ROI based on our audience.

The remainder of the budget was used to maintain our regular publishing and reporting schedule throughout the year.

How to use data to inform your social media budget

If you’re still deciding what to allocate where, let the data speak for itself.

I mentioned using historical data to inform the future. For example, if you spent a large portion of your budget on holiday campaigns last year, you’ll probably want to leave room (or add resources) this time.

Another way to use data is to see what’s trending in your industry from like-minded social media marketers.

We’ve done the research for you and our latest social media marketing report tells us the following:

• 50% of marketers plan to increase their investments Social Selling.
• Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are the most used social media channels by brands in 2024, with 23% of marketers citing this YouTube had the most engagement.
• Increasing brand awareness and reaching new target groups is a top goal for social media marketers.
• Sales/revenue and website traffic are the most important metric marketers use to measure social media success.
• 87% of marketers say with AI tools is crucial to a successful social media strategy.
• The overwhelming majority of marketers evaluate long videos, expert interviews, temporary content (e.g. Instagram Stories) and VR/AR with high ROI.

Check out the full report, check out the expert panel on social trends below, and use insights like these to inform your budget.

Social media budget template

The example below is a general marketing budget template, but you can easily adapt it to your social media plan.

For example, your line items might include “strategy and planning, content creation, and monitoring and reporting” instead of categories like “public relations.”

Download this template for free

No matter how often you track your expenses – monthly, quarterly, yearly, or all of the above – this template can handle it all.

How to measure the ROI of your social media budget

Luckily, my colleague Flori has already written a fantastic article with details How to measure the ROI of your social media marketing, so I won’t go into too much detail here.

However, the simplest measurement is the social media ROI formula:

(Total Sales – Total Investment) / Total Investment x 100

• Total sales: The amount of money generated by your campaigns
• Total investment: The amount of money you invested in creating the campaign (resources, labor, etc.)

So if my total revenue from social media campaigns for the year is $15,000 and my total investment is $5,000, let’s calculate the ROI:

(15,000 – 5,000) / 5,000 x 100 = 200%

This means that for every $1 spent on social media marketing, I earned $2. I love this for myself.

I would also recommend trying ours Marketing ROI Calculator for an overall overview of your social media earnings.

It’s your year to become a better budgeter

We’re doing more with less, but expectations for marketers are higher than ever. The benefits of good social media marketing are enormous – so create a social media budget that allows you to meet business needs and keep your priorities in order.