Budget

A 'budget' amounts to the specific funds set aside for operating and maintaining the paid aspects of a person's, business's, or organization's social media presence. This paid social media activity may be oriented toward advertisements, promotions, or sponsored content, and is typically aimed at achieving a specific marketing objective. The budget dictates how much can be spent over a set period of time on platform-specific advertising campaigns—like Facebook Ads or Instagram Promotions, to name two of the leading social media marketing platforms—that are supposed to make a measurable difference in the audience's appearance, size, and engagement level.

Accordingly, a well-planned social media budget accommodates quite a few factors. These factors include who makes up the desired audience and what demographical differences can or should be targeted; the costs of placing the ads in question on or within the intended platform; the ad's content itself—including the type of content (text, image, or video), and what kind of content performs better across different platforms; the guises (awareness, engagement, conversion, lead generation) in which the ad is supposed to appear to deliver 'success'; and the forecasted/tangible returns on the investment made in the 'aura' of the ad in question across the same platforms. Whatever kinds of ads a person, business, or organization runs, and however much money they funnel toward this part of the social media budget, the ads themselves are too far removed from the immediate revenue-generating structure of the business to be considered anything but speculative performance gambits.

Still, when the performance of these gambits can be tracked and measured in real time, then both the team and the marker can audit the efficacy of the gambits across a sliding scale of costs from low to high (for both the ad and the pay-off itself).