So you might be a cool dude on Twitter and Facebook and now it your efforts are starting to pay off in terms of companies actually wanting you to spend your time tweeting for them and managing their social media efforts. Good for you. But I am sure by now the biggest question that might have come to mind is, "what do I charge for this task"? That is a good question and by industry standards.....there are none as of now.
What I would suggest is to get a good idea of what the company you are going to be running their social media for, tells you what they intend to accomplish with their social media.
Companies want to be apart of social media but some want to because their kids are on it, and hey it must be cool right? Others are trying to maintain a good brand online and know what their customers are saying about them. Others are trying to expand and grow their fan base and loyalty through social media, you just have to know up front what it is that they want to accomplish.
So first step is to have a good sit down with the potential client, determine what the goals are and what your benchmarks will be. Once you have this established you will at least have a general direction that you can go in.
Second thing you will want to do is assess the company in its current state. Do they have a presence online in social media already and just need you to manage it? Or are they starting from scratch? Is this brand something that has a lot of potential fans that you could talk to, or is it something boring like a paint manufacturer? Is this a company that will be managing bad press or building fans?
I have tried in the past to manage clients social media that really had no people in their industry using social media. I was talking to myself and it ended up not doing much for them. So it is best to assess the industry before you go out and end up doing a bad job of their money and your reputation.
So WHAT DO I Charge??
Ok, I hear you. I would do it on an hourly basis. Then set aside that number of hours to tweet, add friends, research and manage the relationships. Be specific of whether or not this will include managing their blog as well and finding new content there and managing the comments.
You will want to be upfront with them, with costs that could incur such as setup (if there is no current social media presence). That should be a flat rate for that. A typical client amount that I would suggest is a total of 15 hours a month at $600. Now why do I suggest this rate? Because you will have people that will come in under you in price and then their will be people that will come in over you. You want to be that happy medium, where they can afford you but not wonder why you are so cheap.
Why only 15 hours? Because if you plan on taking on other clients as well, (once your good deeds start to spread virally), you will want to be able to manage all the clients and still give them the amount of attention that is needed. Basically you will be giving each company 4 hours of your time a week to manage their social media. Which for the average company should suffice.
Now this is for a typical sized corporation, I am not talking about running Walmarts social media.
How Do I Know When I Have Hit My Time?
This is where a good time tracking software comes in place. There are many out there to use, the 47 signals team has a great suite that you can use once you really get going and start having more than one client. But if this is for your first client use something that is simple and free, like paymo.biz. When I started I used this system and it is perfect for the beginner and the more advanced user as well. Kind of wish they had an iPhone app, but there are others that do.
If you really want to go all in there is fresh books and that does have an iPhone app.
The point is here to first focus on getting the work tracked, and having a simple way to invoice. Don't make it too difficult in the beginning. Get familiar with tracking and then once you get a handle on that, spend a weekend and really go through it all.
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