On TwitterJobSearch.com you see over 3,000 Social Media related jobs – we believe there are at least 10,000 social media consultants out there helping businesses to get ready.
The project volume runs anywhere between $20,000 per year and several Million annual investment.
The Social Media Academy is conducting a new research, understanding what consulting firms charge and what customers have to expect.
What do YOU see out there? As consultant what do YOU charge (hourly rates), typical projects, lowest / highest? Deal size? We will publish data and show sources only if you explicitly agree to do so.
I don’t want to give too much away, but I will let you know this. Our consultants are billing between $180-$300 per hour. The lowest priced project we take on typically is for a customer who is in the $20 million in annual sales and with at least 25 employees, otherwise a social initiative is just not worth it for them. I have seen early conversations and SOW’s/proposals within my team in the $600-750k range. If accepted and after the social assessment discovery, that amount could actually turn out to be much higher depending on the clients degree of engagement and the reputation repair that is required.
I hope this is helpful.
Tim Moore
sayitsocial.com
Axel,
I feel with social media, we are where search engine optimization (SEO) was about 5 years ago, in it’s infancy. At that time IT, programmers etc, became interested in this newly defined field, and you saw budgets ‘slowly’ becoming allocated to SEO.
As your post alludes, it seems more corporations, businesses in general are eager to allocate “Hefty” marketing dollars to social media initiatives, quicker, and more so than SEO.
Honestly, I am just now getting inquiries for social media consulting, and am putting one together as we speak. I will peek back at this post to see what others have posted. Also, I will tweet this post to help you get some feedback..