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Calculator Components & Assumptions
the estimator is built on several key components and assumptions that help quantify the value of social media activities. Learn more below.
1. Workdays and Hours
Average Number of Workdays in a Year: Typically, there are about 225 workdays in a year, excluding weekends and holidays.
Average Full-Time Workday: A standard full-time workday is around 7.5 hours.
Non-Content Creation Tasks: Employees often spend a portion of their day on tasks other than content creation, such as planning, attending meetings, training, responding to comments, and other administrative tasks. These non-content creation tasks are estimated at 3 hours per day.
Time Available for Content Creation: After accounting for non-content tasks, approximately 4.5 hours per day are dedicated to content creation.
2. Compensation & Costs
The estimator also factors in the costs associated with social media management, including salaries and any additional compensation for part-time staff or student ambassadors. For instance:
- Full-Time Social Media Manager: The cost of hiring a full-time social media manager varies by state. For our baseline, we used an annual compensation of $75,000. This amount includes the cost of benefits, representing the total expense for the college.
- Part-Time Staff or Ambassadors: Utilizing part-time staff or student ambassadors can provide additional support at a lower cost, enhancing the overall capacity for content creation.
- Social Student Ambassadors Compensation. The standard compensation is set at $2,000 per year. Adjust this amount based on how you compensate your students. Possible compensation structures include internship, federal work-study program, student employee, or stipend. For example, if a student ambassador participates in your program for experience and class credit instead of monetary payment, their compensation would be $0.
3. Total Annual Content Creation Hours
To determine the total available hours employees have for content creation, multiply the number of workdays by the hours dedicated to content creation.
- Total Annual Hours for Employees: 225 workdays * 4.5 hours/day = 1,012.5 hours/year
Here's how we've estimated student ambassadors contributions:
- Weekly Hours: Each student ambassador is assumed to work 5 hours per week.
- Content Creation Allocation: We assume that ambassadors will spend 80% of their time on content creation and 20% on meetings, learning, and planning.
- Annual Content Creation Hours:
- Weekly Hours for Content Creation: 5 hours/week * 80% = 4 hours/week
- Annual Hours for Content Creation: 4 hours/week * 52 weeks/year = 208 hours/year.
4. Social Media Average Content Creation Assumptions
Creating content for different social media platforms and different formats requires varying amounts of time and effort. Here are the very conservative average assumptions we used for different platforms and formats:
- Image-based and text-based posts: 20 minutes
- Instagram reels: 2 hours
- TikToks: 2 hours
- Instagram and Facebook stories: 10 minutes
- Lives: 2 hours
- LinkedIn articles: 2 hours
- X posts: 10 mins
- YouTube videos: 5 hours
These assumptions provide a realistic framework to understand the time commitments required for maintaining an active presence across various social media platforms.
5. Social Content Plan Coverage
The estimator helps gauge the percentage of the content plan that can be covered based on available resources.
This involves assessing the total number of hours required to execute the content plan and comparing it with the available hours from full-time and part-time staff.
6. Engagement
Social media is not just about posting and content creation; it's also about engaging with your audience. Our calculator provides an estimate of the time needed to create and post content. However, engagement activities—such as responding to comments, participating in conversations, and building relationships online—are additional tasks. These engagement efforts can be part of the non-content creation activities that we estimate to take about 3 hours per day for a full-time employee.