On this page
The honest answer to what social media ads cost starts with a number a lot of owners have already spent without meaning to. Forty pounds on a boosted post, a few hundred likes, and not one enquiry.
That is the experience behind most of what people believe social media ads cost, and the conclusion drawn from it is usually the wrong one. The money did not fail. It was never aimed at anybody.
So this post separates the two numbers on a paid social bill and prices both. Our bands for running campaigns across the platforms are printed rather than quoted on request, and the budget is never folded into the fee.
What social media ads cost, in two numbers
Marketing your product costs either time or money. If people don't know it exists you can't sell it. Personally I'd spend money as otherwise you're doing all the content yourself to try to build organically. Avoiding paying for marketing is a false economy IMHO.
A UK business owner, r/smallbusinessuk, June 2026
even if you only have a tiny bit of budget, its still worth spending this rather than trying to create the organic content yourself if that's not your skill set
A UK business owner agreeing, in the same thread
Both are arguing the floor down rather than up, and the second names the reason. Doing it yourself is only free if you happen to be good at it. For most small businesses the cost of advertising on social media begins at a figure small enough to test.
Boosting a post is not advertising
The boost button and the ads manager are different products bought at the same till, and social media ads cost the same through either one. What differs is how much of the decision you are allowed to make.
A boost takes something you already posted and shows it to more people. It cannot ask for an enquiry, it will not usually let you say precisely who should see it, and what it reports back is engagement.
A campaign starts from the thing you want to happen and works backwards to who should see it, which is the whole reason two identical budgets return different results. Same platform, same auction, and a completely different question asked of the money.
It is worth knowing that a boosted post is an advert whichever button made it. The advertising rules require that marketing communications are obviously identifiable as such, which is why the label appears on it, and why it will never read as an ordinary post.
That label is also why the creative has to work harder than an organic post does. A reader who can see it is paid for gives it a fraction of a second, so what the thing looks and sounds like does more to set the cost of a result than the bid does.
What the platforms are actually charging you for
Search advertising sells intent. Somebody types what they want, and you pay to be there at the moment they do.
Social advertising sells attention, which is a different thing at a different price. Nobody opened the app to find a plumber, so an enquiry here is won by interrupting somebody rather than by answering them, and social media advertising cost reflects that.
The auction you are actually in
The mechanism itself is an auction, and the platforms document it plainly enough. LinkedIn says its ads are sold through the ad auction, where your bid competes with other advertisers who want to reach the same target audience, and that what it takes to win depends on the bid and on how sought-after that audience is.
Read that slowly and the logic behind what social media ads cost falls out of it. You are not bidding on a problem somebody has, you are bidding against everybody else who wants that person's afternoon.
Which is why the comparison with buying the search itself is worth making before any budget is set. Paid search costs more per click in most markets and asks less of the visitor, because they went looking.
How big this market is, and how few people are talking in it
The scale is not in doubt. UK advertisers put real money here in 2025, and social media spend rose 21% to £11.5bn, accounting for 28% of the market.
The audience half has moved in a way that matters more to a small budget. Ofcom found that around half of adult social media users (49%) now actively post, share or comment, down from 61% in 2024, while nine in ten adult internet users are still on at least one platform.
So almost everybody is there, and fewer of them are joining in. A feed of people watching rather than talking is a harder place to be noticed for nothing, and a more reliable one to be noticed for money.
You also need to factor in that social media platforms want to keep users on the platform. They usually tank posts with external links
A UK business owner, r/smallbusinessuk, June 2026
That is the clearest statement of what a budget is really buying. The distribution you used to get for free is the thing being sold back to you. Part of what any budget buys now is simply that reversal.
What management costs, and what the fee is not
The second half of what social media ads cost is the fee, and here it is flat and banded rather than a share of the budget. A percentage pays the manager more the more you spend, on the exact decision you hired them to get right.
One thing to say plainly before the numbers. These bands sit alongside an active search, AI search or website engagement rather than being sold on their own, because every post is extracted from that work.
| Band | Our fee a month | Ad budget, paid direct to the platform |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | £245 | £250 minimum, £500+ suggested |
| Growth | £445 | £500+ suggested |
| Scale | £795+ | £1,000+ suggested, scoped with you |
The band follows how many platforms and how many posts there are to look after, never how much money passes through the account. No setup fee, and no markup on what you pay the platform.
The one question worth asking any quote
A quote that arrives as a single figure is worth one question: which half of it goes to the platform. It is a fair thing to ask before signing anything, and the answer should take about a sentence.
That logic runs across everything here, and what our search packages come to sets it out in the same shape. The sibling question for paid search is answered in what a month of Google Ads adds up to.
When paid social is the wrong thing to buy
For some businesses the right answer to what social media ads cost is nothing at all, and saying so is cheaper than finding out over three months. The clearest case is a market where the buyer is simply not on the platforms in any useful way.
The second is a business with nowhere to send the click. Attention is the expensive part, and spending it on a page that loses people is the most common way a working campaign gets blamed for something it did not do.
The third is urgency. Somebody with a burst pipe is not scrolling, and no budget rearranges that.
If neither channel suits the problem, that is a finding rather than a failure, and there are other things we do that may fit it better. It costs nothing to say so before the money moves.
The summary is short. Social media ads cost a budget you control and a fee you can see, and any quote that will not tell you where the line falls has answered a different question from the one you asked.
Say which platforms and which town you are trying to reach and the numbers for your own market can be read back to you.