Your budget is a reference document to control your social media strategy. Social media options are vast and varied and can consume your budget easily if proper precautions are not adhered. Defining your budgetary constraints and tracking them closely will focus your strategy on meeting your goals. See this worksheet for a guide to developing your budget.

By following these guidelines, you can control your media strategy.

Assess your staff and their allocation to determine who will be on the project. If there is a gap between what you need and the people and skills currently available, hiring temporary staff or consultants will bridge that gap. Your resource allocation should also include the equipment and software you currently own, and what additional equipment must be purchased, leased, or what tasks can be handed to a vendor to complete.

Analyze how much time you have for completing your social marketing goals. If your current staff and added staff can meet those goals in the time allotted, you are in good shape. If there still is not enough staff to meet your needs, you will have to cut back on the complexity of the project, or consider a multi-phase project. For example, you want to roll your social media plan to the major social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. However, you do not have the proper equipment for taking videos, or editing them. You could decide to start with the Facebook and Twitter portion of your plan, and then address the video blog in the second phase.

It is better when you are first planning your budget to be more conservative with your estimates. Underestimate your income and overestimate your expenses. As you gain experience with planning your budget, your margin of error can narrow. Regardless of your proficiency, things can and will go wrong. Before they do, allot a certain percentage of the budget as an overflow amount. This money should be strictly managed for dire emergencies in order to complete your project successfully. Consider whether the additional money added to the campaign will lead to its success, or if you are just throwing good money after bad. You can allow some projects to fail, so long as you learn valuable lessons from them, and that they do not devastate your cashflow to your company.

Review your budget often, and make corrections where it is needed. Depending on the volatility of your project, you may need to review your budget daily, weekly, or monthly. It is better to adapt the budget a little to changing trends of your finances than to ignore the needs of your organization to stay competitive. Note the changes in your budget and review them when drafting future budgets. Learn from your company's experiences and plan for them to occur going forward.