How To Find The Best Laptop For Social Media Marketing On A Budget

Finding the best laptop for social media marketing in your backyard farm business can feel like a coin toss. Which brand is better, and which laptop will last longer…. It’s enough to make you want to pull your hair out.

I am literally writing this on my very well-loved laptop that is on its last leg. I have been keeping my eye on the market to see what will be my next partner in crime running this website and my backyard farm business so I wanted to take you on the decision-making process with me.

Now I am going to come at this from a very LOGICAL and “get what you need but stay within your budget” kind of perspective ok?

How To Choose The Best Laptop For Social Media Marketing And Influencers

There are some key things you need to know about yourself and your habits before you hit that buy button. There is no need to spend hundreds of dollars on a feature that you could do without at the beginning that you could have used to invest in a tool that will help you get your job done better and faster.

Choose the tools that will help you work the fastest and get content out faster. Not the ones that make you feel legit or like a “influencer”.

Stay Within Your Budget

A $2000 laptop is not going to help you make more money than if you bought a $500 laptop. While yes you need it to make money you do not need to spend more than you can afford. Which is a huge reason why I am not a fan of Apple devices….GASP!!!!!!!!

Take me out back and call me a trader…

Let me say this out loud so the people in the back can hear me. YOU DO NOT NEED an apple MacBook pro to do good digital marketing work.

Just like any tech device, they are lasting for a much shorter amount of time than they used to. For a laptop that has been heavily used I don’t expect to get more than 4-5 years out of it. If I hit 5 years I am a happy camper.

So look at your budget and see what you can afford. You will likely be shopping online so set your filters for about $30 less than your highest price range amount because you will be paying about that much on top of your list price for taxes. And don’t even let yourself look at the higher-priced laptops. Deal?

Think About Your Habits To Help You Decide What You Need In A Computer

To find the best computer for your budget and what you need you should think about your current habits.

Do you clean out the files you don’t need regularly? Or are you a file junky and never get rid of anything?

Are you going to focus on video editing? Or will you be writing most of your content like captions and blog posts?

For video, editors’ processing is going to be your number one focus. But if you are going to be writing more on your desktop and you are going to be doing short-form videos on your phone you won’t have to worry as much about processing if you have a tight budget.

If you are going to clean out the files regularly you could save on hard drive memory and put it into processing speed or RAM.

Do you like bigger screens or are you ok with a smaller screen size? You are likely going to be spending a lot of time on a laptop that is for digital marketing purposes so personally, I like larger screens. I had a Microsoft surface pro and even the 12-inch screen was not big enough in my opinion. I was squinting and getting super close to the screen way too often.

While all digital marketers need a long battery life they will start to die out. So if you travel a lot maybe a tablet might be a better option for when you are on the go and use your laptop at home.

Three Most Important Things You Should Focus On When Looking For New Laptop

I will tell you right now I don’t hold to brand names or what the marketer says about the laptop. I want key features and I want to see what the users have to say about them. So right now I am going to share with you the key things I look for in a laptop, what it is and does, then will get into how to tell what others are saying about the device.

Internal Hardrive Memory

The internal hard drive memory is where the computer puts any programs you have on your laptop. As well as any videos, images, or documents you download.

A computer may say that you get 1 terabyte of memory but you can guarantee you don’t get to fill up the laptop with that much in content. I don’t like to use up more than one-half to three-fourths of my device memory for the files I leave on it. So if it’s a 500 gig hard drive I what to make sure I keep in under 300 So that means that I probably only have about 250 gigs I can use to store programs and files. But that’s just me.

Typical file usage – An edited video for Youtube that is about 10 minutes long will be about 3 gigs. About 1000 high-quality stock photos will be about 10 gig. So you see why it’s important that you clean off your laptop regularly.

My current laptop has 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of memory but I only have access to 930 Gig. The operating system is taking up quite a large chunk of the memory.

Personal Recommendation – I think you should stick with a laptop that has 500+ Gig for internal memory.

What Is RAM (Random-Access Memory)

I like to think of the RAM in your computer as it’s working memory.

It’s like your short-term memory, you know what the next item is on your to-do list while you are walking to go do that task. You get there to do the thing and move on to the next.

If you are multiple tabs all the time kind of social media marketer. The more RAM the better.

Here is what I have noticed when it comes to the capabilities of computers and the amount of RAM they have.

If you are loading simple web pages you can have open one-to-one pages to ram for every gig of ram the computer has. So if you have a computer that has 8 Gig of RAM then you could pretty easily use 8 tabs open at a time. If you start to increase the number above that then you will probably see some slowdown. If you want to get nerdy and learn more about RAM I would highly recommend you read this post from Intel.

If the page has lots of ads or it continues to load images like the graphics editing software Canva does on occasion this will slow down what your computer can do as well. If you play youtube or a course in the background as well this will REALY slow down the speed of your computer.

Personal Recommendation – I would like to see 8 Gig of RAM or above for a social media marketers laptop. Anything above 16 gb ram is going to be getting to the side of a gaming computer. In that case, you are going to pay handsomely for it.

Processor Speed

While All three of these things work together to give you a great computer having a powerful processor is going to be something you notice while using your computer.

There are two parts to this one. There is what’s called a core in the computer processor. Think of it as wheels on a vehicle that make up the whole. And the speed or gigahertz (GHz) which is the speed at which it can do something.

Let Me Explain The Core Thing First

If you have two wheels like you do on a bike you will get to where you want to go but it could take longer and you might get wet and run into problems.

If you have a quad-core computer that means you have four cores working together to get you to where you want to go on the internet. Just like four wheels on a car will get you somewhere a lot faster than a bike would.

Now Let’s Chat About The GHz or Gigahertz

My whole goal with this blog post is to keep the techy things not so scary and easy to understand. So I’m not going to get to light level with this. But simply put GHz is the number of cycles per second your computer can process the thing you are asking it to do whether or not you are online. The higher the number the faster it can get the job done.

Whether that is loading a web page or opening a computer program.

You will see at the lowest end be around 1-1.5 GHz all the way up to a smidge over 4 GHz. The closer to the four you can get the better.

Personal Recommendation – As high as you can afford. But if I had to make a stand I would not go less than 2.4 GHz

Bonus Features To Have On A Computer

These next few things are bonuses if you have a choice but I’m not sure I would pay a whole lot of money for these things.

Solid Date Hardrive

A solid-state hard drive is another boost to the speed of operation but it also could last longer than a standard hard drive.

USB Slots

I would never buy a laptop with less than two slots. There is so much that runs off of a USB drive these days including charging things like ring lights.

If you want a wireless mouse or a better webcam you need a slot for those. Printers need a USB slot as well as flash drives or external hard drives.

You can get USB extenders where you plug the port into one USB slot and it gives you several more you can plug into things. Kind of like an extension cord into that wall.

But some things won’t charge as fast and like I found out sometimes devices won’t talk to each other through the extender. I had this issue with our printer. It won’t print something through the USB Extender.

SD Card Slot

This is a nice to have especially if you are going to use a DSLR camera.

Screen Resolution

This is going to be more important for photographers or website designers but for a digital marketing laptop, it would be more of a nice to have.

The thing with the resolution is that it will help with colors looking the same across all devices. I have a pretty crummy screen on my current laptop and it does drive me a little crazy sometimes BUT if you set your brand color hex goads from a device you know is better then you can just trust that you set the codes and not worry as much that it will look a little off on your desktop.

But screen resolution is going to be something that will up the price of your computer.

Ok let’s Talk Best Laptops

One quick thing I need to say that I DO NOT BUY is refurbished. All that means is they wipped the hard drive and make sure it does all the basic features. You have no idea how many hours that laptop has run and you will likely not get near the life out of it that you would if you bought a brand-new laptop. So if you need to get started in your online business then do what you need to do. But don’t spend more than $300 on a refurbished laptop.

I am going to use the criteria I talked about above as well as look for good reviews from the users to find a great option for you under $600. Because if I wouldn’t spend more than that on a laptop why should I recommend one that is higher for other content creators?

Laptops At $350-$400

$300-$350 is about as low as I would go because once you get below that amount you are really sacrificing on internal storage which will cause you to run out of memory VERY quickly.

This one is not going to do well if you intend to do a lot of video editing on the device. If you are largely using Canva and writing text then this will do what you need.

I am normally a little hesitant about HP laptops simply because I had a bad experience with a batch of them years ago but I do think they are upping their game and providing a great laptop with this option.

HDMI, Windows 11 3 USB Ports

Best Budget Laptop Options At $400-$500

It is only a Dule Core (2) so that’s not super awesome but the processor speed is pretty decent so I don’t think you will be too disappointed.

It does have 3 USB ports so that is a plus. There is also an SD card slot and headphone jack.

Here are some of the features I love about it.

• 15.6″ FHD IPS Slim Laptop
• 11th Gen Intel Core i3-1115G4(Up to 4.1GHz) – Has good processor capabilities.
• 8GB RAM – It’s not a bad amount for general use.
• 512GB NVMe SSD – Lower amount of internal memory but I clean out my internal hard drive regularly onto an external hard drive.

It is a great laptop for the price.

Good Laptops But Well Out Of The Price Range $1000+

I am sharing these laptops so you can see what I mean about why these are not worth the amount you pay. Do they have some nice features? Sure. But are these features an important factor worth paying $900 more for when you are trying to get a laptop that will just help you get the work done? Not likely.

Dell XPS – See It On Amazon

This laptop is HEAVILY focused on graphics. The screen is great quality and the ram is extremely high. It has a very compact size so would be a perfect choice if you are on the go often.

Here are some of the features of this laptop:

• 3456 x 2160 pixels
• 32 GB LPDDR4X
• 4267 MHz
• ‎1 TB SSD

So this laptop not only has good visuals but it is a powerful laptop and can do a lot at once. If you are going to be a video editor then maybe it is worth it to you. But for marketing on social networks and when your small business is just getting started. No, I don’t think it’s worth the high dollar. But also why get yourself used to high-ticket tools when you aren’t consistently making the money to warrant spending more on tools?

Cons Of The Dell XPS

No USB ports

No SD card reader

You have to have a port to be able to plug anything into it. That’s a problem for me.

It can be tempting to buy something cheap like an Asus Chromebook but they often have very little internal storage space and eventually will update themselves so much that they don’t have any memory left. Which will render your laptop useless. When computers have no space to operate they glitch and even crash which is not good for your laptops to have a long life.

Whatever you decide to go with don’t overthink it. Make your best choice and tell yourself this is the right laptop for you. If you are in this business for a while you will ultimately have to buy another laptop down the road so you aren’t stuck forever if you don’t like what you ended up with. Just remember you don’t need a gaming laptop. Storage capacity and has decent operation speed is about all you need to spend your money on. Also ladies. Pretty doesn’t pay the bills. Buy what will do the job. K?