How to measure and communicate the value of social media

How you explain your social media strategy’s value can secure the executive support it needs to thrive. At Sprout Social, we leverage our platform to translate social data into actionable insights that resonate with leadership. And we want to help you do it, too.

By integrating data from Sprout Social with insights from other marketing channels, we’ve streamlined workflows for surfacing and sharing social insights. This approach empowers our leaders with real-time data to make smarter, faster decisions.

Here’s how we’re showcasing social media’s value and securing resources with Sprout.

Why social media teams need to communicate the value of their strategy effectively

There’s a constant push and pull between social teams and leadership. Social media is a long-term investment, but businesses need clear, measurable returns to justify spend.

The challenge often looks like this: Leadership teams want to see results, so a social media manager spends so much time manually reporting and measuring impact that they have little time left over for creative strategy. Without time for meaningful, strategic initiatives, performance suffers, and leaders don’t see the impact needed to justify additional spend. The cycle repeats.

Breaking this cycle requires integrated tools that help you connect the dots between organic social content and activity further down the sales funnel. This is how you earn the trust, time and space to focus on audience-driven content that delivers stronger long-term results. As results come in, they lay the groundwork for securing additional headcount and resources to take your strategy further.

Proving social media’s value starts with executive buy-in

Achieving the ideal state outlined above starts with securing executive sponsorship. Depending on your starting point, revamping your reporting infrastructure may involve anything from procuring social media software to prioritizing the effort amid other marketing initiatives. Having a leader in your corner ensures the work pushes through bottlenecks and doesn’t stall.

For us, using Sprout meant we already had the tools to capture data for multi-touch attribution. However, gaining support from our CMO and VP of Brand and Social was essential to elevating this initiative alongside other marketing analytics efforts.

“Social teams are driving revenue,” says Sprout’s Senior Social Media Strategist, Olivia Jepson. “But last-touch attribution only tells part of the story. Strategic discussions about how social impacts the entire funnel—spanning top-of-funnel engagement and reach metrics to down-funnel demand—are essential for building a more effective reporting infrastructure.”

With guidance from our executive sponsors, we reimagined our social reporting approach, replacing our five-year-old content tagging structure with a new framework aligned to Sprout’s messaging priorities. Their support also fostered a closer partnership with our marketing analytics team, ensuring the effort was prioritized within their workload.

Bridging the gap between social and business value with Sprout

Building an actionable social media dashboard is a marathon, not a sprint. Jumping into reporting without clarity on what you’re trying to measure can lead to an impact narrative that falls flat.

Start by defining your goals and working backward. “The ability to identify what content impacts pipeline revenue through multi-touch attribution was at the top of our wishlist,” explains Rachael Goulet, Sprout’s Director of Social Media.“We also wanted better data visualization and flexibility to customize reports, so we could highlight channel and content impact while maintaining a holistic view.”

This approach helped us focus on the key metrics linking social’s impact to pipeline generation—KPIs like Earned Media Value (EMV), Cost Per Action (CPA), Cost Per Lead (CPL) and of course, Leads Generated.

These metrics measure brand discoverability, message resonance and clear revenue pathways, and are sourced from four primary platforms: Sprout Social, Employee Advocacy, Salesforce and Google Analytics.

In Sprout, we use My Reports—a premium add-on that allows us to elevate the metrics that align to business priorities in a compelling way—to measure:

• Campaign performance, measuring our social’s impact on cross-team initiatives.
• Key brand message performance, identifying copy and creative that consistently resonate.
• Cross-network performance, focusing on the channels that drive the greatest audience impact.
• How well we’re engaging target audience segments, including the product focus areas that are making the biggest impact.

Employee advocacy also plays a major role in Sprout’s social media efforts, contributing $450,000 in earned media value last year alone. Using Sprout’s Employee Advocacy tool, we gather impressions data to provide a complete view of social reach.

Thanks to diligent UTM tagging within Sprout, we can connect social and employee advocacy efforts directly to revenue using our integration with Salesforce. Multi-touch attribution allows us to track the impact of social media, influencer marketing and employee advocacy on leads throughout the sales funnel, so we get a true measure of pipeline impact.

The final piece in our data feedback loop is Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector. This integration allows us to further analyze Sprout data, uncovering richer network and audience insights in a custom dashboard that strengthens the narrative around our strategy’s impact.

How we communicate social’s value to our leadership team

Data storytelling is both an art and a science. The science is about collecting, analyzing and visualizing accurate data. The art? Weaving a narrative that shows what it all means and how it drives business impact.

At Sprout, we’ve found a rhythm that works for us: a monthly social performance executive summary. It combines key metrics tied to business value with competitive context, so leadership sees how we’re stacking up against the competition.

“A lot of people don’t know what they can ask for when it comes to social data,” says Jepson. “Once I started packaging insights and sharing them proactively, more teammates started coming to me with their own requests for data pulls. It got the social team’s foot in their door.”

This scalable formula helps us consistently share insights and keep leadership in the loop. We got here by thinking of our executive team as an audience—treating each leader like a consumer when we deliver data.

What happens when you tell a stronger social ROI story

This new approach helped us showcase the full value of our social media strategy. By switching to a multi-touch attribution model, we uncovered a 5,800% increase in additional pipeline impact. Factoring in efficiency gains, social lead generation and earned media value, the Sprout Social platform delivers a 529% ROI.

Now, we’re able to clearly demonstrate the ROI of top-performing content and key messaging initiatives. We can also highlight the value our product offers social teams—quantifying benefits like social customer care, reporting efficiency and time savings.

By showcasing the impact of our strategy, we’ve secured additional budget for team growth, expanded our influencer marketing efforts and even gained buy-in for Sprout’s first-ever brand activation at Design Miami 2024. These wins wouldn’t be possible without a deep understanding of both our data and our product’s potential to deliver results.

Embracing our role as end users of our own product takes this a step further, creating a feedback loop that not only improves how we demonstrate value but also supports customer-driven product design and development.

Looking to showcase the ROI of your social media strategy? Request a personalized demo of Sprout Social and see how it helps connect the dots between your strategy to real revenue impact.

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