How to define an actionable social media ROI for your business

Social media ROI often feels like a mystery. Metrics like engagement rates and impressions can seem too vague to link directly to revenue.

But the truth is, you can quantify the value of social media efforts—and that’s exactly what executives need to see to justify further investment. According to the 2025 Sprout Social Index Report, the top factor for securing social investment is proving how campaigns align with business goals.

Demonstrating social media ROI isn’t just key to increasing your budget—it’s also a pivotal step for advancing your career. That’s why we created this guide: to help you finally measure social media ROI based on your brand’s unique online presence.

Bonus Resource: Showcase your social strategy’s ROI with this scorecard template—perfect for sharing key insights with your C-suite and driving leadership buy-in.

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Why social media ROI matters

Proving social media ROI is essential for securing the headcount and resources needed to advance your strategy—but that can feel easier said than done.

Social media is a long-term investment, reaching peak efficacy after a consistent strategy and time to build brand awareness. To sustain that consistency, you’ll need to present your leadership team with tangible numbers—ideally in dollars and cents.

Metrics like Earned Media Value, Cost Per Action (CPA) or even the opportunity cost of not being present on social can all reveal the financial impact of your efforts.

Brands that successfully tie social media to ROI unlock even greater opportunities. According to a 2024 Deloitte Digital survey, social-first brands—those with mature social strategies—see an average year-over-year revenue growth of 10.2%.

How to calculate social media ROI

The short answer?

Social media ROI = [(Earnings – Costs) ÷ Costs] x 100

In this formula:

• Earnings = Revenue generated from your campaign
• Costs = Expenses like hours worked, content production, ad spend, etc.

The long answer? That’s where you’ll figure out your unique social media ROI. Let’s break it down:

Define social media goals for your brand

Let’s be clear. Social media ROI isn't some sort of one-size-fits-all affair.

When we think of “ROI,” we often default to thinking about revenue. Yet, there’s value in social media beyond direct sales. For example, raising brand awareness is a perfectly good reason to invest in social media.

At the same time, other brands may focus on social media marketing to generate leads or provide omnichannel customer service. You could even do all of the above. Many brands juggle multiple objectives, making social media a versatile but complex tool.

That’s why defining your approach to social media ROI starts with understanding your company’s unique goals. What role does social play in achieving your business’s key objectives? This is the perfect opportunity to collaborate with senior leadership to ensure alignment on priorities.

To guide those conversations, consider asking:

• What are our top business priorities for the next quarter or year, and how does social media support them?
• What specific outcomes are we expecting from social media efforts (e.g., awareness, lead generation, engagement)?
• Are there any upcoming campaigns, launches‌ or initiatives that should take priority on social?

Securing leadership buy-in ensures your goals align with what matters most to your C-suite, laying the groundwork for the cross-team collaboration essential to proving ROI. With their support, overcoming internal bottlenecks becomes much simpler.

Set campaign-specific goals

Accurately calculating ROI requires granular insights. Looking only at the big picture of your social presence often leads to insights that are too broad to be actionable or relevant to stakeholders outside of the social team—a common pitfall for many marketers.

A campaign is a focused effort with specific goals and measurable outcomes. If you’re unsure what qualifies as a campaign at your organization, check out our favorite social media campaigns for inspiration and clarity.

Below are some common yet specific goals for any given brand’s social campaigns:

• Email list sign-ups
• Contact form inquiries
• Trials
• Purchases
• Downloads of a whitepaper or ebook

Once you’ve zeroed in on the goal of your campaign, diligent UTM tracking is essential. With Sprout Social, you can set up tracking rules to automatically append UTM parameters to the links in your posts. This ensures consistency and accuracy, so you don’t have to rely on memory to get it right.

UTMs not only allow you to analyze data at the campaign level but also enable precise revenue attribution in your reporting.

Map goals to social media ROI metrics

According to the 2025 Sprout Social Index Report, social media teams measure success largely through production efficiency. However, marketing leaders tend to prioritize tangible, numbers-based results.

To craft a compelling narrative about your impact, you first need to speak your leadership team’s language. That starts with mapping your goals to metrics that demonstrate return.

Here are the key numbers to track when proving ROI:

Metrics that track revenue attribution from social

You 100% can measure direct revenue impacted by your social efforts. While social media is a long-term game, the revenue impact may surprise you. For example, when Sprout’s social team switched from last-touch to multi-touch attribution, they uncovered a staggering 4800% increase in pipeline impacted by social efforts.

With multi-touch attribution, you can see how social contributes throughout the customer journey through pipeline generation, sales, customer lifetime value and more.

Metrics that track social-driven conversions

Social often influences potential customers at different stages of the funnel. Tracking down-funnel metrics—like Clickthrough Rate (CTR), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and leads—shows how your social efforts drive actions that align with broader business goals.

Metrics that track owned media value

You’ve heard the saying, “A dollar saved is a dollar earned.” Metrics that calculate how much you’d spend on paid channels to achieve the same results can highlight the value of your organic and influencer marketing strategies. These insights demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of your social efforts.

Identify your primary data sources

To measure social’s impact across the customer lifecycle, your social media management tool must connect seamlessly with the other tools tracking customer activity. Without integration into your marketing tech stack, you won’t get a complete picture of your impact.

Start by identifying where your priority ROI metrics currently live. These data sources might include:

• Your social media management tool
• Your CRM
• Google Analytics
• Your employee advocacy tool

Collaborate with your marketing analytics team, or the team members responsible for broader marketing reporting, to integrate these systems effectively and establish a reporting infrastructure as your source of truth. With this setup, you'll always have access to the actionable insights you need to prove ROI and drive decisions.

Track your social media expenses

To figure out whether you’re getting a positive or negative ROI for social media campaigns, you’ll have to measure how much you’re spending. That spend doesn't just involve money, though. Here’s what to include in your ROI expense calculations.

• Time: Your time is valuable–whether you’re a solo practitioner or you have a social media team. Add up the hours that go into a specific social media marketing campaign over a specified period. Don’t just use an employee’s annual salary, though, as they’re likely working on several projects throughout the year. This social media time tracker will help you measure how much time it takes to complete routine social media management tasks.
• Content: Did you hire a professional copywriter to write a landing page? Or maybe you partnered with a content creator or influencer. These costs are easy to overlook, but they certainly count. If you're writing such copy yourself, that's going to count toward your time investment.
• Social media tools: Using Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) is free. But if you’re using a tool like Sprout Social or other social media management software, you need to factor in the costs. Just like with the hours, you should calculate this on a per-campaign basis. So if your campaign lasts for one month, only add in the cost of a month of the software, not an entire year.
• Ad costs: If you’re promoting a post or boosting an ad, add in that cost as well. This is fairly easy to track as you set up your ad budget.

After factoring in all your expenses, you can use the social media ROI formula above to make your calculation for each campaign.

Socialize your ROI story with company leadership

Your social media performance shouldn’t be left to speak for itself—context is key to shaping a compelling impact narrative. It’s up to you to ensure your reports tell the right story.

Establish a reporting cadence that aligns with your team’s structure and goals, and share performance updates with leadership regularly. Need visual support? Our social media scorecard template has you covered. It includes slides to highlight what’s driving your efforts, what’s impacting results‌ and how your performance stacks up against industry competitors.

Proactively share these updates with senior leaders and stakeholders. They may not realize the value of these insights until they see the actionable data social can provide—and once they do, they’ll be hooked.

Tips for improving your social media marketing ROI

On that note, let’s quickly cover some additional pointers for stepping up your social media marketing ROI.

Optimize your posting frequency

With social feeds refreshing every second, it’s easy for your content to get lost in a sea of new posts. That means your target audience isn’t going to see your content, let alone engage with it. No engagements equals no returns on your social media investment.

So you need to post new content regularly to ramp up your visibility. Ideally, you should post multiple times a day to get your content in front of the right audience. Not sure how often to post on social media? According to the 2024 Content Benchmarks Report, the industry average stands at a whopping 10 posts per day (total across all networks).

Don’t just stick to these industry norms, though. We recommend testing different posting frequencies to see what works best for you.

Boosting your posting frequency doesn’t just help with social media algorithms. But it even shows your audience that you’re active and you’re worth following. No one wants to follow a brand that only posts every other week.

Consider using a social media scheduling tool like Sprout to automatically send out your posts based on the schedule that makes the most sense for your audience. This lets you plan your content for an entire month and schedule posts to go out at optimal send times.

Improve your engagement metrics

Engagement is the gateway to conversion activities. Someone who engages with your product promotion post is more likely to show interest in the product than someone who just scrolls past it. They might take a closer look at the product, click on the link and eventually buy the item.

So you need to get those engagement metrics up if you want to boost your social media ROI. Use strategies to boost your social media engagement. This might include posting at the right time, using eye-catching visuals and creating compelling copy.

Most importantly, make sure you’re creating content that resonates with your audience. Use Sprout’s social media analytics tools to keep a close eye on your post-level engagement metrics. See which posts are getting the most engagement to gauge what’s resonating with your followers. Then use those insights to inform your social media content strategy.

Mine your social data

Measuring your social media ROI essentially boils down to your metrics. Beyond Google Analytics, take a hard look at your social dashboards to understand your performance.

For example, which types of content are your top performers? When are you getting the most engagement? These data points can be make-or-break for paid and organic campaigns alike. The more data you have on hand, the easier it is to maximize your reach and get a better ROI for your efforts.

Tools such as Sprout are invaluable for mining your data to figure out data points that go beyond the likes of your native analytics. Not only can you get a look at all your channels in one place, but you can use features like message tagging to group together all the messages in a given campaign. This allows you to compare and contrast performance across different campaigns. That way, you can pinpoint what is and isn’t connecting with your audience and adjust your campaign planning accordingly.

That way, you can pinpoint what is and isn’t connecting with your audience and adjust your campaign planning accordingly.

When in doubt, run test campaigns

Marketers today have to run a variety of campaigns, paid or otherwise. And not all of those campaigns will pay off. Before going all-in on a particular campaign or ad type, save yourself time and money by running a test first.

This is especially important for paid ads like those on Facebook that can quickly blow out your budget if you aren’t careful. Check out our comprehensive guide on testing on social media to learn more about what it takes to run an effective test.

Tap into the power of social commerce

Social commerce has exploded in popularity over the past few years. It has helped to seamlessly bridge the gap between researching products on social and actually making a purchase, and that ease of use makes a real difference. 2025 Index data shows that the majority of consumers search for new products and services on social media when they need to make a purchase within the next month.

Conducting commerce on social media makes your ROI much more evident by tying social engagement to retail success. Use Sprout’s social commerce features to connect your Shopify and Facebook Shops product catalog to the platform. That way, you can focus more on ways to drive sales through social and less on managing different tools for product links or customer history.

Partner with influencers to expand impact

When consumers want to make purchases, they’re not going directly to your website for reviews anymore. Instead, they’re turning to their favorite influencers.

According to Sprout’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, 49% of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts. The majority of consumers (86%) make a purchase inspired by an influencer at least once a year.

An influencer partnership can drive the down-funnel conversions needed to boost your social media ROI—especially if you’re strategic about your partnerships. Nano-influencers with a strong presence in a niche related to your product can be a cost-effective way to reach engaged, loyal audiences.

Use tools like Sprout to help you quantify impact

Your marketing tech stack can make or break your ability to prove ROI. Without the right integrations, connecting your social media strategy to revenue becomes a challenge.

The tools you choose depend on your organization and goals. At Sprout, we use Sprout Social, Employee Advocacy, Google Analytics, Salesforce and Tableau to measure brand discoverability, message resonance and revenue impact.

We use Sprout’s My Reports—a premium add-on that highlights the metrics most aligned with business priorities. This helps us evaluate campaign performance and identify what resonates with our target audience.

By integrating with Salesforce, we connect social media and employee advocacy efforts directly to revenue. Multi-touch attribution tracks the impact of social, influencer marketing and advocacy across the sales funnel, giving us a clear view of pipeline contribution.

With some foundational reporting work, you can reach a similar state of measurement and insight. While achieving this requires effort, tools like Sprout make the process smoother, helping you quickly connect the dots between social efforts and business outcomes

How are you measuring your social media ROI?

Knowing the impact of your social media efforts doesn’t have to be a mystery.

To ensure efficiency and accountability, businesses must define and measure social ROI. This helps align campaigns with goals and ensures resources are being used effectively.

When it's time to share your results with leadership, use our social media scorecard template to present your ROI story clearly and effectively.