How to Measure, Prove, and Improve Social Media ROI (With Examples)

Q: Which social media has the highest ROI?

For B2B marketers, Facebook drives the highest ROI , with TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram sharing second place. However, take this with a grain of salt, as this will vary from business to business. Audience analysis is an important step in building a successful social media strategy and will provide the best data on which platform will work best for your business.

Michelle Leighton

Last updated on Apr 10, 2025

QUICK SUMMARY

How do you measure social media ROI in 2025? Start with the metrics that actually drive results. Here’s what to track and why it matters.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Why Social Media ROI Matters How To Calculate Social Media ROI Example ROI Calculation Attribution vs ROI Defining Goals Example Social Media Scorecard Strategies + Industry Secrets Tools

Key Takeaways

Avoid Vanity Metrics: Rely less on follower counts and views. Focus on metrics linked to revenue, retention, and pipeline for true marketing worth.

Start with Business Goals: Align your social media strategy with broader company objectives to ensure every effort ladders up to real impact.

Build the Right Data Stack: ROI measurement starts with clean inputs. Use integrated tools to connect social activity to conversions.

Tell a Story with Your Data: Frame results around business value. Use ROI data to craft a compelling narrative that resonates with leadership.

Despite all the dashboards, analytics tools, and engagement reports, 44% of CMOs still can’t quantify the impact of social media on their business. If you’re leading marketing and can’t tie your social media strategy to revenue, budget conversations may become harder and headcount justifications could fall flat.

58% of companies still rely on vanity metrics like views and follower counts hoping it will prove return on investment. As your organization's marketing maestro, you must dig deeper and connect your social media strategy to monetary values. That means tracking metrics that align with revenue, retention, and pipeline.

In this guide I'll show you why ROI measurement matters, which metrics move the needle, how to calculate impact, and how to report results in a way that earns trust from leadership.

Social media ROI is essential for earning the budget, tools, and headcount your team needs to scale. It’s how you turn a social media strategy from a “nice-to-have” into a revenue-driving engine that stands up next to channels like SEO. With ROI data, you earn a seat at the table. Here’s why:

Measuring ROI Empowers Your Budgeting

Recent data from Deloitte’s Annual CMO Survey shows digital marketing spend dropped 47.3% from 2022 to 2023. With constrained budgets, you need a clear understanding of your returns to avoid inefficiencies and wasted resources.

Say you’re in the process of updating your social media strategy. You intend to launch more Instagram ad campaigns, but after calculating the ROI of your social media activities, you find Facebook ads delivered the highest ROI. This data-driven approach optimizes social media budget allocation based on real business impact

Executives and stakeholders demand accountability. Your ability to showcase tangible and measurable results bolsters your credibility and ensures that your social media marketing plan align with organizational goals.

Whether it be lead generation, website traffic, or conversion rates, quantifiable metrics show social media impact. For example, attribution models help you show how a large portion of your online sales came from specific social media campaigns and highlights their contribution to your bottom line.

Enables You to Build Competitive Strategies

Your social media ROI isn't only about financial gains; it includes assessing engagement, brand awareness, and customer satisfaction. When you evaluate these metrics, you customize your social media strategies to connect more effectively with your target audience.

Take the case of BT, a British telecommunications company. Through a deliberate shift of customer interactions to social media, BT saved £2 million ($2.5 million) in customer service operation costs and experienced a substantial boost in customer satisfaction.

This move reduced customer churn and improved their competitive edge, as customers were more satisfied, loyal, and less likely to turn to competitors.

Here's how to do your social media ROI calculations.

Social Media ROI = [(return-investment)/investment*100]

The “return” refers to the total value of your social media efforts, while “investment” refers to all social media costs.

In the previous section, we outlined the metrics that best reflect your returns and costs, and that data plays an important role here. What you input as returns or costs will reflect the metrics you track, such as web traffic, generated leads, or costs-per-click (CPC).

Imagine you're a small B2B business with tight budgets and limited resources. For you, the focus is on direct sales generated through a specific social media marketing campaign.

For returns, you’re tracking conversions from a paid campaign. On the costs side, you’ve hired the help of a freelance content creator in addition to the total costs-per-click for the campaign.

For your calculation, we can assume the following data:

Cost of freelance content creator: $1500
Number of clicks generated by the campaign: 2,000
Cost per click (CPC): $2.50
Number of conversions (actual sales): 50
Average revenue generated per conversion: $200

Using this data, let's calculate your return:

Return = Number of conversions * Avg. revenue of conversion

Return = 50 * $200 = $10,000

Now, we must add up the costs:

Investment = Freelancer costs + CPC * Clicks generated

Investment = 1500 + 2.50 * 2000 = 6500

Plug this data into the formula:

Social Media ROI = [(10,000-6500)/6500*100]

Social Media ROI = 53.85%

With a total investment of $6,500, your Social Media ROI would be approximately 53.85%.

This means that for every dollar you invested in the social media marketing campaign, you generated a positive return of $1.54.

If you work at a larger corporation with more resources and a larger social media presence, the same formula applies. But the data used should include the total returns and investments across all channels and campaigns.

Pro tip: Use tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to generate performance reports (weekly or monthly) and get into the habit of calculating ROI once per quarter. This saves you from sifting through a mountain of data each time.

Key Metrics You Need To Measure Social ROI

No one metric will prove your social media success. It depends on your social media objectives and broader content marketing strategy.

For CMOs looking to quantify their social media ROI, connecting social media metrics to broader key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential. Consider the customer journey and how the metrics you track align with goals at each stage:

Stage of Funnel	Key Metrics
Awareness: Introduce and build your brand recognition.	Reach and impressions for organic posts, website visits, traffic sources, Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for paid social.
Interest: Capture and maintain the attention of potential customers.	Likes, shares, follows, link clicks for organic social posts, Cost per click (CPC) or Click-Through Rate (CTR) for paid social.
Evaluation: Help potential customers assess your product or service.	Demo requests, free trial sign-ups, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).
Purchase: Convert interested leads into paying customers.	Conversion rates, revenue generated, “Add to cart” actions.
Retention: Foster loyalty and satisfaction among existing customers.	Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), referrals.

Key social media metrics by funnel stage.

You’ll need to use social media analytics to monitor several metrics and calculate your social media ROI, so separate them into cost and return metrics. In other words, what is taking money out and driving revenue back in?

Also, consider your paid and organic social media activities when measuring the ROI of your social efforts. While organic is “free” to a degree, costs are still associated with producing and managing content, such as hiring creators or social media managers.

For paid social campaigns, monitor Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Cost per Click (CPC), and Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) to define your costs:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): CAC represents the cost of acquiring a new customer. You track CAC by dividing your total marketing expenses by the number of new customers acquired within a specific period.
Cost per Click (CPC): CPC measures the cost for each click on your ad. To track CPC, divide the total cost of your campaign by the number of clicks it generates.
Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM): CPM calculates the cost for a thousand impressions. Track CPM by dividing the total cost of your campaign by the number of impressions, then multiplying by 1,000.

Return on Investment Metrics

Return metrics may vary based on your business goals. But you’ll often need to monitor your engagement rates, web traffic, reach, impressions, conversion rates, and click-through rates (CTR).

Engagement rate: Your engagement rate gauges the level of interaction with your content. Track it by dividing the total engagements (likes, comments, shares) by the total reach and then multiplying by 100 for a percentage.
Web traffic: Web traffic represents the number of users visiting your website. There are many tools that can measure this, the most popular being Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Hootsuite. To enable tracking, use these tools to insert unique tracking codes in your website link, known as UTM tags.
Reach: Reach indicates the unique users exposed to your content. This can be monitored through in-platform analytics, like Instagram Insights, or through external social media management tools, like Hootsuite or Sprout Social.
Impressions: Impressions measure the total views of your content. Track impressions via platform analytics or using social media management tools. Impressions provide insights into overall content visibility.
Conversion Rate: Conversion Rate reflects the percentage of users taking a desired action. Track it by dividing the number of conversions (e.g., sign-ups or purchases) by the total number of visitors and multiplying by 100.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR calculates the percentage of users clicking on a link. Track it by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions, then multiplying by 100 for a percentage.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): MQL refers to leads that are ready to be passed off to sales. Track MQL by monitoring bottom-of-funnel activities such as form submissions, demo requests, or specific offers that indicate strong intent to engage with your product or service.

Pro tip: Create benchmark reports on your social media performance to get clear on where you stand in your industry. Hootsuite Analytics includes a benchmarking feature that automates this for you, providing a quick and easy overview of your competitive standing.

Attribution tells you how someone got there whereas ROI tells you if it was worth it. Marketers love attribution models: last-click, multi-touch, data-driven. They’re useful for mapping user journeys. But that's not the whole story. A beautifully attributed campaign might drive traffic, but if that traffic doesn’t convert, or the cost of acquiring it outweighs the return, it’s not profitable.

ROI zooms out. It asks: Did this social media strategy actually deliver value? It forces you to weigh inputs against outcomes, not just map touchpoints.

In SaaS, where the buyer journey is long and nonlinear, attribution can mislead. A LinkedIn post might spark awareness that leads to a deal six months later. If you’re not looking at ROI through a broader lens, you’ll undervalue the work that moved the needle.

Before you launch a single campaign or draft a content calendar, get crystal clear on what success looks like.

Every social media effort should map to a concrete goal and that goal should ladder up to a broader business objective. Here are some examples of what those goals might look like:

Driving demo requests
Building brand authority in a new market
Reducing churn rate through better customer education

Each of these requires a different strategy, different content, and different success metrics. Start by choosing 1–2 primary goals per quarter. Make them specific, measurable, achieveable, relevant and time bound (S.M.A.R.T) and aligned with where your company is focused right now.

Tie your social media strategy to a specific business goal like revenue growth, lead generation, or customer retention to measure ROI.

Start by working backward from the company’s top-line goals. For example, if revenue growth is a primary concern, use tracking and attribution software to align your metrics reporting to showcase the impact on sales and conversions. If customer success is the priority, social might play a role in onboarding, education, or proactive support.

When you define success through a business lens (not just a marketing one) you create clarity, alignment, and the credibility needed to secure more investment.

Create a quarterly social media goal scorecard that will keep your team’s focus tied to larger goals for the company. Here’s what a social scorecard might look like:

To calculate social media ROI with any real accuracy, you need to lock in your primary data sources. That means knowing exactly where your performance, cost, and conversion data is coming from—and ensuring those sources are reliable, connected, and consistent across teams.

At a minimum, your data stack should include:

Social platform analytics (e.g. LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Meta Business Suite, X Analytics) for channel-level performance
Web analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics 4, Adobe) to track behavior, conversions, and attribution across touchpoints
CRM and marketing automation (e.g. HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo) to link social engagement to pipeline and revenue
UTM parameters and link tracking tools to capture campaign-specific performance
Paid media platforms to track spend and ROI at the ad level

Pro tip: If you're running community-led initiatives, add self-reported attribution fields and engagement surveys to uncover influence that your tools might miss.

Understanding Your True Costs

Over the years, I’ve worked as a social media specialist, social media manager, and freelance content creator for B2B organizations large and small. And I have learned that most organizations underestimate their ongoing social media costs.

According to estimates by Sprout Social, social media content creation costs $7,950 per month on average. On top of that, you must factor in the average ad spend ($5000 per month) and management costs ($1500-3000 per month).

In total, that brings us to $15,950. This number will be shocking to some, given that social media channels are often positioned as a “free” marketing channel.

Pro tip: Take the time to break out your complete social media costs, from strategy development through to ongoing management. This is the only way to understand your true ROI.

Keeping Track of all Returns

Don’t let tunnel vision blind you from the true value of social media marketing because it’s more than just sales and profit. You must also consider brand awareness, customer relationships, and retention. Neglecting these dimensions can lead to an incomplete understanding of social media's impact.

Falling into the trap of tracking vanity metrics or those unrelated to business objectives is also prevalent. While likes and shares might seem promising, their translation into tangible SaaS outcomes is limited.

Pro tip: Expand your metrics tracking beyond sales data and vanity metrics. Remember to measure brand awareness, customer retention rates, and community engagement to get the full picture.

When building ROI measurement reports for executives, focus less on vanity metrics and more on strategic outcomes.

Structure your report like a story: begin with the objective, walk through what was executed, highlight the impact, and tie everything back to business goals like revenue growth, customer retention, or market expansion.

Contextualizing performance within the broader landscape: how changing algorithms affected reach, how paid and organic efforts worked together, and most importantly, how those shifts translated into measurable impact. Highlight what worked, what didn’t, and what’s changing.

Use visuals to spotlight trends and context, not just results. Most importantly, explain what the data means and what’s next. The goal isn’t just to inform—it’s to influence decisions, justify investments, and show how your social media strategy drives real business value.

Once you’ve calculated the returns of your social media strategy, you may find it isn’t what you’d hoped. If so, it’s time to re-evaluate your strategy by looking into content optimization, audience research, and how to leverage tools and trends.

Optimize Your Content

We all know the saying, “Content is king.” It’s true for the most part, but creating content for content's sake is not how you win on social media. As Liana Evans, the author of Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media, says:

“Content doesn’t win. Optimized content wins.”

To improve your social media ROI, start optimizing your content with strategies like social media SEO (search engine optimization) and A/B testing. This will help you identify which types of content lead to certain results.

A/B Testing

Improve your social media ads through A/B testing, a strategy that tests variations in different elements. Experiment with post text, CTAs, visual formats, and ad formats across platforms. Assess the impact of hashtags and audience segmentation. Use social media scheduling to push tests live automatically, and diversify your approach based on what resonates with your audience.

Social Media SEO

Social networks like TikTok and Instagram are the preferred search tools for 40% of Millennials and GenZ. Optimize your profile by incorporating relevant keywords into your bio, name, and handle. Craft captions with strategically placed keywords and employ relevant hashtags. Enhance the accessibility and search visibility of your content by using subtitles, in-video, and alt-text.

Listen to your Audience

Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing online conversations for insights into audience sentiments, preferences, and trends.

social listening for ROI — More marketers now use social listening tools to prove ROI, according to Hootsuite’s 2025 Trends Report

Using social listening tools like Sprout Social and Agorapulse help you monitor your audience's sentiments, identify trends, and stay in touch with topics your audience loves to chatter about on social media.

Implement Link Tracking

All social media platforms include some form of analytics tracking, but this data must be combined with off-platform analytics to completely understand your ROI. URL shorteners are a great way to do this.

For example, if you suspect a lift in website traffic is due to your Facebook posts, link tracking through UTM parameters or tracking pixels will provide the data to confirm your suspicions.

You should also check out how you can maximize your marketing analytics by focusing on full-funnel marketing.

UTM Parameters

UTM parameters, or UTM tags, are short text codes that differentiate between links pointing to the same URL. These codes track the source of web traffic.

For example, the UTM code utm_medium=social indicates traffic came from social media, the medium, while utm_source=facebook shows the source of the visitor, which is Facebook. Both of these codes can be added to a URL to provide information on where your traffic is coming from. I usually use Google Analytics for UTMs.

This option is much more manual, though it offers complete customization. Alternatively, social media management tools like Hootsuite offer built-in link-tracking tools to streamline the process.

Pixels as UTMs

Essential for ad campaign evaluation, tracking pixels captures user actions from social ads, including purchases. These tracking codes are similar to UTM tags in that they share website interactions with social platforms like Meta and TikTok.

This is helpful for tracking your social media marketing ROI, as it reflects how social ads contribute to customer actions off of social media platforms. This data can also be used for strategic retargeting, enhancing conversions, and brand engagement.

Invest in social media analytics tools. These provide a wealth of time-saving automations, in-depth data reporting, and scheduling features. Let’s take a look at a few of the best:

1. Sprout Social — Best for audience insights
2. Social Status — Best for automated social media reports
3. Snapchat — Best for Snapchat analytics
4. Brand24 — Best for social listening
5. Agorapulse — Best for measuring ROI
6. Rival IQ — Best for competitor analysis
7. Sendible — Best for enterprise brands and agencies
8. Cyfe — Best for customizable dashboards
9. Buffer — Best for getting started
10. Keyhole — Best for real-time tracking and analysis

Here are some others tools you can use to keep track of social ROI:

Hubspot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software with in-depth analytics reporting for organic and paid social media campaigns. You can track engagement, click-through rates, and conversions from a central dashboard. And create automated reports on your performance. HubSpot also supports tracking link creation – a helpful alternative to manually generating UTM codes.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a fantastic solution for social media management. While similar to Hubspot, Hootsuite provides a more comprehensive and customizable analytics dashboard for social media. It includes post-scheduling features and social listening tools. And enables real-time monitoring of keywords, brand mentions, and industry conversations.

Bonus: Check out Hootsuite’s social media ROI calculator for a helping hand in understanding your social media return on investment.

Mastering the measurement of social media ROI is not a “nice to have” – it's a must for marketing leaders and their teams.

Key metrics, both in costs and returns, provide a holistic view of your social media performance. By embracing strategies like A/B testing, social listening, and leveraging advanced analytics tools, you can optimize your content and enhance your social media ROI.

So, refine your social media marketing strategy, stay informed with the latest industry insights, and continue optimizing your approach.

If you're eager to delve deeper into advanced metrics and strategies, subscribe to our newsletter for marketing leaders to get resources and insights on social media delivered in your inbox.

Your journey to unlocking the full potential of social media ROI begins now.

FAQs on Mastering Social Media ROI

Advanced metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and Customer Retention Rate provide deeper insights on how social media impacts your business.

If you’re ready to dive deeper into advanced metrics and KPIs, read our guide on Key Performance Indicators Every CMO Should Track for a more comprehensive overview.

For B2B marketers, Facebook drives the highest ROI, with TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram sharing second place. However, take this with a grain of salt, as this will vary from business to business.

Audience analysis is an important step in building a successful social media strategy and will provide the best data on which platform will work best for your business.

Growth rates on social media vary widely based on industry and platform. On average, a growth rate between 2-5% is considered good, but this isn’t concrete. For example, here are the average monthly audience growth rates on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok:

LinkedIn: 1%
Instagram: 1.45%
TikTok: 2-3%

This variance in growth rates is why it is important to create your benchmark reports to personalize your growth tracking.

Start by identifying overarching business goals. Then, define specific, measurable social media objectives that contribute directly to those larger aspirations. When goal setting, utilize social listening to understand better your target audience’s needs, desires, and struggles.

Yes. Negative ROI indicates a loss on investment, which means you’re putting in more than you’re getting out. Evaluate the cause – whether it’s strategy, targeting, or execution – and adjust your marketing budget accordingly.