10 Impacts of Social Media on Business You Must Know

In 2025, social media is more than just a medium for engaging customers. Brands are using them to boost sales, deliver customer support, attract top talent, manage investor expectations, and even monitor real-time sentiment.

A misstep on socials can spark a boycott, but a smart move can expand your market share. Like it or not, social media is the place that can make or break your hard work in 2025.

That's why it's essential to understand the specific ways social media is influencing your business.

We explore 10 key ways social media is transforming enterprise business outcomes ranging from brand resilience and marketing agility to measurable ROI and beyond.

1. Boosts direct revenue via social and conversational commerce

If you've scrolled any popular social media feed lately, you'll know that they have evolved into end-to-end shopping ecosystems.

The traditional sales funnel is now a single, immersive experience that could begin and end within a social media app.

TikTok Shop has, for example, driven a 26% surge in U.S. social commerce sales in 2024. In China, jewelry shopping through social live streams is reportedly a successful phenomenon, something that's also growing in the West since TikTok Shop's rollout in 2023.

TikTok Shop, Instagram Checkout, YouTube Shopping, and similar ecommerce extensions on social native platforms are examples of social commerce, features that let your consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products without ever leaving the app!

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To support the new customer journey, social commerce has evolved into conversational commerce, where brands integrate messaging apps, chatbots, or voice assistants within social media environments to provide personalized support, purchase assistance, and foster stronger customer relationships.

Here's an example of Sprinklr's conversational commerce platform with a 1:1 chat window open 👇

These platforms centralize customer conversations from multiple social media profiles and channels in unified inboxes, so you can facilitate purchases or provide instant customer support right from the social media platform.

boAt, an Indian consumer electronics leader, integrates WhatsApp Business on Sprinklr’s Conversational Commerce platform to engage directly with customers in real time.

Implementing social and conversational commerce helped them engage more than 500,000 conversations through "Click-to-WhatsApp" actions followed by proactive order updates, restock alerts, and cart recovery campaigns.

boAt achieved over $236,000 in direct-to-consumer revenue within six months of implementation, including $18,000 from abandoned cart notifications.

This is social + conversational commerce, turning casual conversations into purchases without leaving social media platforms.

🔥74% of consumers will message a business before purchasing. Make it count with Sprinklr's Conversational Commerce platform.

• Get an omnichannel inbox
• Integrate data from CRM/CDM, for instance, deeper context
• Deliver 100% reply rates via cross-team collab
• Learn how boAt generated $236,000 in D2C revenue in six months with conversational commerce

Book Conversational Commerce Demo

👉 Know more: How social selling helps build your B2B sales pipeline

2. Increases your organic reach on search engines

Over the last couple of years, social media content, especially UGC on platforms like Reddit and Quora, has seen massive gains in search engine visibility.

This phenomenon began because of a slew of concurrent developments, including:

• Evolving search habits – for example, people began using "Reddit" as a suffix to their queries for authentic discussions
• Google's partnership with Reddit to train its AI
• The integration of gen-AI in Google search, prompting many to prefer forums over AI overviews

As a result, Reddit threads began to appear in Google search queries more than 97% of the time, according to a 2024 study. Even AI models such as Gemini and ChatGPT began citing Reddit threads in their responses.

Another study found that discussions and forums appear in 77% of search results, but Reddit and Quora have a significantly higher visibility than other forum sites.

This trend isn't, however, limited to just Reddit. Google appears to index LinkedIn articles, X posts and profiles, Medium posts, and more on search if they meet a search intent.

👉 You may like: 4 Reasons Reddit is everywhere

The cue for you here is that brands investing more in authentic, community-driven content, especially on Reddit and Quora, have a higher chance of achieving better organic visibility than those who aren't doing it.

Not to mention the bonus of better recognition and brand trust that you will accumulate from being present in forums and social media platforms.

🔥If you use Sprinklr: You have direct, near–real-time access to public Reddit posts and comments right within Sprinklr's interface, thanks to Sprinklr-Reddit strategic partnership. You can:

• ✅ Monitor Reddit conversations in real time via the Data API
• ✅ Analyze sentiment, trends, and brand perception on Reddit
• ✅ Track competitor mentions and emerging discussions
• ✅ Plan, create, and manage Reddit ad campaigns via Ads API
• ✅ Optimize Reddit ad targeting and ROI with performance insights
• ✅ Engage with Reddit users directly from Sprinklr
• ✅ Publish organic and paid content to Reddit
• ✅ Generate unified cross-channel reports including Reddit data

Demo Reddit + sprinklr

3. Drives engagement with emotional content

Social media, unlike traditional ads, invites participation, rather than passive consumption.

Where a TV spot tells you what to think, a TikTok skit or Instagram Reel shows you how it feels. This emotional involvement on social media is a massive shift.

People don't come to social platforms to be sold to. They come for connection, entertainment, and identity. And brands that show up as people, not billboards, thrive in that space.

This is where authenticity becomes a competitive advantage, and social media is the best place to orchestrate that.

A meta-analysis of 800 Facebook video ads found that high-arousal videos are shared twice as often as low-arousal ones.

✨Exclusive insights: Two social platforms that had a moment in 2024 and what to watch in 2025

A behind-the-scenes reel or a raw customer testimonial can generate more trust than a slick, scripted ad. Why? Because it's real. It's vulnerable. And in a scroll-stopping world, that matters more than perfection.

Take Duolingo, whose TikTok strategy relies almost entirely on humor and pop culture memes featuring their green owl mascot, Duo (who has a crush on pop star Dua Lipa!).

By embracing meme culture instead of pushing feature lists, they've grown their TikTok following to over 10 million and generated millions of organic views.

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Another example is Dove's long running Real Beauty campaigns. It taps into themes of self-worth and authenticity — Dove's brand values, which drive both emotional engagement and brand trust.

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Emotional content in the form of reels, behind-the-scenes, etc., builds cultural relevance because it connects with people on shared feelings — joy, nostalgia, even frustration. These formats consistently outperform "feature-led" posts in reach and interactions.

And there are hardly other media better than social media to tap into the power of genuine, emotional content.

💡Pro tip: Test, refine, and tailor your emotional content on Sprinklr's Social Publishing & Engagement platform with built-in sentiment analysis.

A/B test emotional hooks — such as user-led storytelling versus polished brand campaigns — across channels and measure the sentiment of comments, shares, and reactions after posting.

Pair it with traditional engagement metrics and identify which emotions (joy, urgency, empathy, outrage), angles, and content formats drive the highest conversions from both paid and organic strategies. All these, in one, unified platform.

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👉 Also read: 12 Social media platform features to fuel your strategy

4. Boosts your brand’s visibility and sales through cross-platform presence

Today's buyers don't follow a linear path to purchase. They zigzag their way through social media platforms, devices, and content types before making a decision.

A single purchase might originate on TikTok, lead to peer validation on Reddit, continue in-depth research on YouTube, before finally triggering a purchase on an Instagram Story ad!

But while consumer behavior has evolved, your team may still operate in multichannel silos, managing each social media platform independently. This leads to a fragmented brand presence, inconsistent messaging, duplicated efforts, and missed retargeting opportunities.

But brands that are capitalizing on social media's impact on business are investing in omnichannel customer experience that includes social media.

They are creating integrated customer experiences across all social channels rather than merely being present in all of them.

For example, a large tech company consolidated publishing, engagement, and reporting across multiple channels — Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube — on Sprinklr's Unified-CXM platform.

As a result, both global and regional teams coordinate paid and organic social media efforts from the same source, leading to rich outcomes.

In 2022, they managed over 80 social accounts, published 5,000 posts, and responded to nearly 30,000 messages.

Cross-platform presence plus unified overview led them to analyze 379K customer reviews and save $81.5K with ad automations.

When your brand coordinates storytelling (posting), targeting (ads), and creative across channels, you create a multiplier effect and also save precious resources that go into managing disparate entities.

Cross-platform presence reinforces each other, improves brand recall, increases conversion rates, and maximizes the value of every piece of content you publish.

5. Improves business outcomes with social amplification

Employee or stakeholder advocacy is a performance multiplier on social media.

A Hinge Marketing study (PDF) found that 79% of firms surveyed reported more online visibility after implementing a formal employee advocacy program. Sixty-five percent reported increased brand recognition.

On social media platforms like LinkedIn, employees collectively have 10 times more reach than the corporate page, directly impacting both hiring and lead generation outcomes.

A broader reach on social media isn't just about brand awareness. It simplifies the process to find expertise for your org, reuse knowledge assets, and tap into real-time input from cross-functional stakeholders.

For example, Lenovo encourages its employees across the org, including sales, R&D, marketing, HR, and operations, to share content that resonates personally.

Its team members get to choose posts on themes that include corporate values, sustainability, employer branding, and diversity initiatives — no hard assignments. Read the full case study here.

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As a result of its employee advocacy program, Lenovo saw a 200% increase in engagements and a 360% increase in social media reach in just six months!

"Using Advocacy for employer branding is a natural fit," says Alli Soule, social education and advocacy manager, Lenovo.

"The brand can say it's a great place to work — loudly — on every platform. But it's only made true when employees say it is."

💡Pro tip: Use Sprinklr's Employee Advocacy platform to make it easy for the team to share branded content, measure its impact, and generate leads. Plus:

• Make a library of posts with a centralized creation + approval workflow
• Let teams share posts with pre-made hashtags and captions
• Incentivize best best-performing content with awards and badges
• Get OOTB reports on top-performing content and much more

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6. Enhances customer support and crisis resilience

With 31% of consumers expecting a response within 24 hours, your brand is under constant pressure to deliver fast, empathetic customer support.

On the other hand, misinformation, data breaches, product recalls, or even a single viral complaint can potentially spiral within hours on social media.

Both are high-stakes moments. And in both cases, your ability to predict them, respond swiftly, monitor sentiment, and track the hot threads will make the difference between containment and brand fallout.

Remember the coverage of Samsung Galaxy Note 7's battery catching fire in 2016?

It spread rapidly on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube, fueled by viral videos and posts from frustrated customers.

Negative social media mentions jumped into the millions within days. Consumers demanded answers, while airlines and regulators issued warnings.

But the good news is that, with AI, technologies like social listening and conversational commerce, you now have much higher chances of thwarting such a crisis from spiraling into a viral, loss-ushering mess.

You already know how an omnichannel social media strategy and conversational commerce can help with customer support and experience, especially during crisis.

Social listening is another technology that helps identify trends and developments on social media and other digital channels before they become critical.

For example, you can use Sprinklr's social listening with AI/ML to track conversations on 30+ channels and analyze their sentiment in real-time.

The platform automatically surfaces themes, trends, and anomalies, even from images and videos, that you can analyze, benchmark against rivals, and generate reports on.

AI-powered triage, sentiment spike detection, and escalation workflows surface potential issues before they explode, acting like a team of 24/7 social media assistants.

For example, if Sprinklr detects a spike in negative sentiment around a keyword like "login issue" or "data leak," it will automatically trigger alerts and route the issue to the appropriate crisis team with contextual data and a pre-approved response playbook.

This level of preparedness, thanks to the real-time nature of social media, lets you respond with transparency, consistency, and speed, critical in maintaining trust during crises.

You can use the post-incident social insights to inform debriefs, assess recovery sentiment, and guide reputation rebuilding efforts.

7. Strengthens retention and counters digital fatigue

According to Gartner, 50% of consumers will significantly reduce their time on social media due to growing concerns around toxicity, misinformation, and privacy.

Social media fatigue is particularly acute among Gen Z and Millennials, who are increasingly aware of manipulative content, surveillance concerns, and mental health risks.

The message here is that it may no longer be enough only to pursue retention on social media. The changing winds may, sooner or later, call for a focus on building safer brand communities, while continuing to deliver value and chase business outcomes.

A Deloitte digital survey found that organizations with mature social media strategies experience a 26% higher customer retention rate and a 21% increase in revenue per customer interaction.

Brands that foster healthier comment sections, offer credible and original information, and create opt-in, low-noise spaces for interaction may experience greater traction and overall better business outcomes from socials than those that fail to do so.

Consider how Glossier built its brand on social media, maintaining genuine value and showing its products in action.

Instead of relying on curated ads, it turned everyday customers into ambassadors. And there are several other brands following this strategy.

Users share casual selfies, product routines, and honest feedback using hashtags like #GlossierGirl and #GlossierPink.

Glossier reposts these content pieces on its social channels, making customers feel seen and part of the brand story. For onlookers, there is a tranche of authentic and transparent content from real people rather than ads.

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Most of Glossier’s growth comes from peer referrals. That kind of real, user-led engagement feels more like a conversation than a campaign. Yet it converts.

Younger consumers respond well when brands listen and participate rather than dictate. Fixing feedback transparently (like reverting a vegan formula when customers pushed back) also helped Glossier preserve credibility.

💡Pro tip: Use a consumer intelligence platform like Sprinklr Insights to monitor emotional/sentimental shifts about your brand content on social media.

Sentiment changes (negative and neutral over positive), content performance drops, engagement wanes, or misinformation/complaints rise are early signs of fatigue. Track and act on them fast, with empathetic response and updated content that your users will love.

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Book Sprinklr Insights Demo

👉 Also read: How does your customer really feel? How social listening can help

8. Expands reach through user-generated content

According to Forbes, 55.7% of TikTok content is user-generated, reflecting a deep shift toward authenticity over polished ads.

Meanwhile, Kantar, a UK-based market research group, reports that influencer-led strategies are now outperforming traditional ads, thanks to the personal credibility and intimacy with the audience they bring.

The numbers support this shift: the average engagement rate for influencer campaigns stands at 4.2%, higher than most traditional paid media.

Over half of consumers now trust product recommendations from influencers they follow, especially when making purchasing decisions.

It's not just about visibility. On average, brands earn $5.20 in sales for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

UGC and influencer marketing on social platforms help your brand to build trust at scale, reduce content production costs, and increase organic reach... these are all really positive impacts of social media on business.

👉You may like: How top brands harness UGC marketing

Apple, National Geographic, GoPro, Patagonia, Porsche, and many other brands routinely use user-generated content on social media to distribute their offerings without hard-selling while also fostering a community of like-minded.

🧑‍🎓 Learn: How to leverage social media USG to drive engagement

9. Proves ROI with ad spend and attribution

Social platforms not only generate awareness but also drive powerful, full-funnel conversions. This is especially true if you do social selling.

If you can track both paid and organic efforts across social channels, you can tie engagement directly to revenue, influence budget allocation, and drive accountability in marketing decisions.

Most of your social media platforms will come with built-in data analytics for native content and ads.

For example, Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads Manager, and LinkedIn Campaign Manager are built-in tools to measure the ROI of your organic and paid activities on respective platforms.

Beauty brand Glossier uses UTM tracking and social commerce tools to monitor how user-generated content on Instagram drives product sales.

The data tells them which are their top-performing influencers, and they double down on the high-converting content themes.

If you are active on multiple social media platforms, native reporting tools will create silos. In such cases, consider platforms like Sprinklr Social Analytics and Reporting, which help you analyze various social media platforms from one, unified place.

It unifies paid and organic reporting, customer journey tracking, and the ability to optimize campaigns based on real engagement and conversion data.

You can build custom ROI dashboards by integrating your native tools, setting KPIs, monitoring ROI in real-time, getting AI-powered suggestions, and pulling insights into a Customer Dashboard to show spend vs. value, realized savings, and revenue uplift, among other data.

10. Raises risk as platform scrutiny grows

Not every effect of social media has been positive.

Its growing influence also brings complex compliance and reputational risks that you, as a business, can't ignore.

Regulatory bodies worldwide are introducing stringent frameworks to hold platforms and, by extension, brands active on the platforms, accountable for harmful or non-compliant content.

For instance, Brazil's 2023 legislation now makes platforms legally responsible for illegal posts.

Similarly, Pinterest's 2024 Transparency Report highlights a 48% increase in flagged content related to mental health.

All these reinforce the heightened sensitivity around brand association with potentially harmful messaging.

If you have a global presence with social media managed by distributed teams, there's a bigger ball on your court, since the chances of compliance gaps could trigger bigger consequences.

This shifting regulatory climate presents two major challenges for your enterprise:

1. Ensuring regional compliance without slowing down content velocity

2. Preventing reputational fallout from unmonitored local or affiliate accounts

To navigate this complexity, explore ways to bring your social media publishing under a compliant and governable umbrella. Disparate management and team silos make compliance difficult.

For example, many Fortune 100 brands use Sprinklr's distributed marketing platform to bring their geographically dispersed team and global social media publishing under one, unified purview.

These platforms bring:

• Social listening to track sentiments and keywords
• AI-powered compliance monitoring and governance tools
• Omnichannel publishing with permission controls
• Localized compliance filters, and more —

— so teams can confidently publish and manage risk across jurisdictions with 100% compliance.

A strong social media governance ensures that every outgoing message aligns with both regulatory norms and your brand's identity, a Holy Grail in regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and telecommunications.

The impact of social media on business is enterprise-critical. Make it count with Sprinklr

Each of the effects you saw in this post is a cue for a tangible way you can use social media to transform outcomes.

As users experience social fatigue, trust-driven, authentic, and valuable social media strategies are essential to succeed.

Convert social media insights into outcomes in a single system that orchestrates publishing, listening, engagement, and analytics across platforms and teams - Sprinklr Social.

Book a demo now to see how Sprinklr helps increase campaign ROI, engagement rates, and deliver a coordinated brand experience across channels and regions.