How to Determine Social Media Value: Tips, Metrics and More

Once the purview of B2C brands chasing real-time, personalized customer interactions, social media is now a place where even legacy B2B businesses spend a respectable chunk of their marketing budget.  

Clearly, businesses see value in building a strong presence on social media. But as the world becomes more data-driven, decision-makers may ask: How exactly do we determine social media value? Where is the data?  

And they would be right to do so. Cold, hard numbers make a better business case than words ever could.  

Therefore, you need to turn to metrics to evaluate how social media benefits your brand. With social media metrics that can measure the traffic on your site or the engagement level of your audience, you can assign concrete, number-based outcomes to your social media efforts.  

Social media metrics also help you determine the effectiveness of your social media marketing. Armed with them, you can communicate the value of what you do to key stakeholders. But most importantly, social media metrics contain key insights on how to improve your social media strategy.  

Before we break down exactly how to determine social media value, let's cover the basic whys.  

Why is it important to calculate social media value?

Calculating social media value helps marketing teams and budget owners in the following ways: 

• Quantify user engagement: Likes and shares are not the only metrics of user engagement. An in-depth social media analysis can reveal behavioral trends, such as a customer's increased interaction during specific hours and preferences for content formats such as user-generated content or how-to videos. You can then use that information to tailor their outreach programs on social media. 
• Enable precise conversion tracking: With social media analytics, learn how many of your window shoppers turn into serious customers. You can do this by linking social media interactions to specific business outcomes, like lead generation and sales. This data-driven approach helps you refine your social media strategy, and take strategic calls on budget allocation and content modification.  
• Analyze your competitors: You can always learn a thing or two from your competitor's social media strategies. By monitoring your competitors’ performance metrics — engagement rates, follower growth and content virality — you can tweak your strategies to stay ahead of the pack. Comparing social media metrics also gives you a glimpse into emerging marketing trends in your industry, including changing social media consumer behaviors or content preferences.  
• Optimize content strategy. Through analytics, you can identify which types of content attract the highest engagement and conversion rates. Are your live streams more popular? Or do your customers respond far more enthusiastically to interactive polls and long-form storytelling-oriented posts? This knowledge can lead to better brand recognition and customer loyalty. 

Now that you know the importance of social media value, learn how to calculate your business's value.  

10 important metrics to communicate social media value 

Without the right context, a metric is just a meaningless number. Ensure you tie your metrics to relevant business activities and outcomes. This will help your teams and your stakeholders understand these metrics better and use them more effectively. 

Here’s how it’s done.  

1. Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) in social media quantifies the efficiency of your social media campaigns by comparing the gains against costs. This metric is a direct representation of the financial success of your social strategies. And knowing the ROI of a social media campaign will impact future budgeting and marketing decisions.  

Inaccurate calculations of ROI can lead to misinformed strategies and budget misallocation. 

💡 Pro Tip: Integrate financial tracking with analytics tools to streamline ROI calculations. This can simplify the process and also provide valuable data that will prove useful when setting up future campaigns.  

2. Website traffic

Website traffic indicates the number of people who visit your site from your social media platforms. It helps you understand how effective your social media content is at leading customers to your website. You can modify your social media tactics to see if your website traffic numbers improve. 

A capable social media analytics platform like Sprinklr can help you accurately count the number of site visitors originating from social media. 

💡 Pro Tip: Use Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters, such as utm_source and utm_campaign, when linking to your website from social media. This will help you track the traffic arising from each social platform. You can also understand which campaigns or content types resonate with your target audience.  

Also Read: Social media attribution: How to measure correctly.  

3. Brand awareness

You can use brand awareness to evaluate how familiar your target audience is with your brand. This is a particularly important metric as it determines your brand's market position and visibility to potential customers.  

Though it seems like a qualitative assessment, brand awareness is, in fact, calculable. But you need to measure it carefully. Not measuring brand awareness can leave you with a skewed perception of your brand's market impact. 

💡 Pro Tip: Implement social listening to track brand mentions and sentiment across multiple platforms. An AI-powered social listening tool like Sprinklr enables you to identify relevant conversations that don’t directly mention your brand or products — and creates new opportunities to engage with customers and prospects, enabling faster and more efficient feedback loops.

4. Sales generated from social media 

This metric helps measure the direct revenue earned from social media campaigns and activities. It is vital to quantify the actual financial impact of your social media efforts. Incorrectly attributing sales to social media can lead to a distorted view of campaign effectiveness. 

To calculate social media sales, you only need to add up the revenue from transactions originating from social media channels.  

💡 Pro Tip: To enhance tracking, integrate your social media platforms with your CRM or e-commerce analytics. This integration allows you to monitor customer journeys — from social media interactions to the final purchase — with greater accuracy. It also gives you precise insight into the effectiveness of different social channels and content in driving sales. 

Recommended Read: What is social selling: Definition, strategy and tools. 

5. Brand and customer engagement

Brand and customer engagement assesses the level and quality of interactions between your brand and its audience on social platforms. This social media metric reflects how effectively your brand engages its audience, influences customer loyalty and manages brand reputation.  

Remember that misinterpreting engagement levels can lead to misguided marketing strategies. 

💡 Pro Tip: Focus on crafting interactive and relatable content to boost engagement. Polls, Q&A sessions and user-generated content campaigns are excellent for increasing active participation. These strategies elevate engagement rates and foster a sense of community and belonging among your audience.

6. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) 

This metric analyzes customer interactions on your social media platforms to gauge how satisfied they are. By knowing what satisfies your customers (and what doesn't) you can create exceptional customer experiences and gain a loyal customer base.  

💡 Pro Tip: Engage with your audience actively. Respond to their comments, messages and reviews on social media as soon as you can. This active engagement helps resolve issues without them escalating and demonstrates your brand's commitment to customer satisfaction. Also, invest in customer satisfaction software that can perform sentiment analysis to gain deeper insights into customer emotions and opinions. 

Must Read: Social media sentiment analysis: An easy guide. 

7. Lead generation 

Social media lead generation is a popular metric for social media valuation, especially as many businesses consider social media interactions as an important aspect of customer journey.  

Simply put, lead generation tracks the number of potential customers or clients showing interest in your product or service through social media activities.  

To calculate lead generation, you need to count the total number of leads acquired through social media channels. 

💡 Pro Tip: Optimize your social media profiles for lead generation by including clear calls-to-action (CTAs), contact information and links to lead capture forms. From targeted ads to gated content like webinars or whitepapers on social media, there are many ways to boost your lead generation efforts.  

With so many brands fishing in the same pools for leads, you need an out-of-the-box strategy to reel in high-quality ones. An AI-powered marketing platform can help you devise a fully loaded social media strategy with lead-generation campaigns, all in a few clicks.

8. Net promoter score (NPS) 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures a customer's loyalty and satisfaction based on how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. A high NPS score means you have a significant number of genuine brand advocates who promote your brand to anyone willing to listen. It's a key indicator of customer advocacy and indicates a high potential for organic growth (driven by word-of-mouth recommendations).  

💡 Pro Tip: Carry out regular NPS surveys through an omnichannel survey platform to gather customer feedback across channels and fill in the missing gaps with AI powered CSAT predictions. Tailor post-purchase follow-ups with NPS questions to get real-time insights. Also, actively address customer feedback, especially, from detractors to turn them into promoters. 

Must Read: How to improve the net promoter score of your brand. 

9. Cost-per-click (CPC) 

Cost-per-click (CPC) is a social media metric that indicates the cost of each click in your paid social media advertising campaigns. Essentially, it's the amount you pay for ads on social media, based on the number of clicks the ad receives. CPC ensures optimum use of your marketing budget.  

💡 Pro Tip: To optimize your CPC, analyze and adjust your targeting criteria regularly. Focus on high-performing demographics, interests and behaviors. Use A/B testing for ad creatives and messaging to identify and deploy the most cost-effective strategies. 

To learn more about CPC, read Instagram advertising. 

10. Audience growth rate 

Audience growth rate is an important metric to measure social media value. It measures the growth rate of your brand's social media following. Your audience growth rate indicates the extent of your brand's reach and how effective your social media content strategy is at acquiring new followers.  

💡 Pro Tip: Use an audience insights platform to create content tailored to your target audience. Analyze which posts (educational, entertaining, inspirational or other) gain the most traction and modify your content strategy accordingly.  

Also Read: How to measure social media engagement effectively  

5 tips to explain social media value to teams 

Once you've used these metrics to calculate your social media value, how do you explain it to your team members and other stakeholders? 

1. Consult team leaders at the outset 

Before you discuss social media value, try to understand the needs and expectations of your stakeholders. What are their desired outcomes from social media campaigns? Or what are their audience engagement goals?  

Consulting with team leaders before implementing your social media strategy prevents misalignment with departmental needs and minimizes inefficiencies and redundancies. Get a clear understanding of what they hope to achieve with social media and how it aligns with their departmental or larger business goals. Once you understand their expectations, you can communicate social media value in a way that’s meaningful and business-friendly. 

2. Evaluate customer care performance regularly 

Communicate social media value by showing your customer care team how their performance drives a sizable amount of social media interactions.  

Regularly assess your customer care team’s performance on social media. Monitor aspects like response times, customer feedback and resolution effectiveness to identify areas of improvement. This will help your customer care teams improve their strategies and show decision-makers how social media acts as a barometer for the quality of customer service your brand provides.

3. Forewarn your product teams about market shifts  

Keep your team in the know by sharing emerging market trends that you observe on social media. With increasingly short trend cycles, social media channels are often the first place you learn about shifts in the market, such as a preference for human-like chatbots among B2B customers or a spike in demand for wellness products. Thus, analyzing social media data can shed a light on shifts in consumer behavior, capitalizing on which can give your company a competitive edge.  

But you cannot simply set up alerts or automated messages and then forget about it. Make sure you regularly review customer behavior changes on social media and run them by your product team. This will help them innovate in line with market demands.  

4. Provide your creative team with direction 

Creating content that resonates with audiences while staying true to their brand identity is the goal of any business. Employ social media analytics to understand what type of visuals generate the most engagement. Share these insights with your design team as a reference for designing content for future campaigns. This collaboration should be ongoing, where successful visual themes and design choices are identified and built based on audience reception.  

5. Share audience sentiment with your PR team in real time 

Sharing real-time social media feedback with your PR team helps them respond swiftly to public sentiment. This is where tools that monitor audience sentiment come in handy. When you regularly relay audience sentiment data to your PR team, it creates a constant feedback loop that allows them to adjust their strategies or messaging accordingly.  

Final thoughts 

Social media metrics are a compass for your future decisions on social media.  

However, not all metrics are equally meaningful to every brand or team. Understand the distinct business objectives of various stakeholders in your organization and try to showcase social media value that gets them closer to those objectives.  

But you don't have to do it on your own. At Sprinklr, we have the tools to help you manage social media. With Sprinklr's social media management platform, you can create social media plans, post automatically, analyze results, promote your brand and do a whole lot more.  

Book a demo today to learn more.