Every marketer has heard the question from leadership: what is the ROI of our social media? It is a fair question, and for too long, the answer has been a vague wave at brand awareness metrics. That era is ending. Modern attribution tools and measurement frameworks make it possible to tie social media activity directly to revenue.
The Attribution Challenge
Social media rarely drives last-click conversions. Someone sees your LinkedIn post, visits your website a week later through organic search, and converts after clicking a retargeting ad. In a last-click model, social gets zero credit. In reality, social initiated the entire journey.
Multi-touch attribution models fix this by distributing credit across all touchpoints. Linear, time-decay, and data-driven models each tell a different story. The right model depends on your sales cycle and channel mix, but any multi-touch model is better than last-click when evaluating social impact.
Metrics That Matter
Forget vanity metrics. Follower count and impressions tell you almost nothing about business impact. Instead, track these five metrics that connect social activity to revenue:
- Social-attributed pipeline: How much revenue is in your pipeline from social-sourced leads?
- Engagement rate by content type: Which formats drive meaningful interaction?
- Click-through rate to site: Is your social content driving qualified traffic?
- Social share of voice: How does your brand presence compare to competitors?
- Customer acquisition cost by channel: How does social CAC compare to other channels?
Building the Business Case
To justify social media investment, you need to speak the language of your CFO. That means framing results in terms of pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value impact. Build a monthly report that tracks these metrics over time, showing the trend line of social media business impact.
The goal is not to prove that social media works in isolation. It is to show how social media amplifies your entire marketing ecosystem.