ICYMI: 5 Steps to (Finally) Proving Organic Social ROI
With Rachel Goulet | Expert Series
Proving the ROI of organic social has always felt like chasing a moving target — until I came across a smart framework from Sprout Social’s Director of Social, Rachel Goulet. Yes, even a social media software company has to get strategic about its own social strategy.
For example, you wouldn’t hit publish on a post that doesn’t speak to your social audience, right? Internal reporting should be held to the same standard says Rachel. That starts with figuring out which data points your leadership team actually cares about — and how often they want to see them.
Today’s newsletter — written by Rachel — is free to read, thanks to a sponsorship from my friends at Sprout Social. If you’re enjoying ICYMI as a free subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription for the full experience!
Social media ROI often feels like a mystery. Plenty of leadership teams don’t understand how metrics like engagement rates and impressions directly impact revenue.
Yes, our work is mysterious and important. And while social is a long-term investment, executives need clear returns to justify spend. As social teams, we can do more to help connect the dots between what we do and how it fuels our businesses.
Quantifying and communicating social ROI is not an easy code to crack. Once you do, it unlocks all the right things: more resources, more respect and more space at the decision-making table.
Over the past year, my team (the Social Team at Sprout!) has been on our own journey to refine how we prove social ROI. Thanks to the right blend of internal champions, tech integrations and process improvements, we’ve been able to uncover a 5,800% increase in additional business impact driven by our social strategy.
Here are the biggest takeaways we’ve learned along the way and how you can apply them to your own work.
Step 1: Get your reporting infrastructure in check
Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: Executives want to see results, so you (or your team) spend so much time manually reporting that there’s little time leftover for creative strategy. Without time for meaningful initiatives, performance suffers, and leaders don’t see the impact needed to justify additional spend. The cycle repeats.
Breaking this cycle requires integrated tools that help you draw the line between organic social content and activity further down the sales funnel. This is how you earn the trust and space to focus on audience-driven content that delivers stronger long-term results. As results come in, they lay the groundwork for securing additional headcount and resources.
Look at all of the tools in your social marketing tech stack today (e.g., social media management, CRM, analytics). Do these systems talk to each other? And if they did, could you track how social contributes to conversions across multiple touchpoints?
Social teams are driving revenue. But last-touch attribution only tells part of the story. Your reporting infrastructure must be set up to demonstrate how social impacts the entire customer journey — from top-of-funnel engagement and reach metrics to down-funnel demand.
Step 2: Enlist an executive sponsor
Depending on your starting point, revamping your reporting infrastructure may involve anything from procuring social media software to prioritizing the effort amid other marketing initiatives. Having a leader in your corner ensures the work pushes through bottlenecks and doesn’t stall.
For us, using the Sprout platform (and integrations with Google Analytics and Salesforce) meant we already had the tools to capture data for multi-touch attribution. However, gaining support from our CMO and VP of Brand and Social was essential to elevating this initiative alongside other marketing analytics efforts.
With guidance from our executive sponsors, we reimagined our social reporting approach, replacing our five-year-old content tagging structure with a new framework aligned to Sprout’s messaging priorities. Essentially, this meant aligning our tags with broader Sprout content pillars and messaging themes that other teams also track. Our sponsors’ support also fostered a closer partnership with our marketing analytics team, ensuring the effort was prioritized within their workload.
Step 3: Track the right metrics
One of the biggest reporting pitfalls is lack of specificity. Looking only at the big picture of your social presence yields insights that are too broad to be actionable or relevant to stakeholders outside of the social team.
Start by defining your goals and work backward. Given my team’s B2B focus, the ability to identify what content impacts pipeline revenue through multi-touch attribution was at the top of our wishlist.
For example, we moved the launch date of our keystone report, The Sprout Social Index™ from fall to January of this year, and we rallied around driving impact on social to this asset. We also wanted better data visualization and flexibility to customize reports, so we could highlight the impact of distinct channels and content.
This approach helped us focus on the key metrics linking social’s impact to pipeline generation — KPIs like earned media value, cost per action, cost per lead and leads generated.
For us, these metrics measure brand discoverability, message resonance and clear revenue pathways. If you work in a B2C industry, your KPIs might instead include sales, customer lifetime value, cost per acquisition, click-through rates or return on ad spend.
Regardless of your industry, UTMs are non-negotiable. Diligent tagging makes it exponentially more feasible to see how our organic efforts influence revenue.
Step 4: Clearly communicate up
Pulling the right data is a win. But numbers alone will only resonate with people who live and breathe social on a daily basis (us).
Marketing leaders say that demonstrating how social ties to business goals and sharing social data in a contextualized way are both crucial for securing more social investment. You’d never hit publish on a social post that doesn’t speak to your target audience — we need to treat our reporting rituals the same way.
“You’d never hit publish on a social post that doesn’t speak to your target audience —
we need to treat our reporting rituals the same way,”
-Sprout Social’s Director of Social, Rachel Goulet
Work with your executive sponsor to narrow down which data points your leadership team (or other stakeholders) need to see and on what cadence (like organic social and influencer impressions with year-over-year growth, or average engagement rate and progress toward goal).
Also consider where qualitative insights or commentary would be more valuable than raw data (at Sprout, we share monthly insights that include listening and media insights based on what consumers and the industry are talking about).
At Sprout, we’ve found a rhythm that works for us: a monthly social performance executive summary. It combines key metrics tied to business value with competitive context, so leadership sees how we stack up against industry peers.
Step 5: Keep social insights flowing across your organization
So you’ve mastered the art and science of quantifying the ROI of social — now what? Look for ways to grow that impact even further.
This isn’t necessarily a call to action to A/B test your content or start testing a new network (although those are both smart steps to take). Instead, look for opportunities to embed social insights into other teams’ work.
Social teams have an unobstructed view into our audiences’ preferences, frustrations and even personal milestones. Are you cascading that information across your business? Are other departments using it to inform product development, campaigns or surprise-and-delight moments?
By using social feedback to inform initiative outside of marketing, your entire org can focus on building products or experiences that directly address customer needs, increase loyalty and grow revenue.
A lot of people don’t know what they can ask for when it comes to social insights, so don’t be afraid to make the first move.
Once my team began packaging this information and sharing it proactively with our colleagues on the product side, more folks started approaching us with their own requests for data. This started out via email to a smaller group, but as that interest and value has grown around these insights, we baked it into larger internal communications across email, Slack and more.
By showcasing the impact of our strategy, we’ve secured additional budget for team growth, expanded our influencer marketing efforts and gained support for new-to-us brand activations. These wins wouldn’t be possible without a deep understanding of both our data.
Check out our NEW toolkit to see (and customize) the frameworks and formulas we’ve used to demystify organic social ROI.
About Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a global leader in social media management and analytics software. Sprout’s intuitive platform puts powerful social data into the hands of more than 30,000 brands so they can deliver smarter, faster business impact. Named the #1 Best Software Product by G2’s 2024 Best Software Award, Sprout offers comprehensive publishing and engagement functionality, customer care, influencer marketing, advocacy, and AI-powered business intelligence. Sprout’s software operates across all major social media networks and digital platforms.