Hello! If you’re new here, welcome 👋 I’m Sam, a freelance social media manager and strategist.
I’ve been running Sam Oliver Social for just under two years. Before that, I worked agency-side and started off my career as a radio producer.
This newsletter is the place where I share rambles about social media strategy for marketers and business owners.
Social media in the year of our lord 2026 is incredibly nuanced. So much so that a 600 word LinkedIn post isn’t enough to explain the complexity of some topics.
That’s the purpose of this newsletter. To get under the skin of the social and hopefully help you out, whether you be a seasoned social pro or completely new to the game.
So let’s get into it! Oh, and if you find this helpful, make sure you share this in your work’s internal Slack or Teams channel…
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How do I prove the ROI of social media?
This is a topic that keeps coming up again and again recently.
Budgets have been tightened due to the uncertainty in the Middle East. The cost of living crisis continues to bite. Businesses are getting hit left, right and centre with an increasing tax burden that seems to punish anyone with ambition to grow.
So marketing teams are understandably looking to tighten up their budgets.
This makes anyone working in social media feel like the dog in the meme below…
Why? Because unfortunately, with social media, it’s harder to prove direct return on investment.
And if the c-suite can’t see you contributing to the bottom-line of the business, the cost/benefit analysis determines that the social team is the first place where budget and resource gets pulled.
Our friendly marketing cousins, PPC and email marketing, are much easier beasts to deal with from an ROI perspective. They live further down the marketing funnel and have more sophisticated tracking in place.
As a result, they can directly attribute company revenue driven by their outputs.
If I had a penny for every social media manager who said they’d struggled with conversations around social ROI and revenue tracking, I’d be giving Elon Musk a run for his money!
Social’s a newer discipline compared to many others in the marketing sector. And as a result, those leading social teams at the moment tend to be Gen Zs or younger Millennials not used to having these boardroom-level discussions.
As a young account exec and social manager working agency-side, I remember having tricky conversations when working in agency-land where a client would say something along the lines of…
“The social content is good. But we’re going to have to move the budget elsewhere, as we’re not seeing anything from it”
As a junior, I never really understood their reasoning.
We were getting a great engagement rate and plenty of impressions. What’s not to love?
But by saying “not seeing anything from it”, the client meant core business results like leads and sales.
So how do you prove the ROI of social? This is what I wished I knew at the time.
Admittedly, it’s much easier to prove for paid than organic…
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Proving the ROI of paid social
Firstly, let’s rewind back to the good ‘ol days of 2013.
Everyone was doing the Harlem Shake. Flappy Bird was everywhere. And Les Binet and Peter Field released The Long And Short Of It.
It was (and still is) a monumental piece of research into how to balance short-term marketing and long-term brand building that’s particularly relevant to paid social.
The research deduced that 60% of the budget for any marketing activity should be attributed for brand building, whilst 40% should be used on sales activations.
For paid social, that generally means that…
- 60% of your budget should be spent on top/middle funnel optimisations such as awareness and engagement
- 40% of your budget should go on lower funnel optimisations such as lead gen, conversions and sales
The 40% you can immediately tie back to ROI through metrics such as cost per lead and cost per purchase.
I’d argue that the 60% should be measured by softer metrics such as CPM, CPE (cost per engagements) and total impressions, rather than ROI metrics. This is because your customer is further away from the point of purchase. If you get purchases through your awareness activity, then that’s great! But it shouldn’t be a core aim.
And yes, I’m aware that the marketing funnel model is quite simplistic these days when talking about customer journeys. I love Google’s Messy Middle model. But for the purposes of this context, it’s still the most relevant one to use that ties in with proper, concrete research.
But here’s a caveat. If you’re running paid social ads on Meta, the Andromeda update earlier this year has muddied the waters a little. There’s now an argument to say that you should put 100% of your budget into one purchase-led campaign (rather than a 60%/40% split) and let Meta’s AI systems do the targeting. This might work for your brand, but it’s definitely worth having some sort of budget set aside for brand awareness. This is particularly the case if you have a high-value product or service, as you’ll need to ‘warm’ up your audience before they convert.
So in a nutshell, you can prove the ROI of paid social through those bottom-of-funnel metrics.
Proving the ROI of organic social
With organic, it’s a little tricker, but NOT impossible!
In general, your overall social strategy should look something like this: post organic content, monitor performance, take your top-performing creatives and make them into ads via paid social platforms. Because they’ve already been validated by the algorithms, you reduce your ad costs and save money (in a sense, by doing this, you’re already thinking about business metrics).
This is the method promoted widely by Gary V and having tested it many times with countless clients over the years, I can confidently say it works.
But there are other ways to prove the business value of organic social. Here are three of my favourites that I use with my clients…
1) Adding UTM links onto everything. And I mean literally EVERYTHING. Wherever you have a link on social posts, whether it be in a Linktree or in the post itself, add the UTM tag so you can track it through Google Analytics. Yep, the tag will likely fall off if the user navigates to different pages on your website, but it’s still a valuable tool to prove the impact of your content via web traffic.
2) Organic social is a demand creation channel, not just demand capture! And it’s likely many of your customers will Google things after seeing your content on social rather than clicking on your links directly (I wishhhh there was a study that backed this up! If you know of one, please LMK!). If you’re running an organic campaign, you can track the increase in branded search volume traffic over the campaign period using Google Analytics. Taking this one step further, you could then compare this traffic against paid activity. For example, if your campaign brought in 200 organic website clicks, you could frame it as “To generate the same traffic via paid would have cost £xx this month”.
3) This one is my personal favourite! Exit checkout survey tests are still super underutilised by most brands. It involves adding a survey pop-up after a customer has bought a product or submitted their contact details on your website. The survey asks a question along the lines of “Where did you hear about us?”, with multiple options such as “Word of mouth”, “Google” and (you guess it) “Social media posts” available to choose from. Using the data from these is a great way to tie social directly back to business revenue.
I used an exit survey checkout test with one of my clients recently and the results were off the charts! We attributed 9% of total revenue to social media and influencer activity, which equated to £££ per month – tying our organic social activity back to ROI and revenue.
As always, I’d love any thoughts from other social pros and marketers, too. Let me know your take on LinkedIn or Instagram.