Skip to main content
Search

Social media return on investment

Published on February 26, 2026   7 min

A selection of talks on Marketing & Sales

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi. My name's Julie Atherton and I'm the founder of the social media advisory and marketing consultancy Small Wonder. I write books on social media and social media strategy. Today we're going to be talking about social media return on investment or ROI.
0:20
We'll cover the definition of ROI. We'll look at the formula and how social media ROI affects marketing decisions within an organization. I'll give you an example of how to measure ROI and a tool that you might find useful if you're trying it in practice. What is the definition?
0:40
Return on investment or return on marketing investment is a metric that's usually expressed as a percentage and shows the level of revenue in relation to the money spent generating that revenue. In acquisition, sometimes it can be a negative percentage where organizations are investing in bringing new people into the organization. Generally though, when we're looking at activity with existing customers, we want to see a positive return on investment. We can also compare ROI by marketing channels to make decisions about which channel gives the best level of return and therefore where we want to invest more money and where we want to pull back. Although ROI is useful other considerations that are also important. Some channels may have a good level of return but offer limited numbers of potential customers, i.e, they bring in a high level of return on investment, but they might only bring in hundreds instead of thousands of customers. If we're trying to reach large audiences, it would be more important to get a lower ROI and reach those customers. Additionally, some channels might not provide access to specific customer groups. If the business wants to target them, they may be willing to sacrifice ROI to reach the actual customers that they need.

Quiz available with full talk access. Request Free Trial or Login.

Show
Hide

Social media return on investment

Embed in course/own notes