How Effective is Social Media Marketing - Track The Data To Get Answers

Ten to fifteen years ago, social media marketing was a brand new strategy where you could make a splash simply by having a social media presence.

Nowadays, when customers will be wary about working with a business that doesn’t have a social media presence, the impact of social media marketing is vastly different.

Because of this, many business owners and marketers are asking themselves, how effective is social media marketing in 2025? Brands don’t want to waste time and resources on a strategy that isn’t going to impact their bottom line.

To help alleviate those fears, we’re going to help you understand how social media marketing can still be an effective marketing strategy—as long as you properly measure your performance to understand your strategy’s impact.

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Why measuring social media effectiveness is crucial?

If you’re going to determine how effective social media marketing is for your business, you need to take one crucial step—measuring your social media performance.

Keeping tabs on your marketing analytics gives you the full picture of the impact of your strategy and a clear answer to your question.

Here are a few other reasons why measuring the effectiveness of your social media presence is so critical.

It helps you align social media goals with business objectives

Social media marketing plays an important role in generating brand awareness, sales, and customer loyalty, all of which are potential business objectives. By focusing your strategy on the same social media goals that align with your business objectives, you can improve your strategy’s effectiveness and the impact it makes on your brand.

You can identify what works (and what doesn’t)

Continuing with our goal of social media engagement as an example, tracking your analytics to gauge effectiveness of your content will show you whether your strategy is working. And if it’s not, it gives you the opportunity to make changes and adapt so that it does work.

Optimize your budget allocation based on performance

When you measure your performance and you see what’s working, you can put more of your marketing budget behind creating and promoting more of it.

Optimizing your budget allocation like this also helps optimize and improve your overall return on investment (ROI), giving you even more money to spend towards what’s working.

It keeps you competitive and relevant in fast-paced, ever changing markets

Measuring your brand’s social  presence helps you consistently adjust your approach so you stay competitive and relevant even as trends come and go.

But this extends further beyond than just the digital world. For example, just this year, McDonald’s finally caved to the social media pressure that’s been asking for snack wraps to reappear on its menu.

By listening to your customers and understanding what they want, you can appeal to that with your online content and your business offerings.

Core metrics to evaluate your social media effectiveness

To measure how effective social media marketing is for your business, there are a few key metrics to keep in mind. We’ll walk you through what each metric is, what it means, and how it pertains to your strategy’s effectiveness.

Plus, we’ll show you how you can measure each of these core metrics for your own social media reporting needs.

Brand awareness metrics

Brand awareness refers to how well people know about your brand and its products or services. There are a few different metrics you can measure on social media that can help you gauge your audience’s awareness.

Reach

Reach refers to the number of people that your content reaches on social media. The more people you reach, the more likely it is that those people know about your business and could recall it if they find themselves in need of your product or service.

You can find your reach by using a social media analytics tool like Socialinsider. Create an account, connect your social media platforms, then head to your main dashboard.

Click on each individual social media platform to view the reach of your content on that platform. For example, this chart below shows Instagram reach.

Take a look at each of the sections of this dashboard to gauge your reach: a line graph showing reach over time, a number sharing your total post reach within your specified time range, a bar chart showing reach based on post type, and more.

Impressions

Whereas reach tells you how many individual people have seen your content, impressions measure the total number of times your content was seen.

People may see your posts more than once for a number of reasons: it appeared multiple times in their feed, they sought it out to view it again, or friends shared it with them.

You can also view your impressions within Socialinsider by clicking on the Impressions tab in your left sidebar.

Similar to your reach dashboard, you have different graphs and interpretations of the data to help you understand how many times your content is being viewed.

It’s also a good idea to compare your impressions to your reach as it gives you an average number of times that your content was viewed by each person.

For example, if a recent post reached 750 people, but got 1,000 impressions, you’d divide 1,000/750 to see that your post was seen an average of 1.33 times per person.

Video views

If video content is a big part of your social media strategy, you’ll want to measure video views. If these numbers are low, it’s an indication that your videos aren’t very effective.

Since creating videos is one of the more time and resource-intensive types of content, you really want them to make an impact.

You can check out your video views within your Socialinsider dashboard by scrolling down in the Engagement tab until you see the following graph.

If you’re not satisfied with your video views, you may want to pivot the type of content you’re creating. Test different video ideas and styles until you start reaching a larger audience.

Followers and follower growth

Follower count gives you a clear cut baseline of the number of people that are aware of your brand on any given platform. And as you grow your followers, you can see visual proof of your brand awareness growing as well

Monitoring follower growth also helps you see if your strategy is working and getting you in front of the right audience. As long as you’re consistently seeing positive growth in your follower count, you’re doing something right. But if it starts to stagnate or drop, you might need to make some changes.

Remember that you can keep tabs on these metrics in the Audience tab of your Socialinsider dashboard.

You can see your total follower count, how many followers you’ve gotten in a specific time period, and a graph showcasing growth over time.

Mentions

Mentions tell you how many people are talking about your brand online, giving you another good indicator of brand awareness. Conduct regular searches on each of your online platforms for your brand name to make sure you don’t miss any mentions.

Track the total number of mentions you get over time, but also be sure to respond to anyone talking about your brand online to keep the conversation going and provide good customer service.

Engagement metrics

Engagement refers to the interactions social media users had with your content gathered on each platform.

Engagement is one of the most important indicators of social media effectiveness, as you want to build a loyal online community, and keeping them engaged with your content is a great way to do that.

Keep an eye on these engagement metrics so you know how well your content is performing with your target audience.

Engagement and engagement rate

Engagement tells you how many different interactions your content has received. This might refer to likes or reactions, comments, shares, saves, or any other type of interaction someone can make with your social media posts.

Your engagement rate tells you how many engagements you’re getting in comparison to your follower count or the number of people who have viewed your content.

Find this data in the Engagement tab of Socialinsider. You can scroll through this dashboard to see tons of information surrounding your profile’s engagement, like total number of interactions, engagement by post type, likes versus comments, and more.

If you’re seeing a relatively low engagement rate by reach, this means that your content doesn’t have the impact you want it to when people see it, in which case a strategy revamp is in order.

Comments

Comments are a big indicator of effectiveness. While anyone can scroll and double-tap photos or videos to show they like it, leaving a comment takes time and brain power. So, you want to track the number of comments you receive on your posts.

You can see this by scrolling down in the Engagement tab. Watch your total comments over time, total comments in your specific time period, and average comments per post.

Saves/shares

Saves are an Instagram-specific metric, as users can save your posts to different collections to refer back to later. They’re private, but are great indicators that your content is resonating with your audience.

Shares can happen on any platform and refer to users sending your post to one of their friends so they can view it too.

Both engagement metrics are clear markers of effectiveness, so you’ll want to watch these and aim to increase them over time.

Again, you can scroll down in the Engagement tab of your Socialinsider dashboard to find these metrics.

Conversion metrics

Although engagement is important for effectiveness, conversion metrics let you know if your social media strategy is actually impacting your business’s bottom line.

It’s important to understand that you shouldn’t put all of your focus on conversions. In many cases, social media marketing is meant to engage and build an audience, with conversions being a nice byproduct.

However, you still want to see leads and sales come from your social media efforts. So, we measure these metrics.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Your click-through rate refers to the number of clicks you get from your social media content to your website or landing pages. This will look different on each social media platform.

For example, Instagram doesn’t let you add links to individual posts, but you get a profile link that you can use strategically. Take advantage of link-in-bio tools with tracking capabilities to monitor your click-through rate.

However, on a platform like LinkedIn, where you can put links in your post captions or comments, you’ll want to monitor your LinkedIn analytics while also setting up UTM tracking so you can monitor clicks in your website’s Google Analytics.

Leads generated from social media

Leads are potential customers who have taken some kind of action indicating interest in your business. This might be filling out a form on your website, signing up for your newsletter, or requesting a demo.

By using UTM tracking parameters, you can monitor lead acquisition through your Google Analytics, getting a clear idea of how many of these new leads were generated directly from social media.

Sales from social media

Similarly, you can set up UTM tracking to monitor how many sales on your website occurred from people landing on your website from a social media platform.

However, ecommerce brands can also set up shopping catalogs on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, making direct sales from social media even easier to track.

Return on investment (ROI)

To track ROI, you first need to have an understanding of how much you’re spending on your marketing. Then, you can compare it to how much revenue you’ve generated thanks to your social media efforts.

The ROI formula is: Net Profit / Total Cost of Investment x 100.

Like we mentioned, though, when it comes to social media marketing, actual profit isn’t the only measure of effectiveness or success.

Many brands don’t plan their social media strategy around generating revenue at all, instead using it as a way to build brand awareness or community. But if you can get the best of both worlds, that’s even better.

Customer retention metrics

Finally, you’ll want to look at how well social media is helping you to retain customers, keeping them happy and returning for more purchases.

The following metrics are good KPIs to track for your business as a whole. You’ll need to rely on a CRM (customer relationship management tool) to help you track these in relation to customers who initially came from social media.

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Your customer lifetime value (CLV) tells you the total revenue your company can expect to generate from each customer throughout their lifetime. If you sell $25 candles and your CLV is only $25, this means people come and buy one candle and never make another purchase with your business.

This tells you that your business isn’t doing a very good job of getting customers to come back. Social media marketing can be a great way to improve your CLV, by engaging customers, promoting new products, and enticing them to make another purchase.

You can use your CRM to look at how many customers who initially came from social media have made return purchases, giving you an idea of how effective your strategy is at customer retention.

Churn rate

Your churn rate refers to the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a certain period of time.

This is easier for brands with some kind of subscription model to track. You’ll divide the number of customers who cancelled their subscription during a set time frame by the total number of customers your brand had at the start of that period.

The hope is that you’ve brought in enough customers to cancel out those that may have left your business, and then some.

The social media marketing effectiveness framework

If you want to maximize your social media marketing effectiveness, you need a solid foundation. This framework provides a structured approach to measuring, optimizing, and maximizing social media success.

Structure a data-driven social media strategy

The first thing you need to tackle is your strategy. Even before measuring your social media performance, you should be using competitive benchmarking tools (like Socialinsider) to get an idea of how you can stack up to your competitors.

Then, focus on setting clear business objectives, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and using analytics tools to guide decision-making. A data-driven approach ensures that every post and campaign contributes to tangible business outcomes.

Use a custom formula for measuring social media ROI

However, many social media marketing goals aren’t monetary, making it more difficult to calculate an exact ROI.

In those cases, you need to look at more than just monetary investment and data to find your answer.

So think of it like this. If engagement is important to your business, how can you tell if the time and resources you’ve put into your social media strategy is getting the same output in interactions from your audience?

Instead of assigning a monetary value to engagement, something that’s nearly impossible to do and almost always inaccurate if you try, you instead need to look at something else that’s valuable.

For example, what is the sentiment from that engagement? Are people reacting positively to your brand and its content? Audience sentiment can be a powerful thing for your business, improving or diminishing your brand’s reputation.

So reworking your strategy to ensure you’re seeing positive sentiment from your target audience would be the key here—and an example of a positive ROI.

Strike a balance between paid, organic, and earned media

A successful strategy blends organic reach, paid amplification, and earned credibility to drive sustainable growth.

• Organic media that you generate naturally builds brand trust and long-term engagement
• Paid media that you’ve put some ad budget behind expands reach and drives conversions quickly
• Earned media leverages word-of-mouth marketing through UGC, PR, and influencer mentions

A step-by-step guide to measuring social media performance

Now that you know which metrics to track, let’s talk about how to measure your social media performance as a whole.

Step 1: Set SMART goals based on business objectives

The first step in measuring your social media performance is setting goals or objectives that matter most to your business. What, exactly, are you hoping to achieve through your social media marketing efforts?

Do you want to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Boost engagement
• Generate leads
• Drive website traffic
• Improve sales and conversions

Choose one or two objectives that are most important to your brand. If you’re a newer company, you might want to focus on building awareness and sales through your social media efforts. But as you grow, you may want to switch to boosting engagement and building an online community.

Decide what matters most to your business, then set SMART goals around those objectives. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

Essentially, this means you want to set goals that have a specific, measurable outcome and that you want to accomplish within a set time frame.

So if you’re hoping to increase brand awareness with your social media presence, you might set SMART goals like:

• Grow to 1,000 Instagram followers in the first three months on the platform
• Increase TikTok reach to 10,000 people per month by the end of Q3

With your SMART goals, you’ve given yourself a specific metric to monitor, and a specific period of time you want to improve that metric.

As long as you’re realistic with your goal (for example, if you’ve just created an Instagram account, reaching a million followers in a week simply isn’t going to happen), monitoring that growth will help tell you how effective your strategy is.

Step 2: Choose the right KPIs for your brand

Once you’ve set your social media goals, you need to choose the right KPIs (key performance indicators) or metrics to measure.

Sometimes your goals will include the metric right inside (i.e., follower growth, reach, sales). Other times, you’ll have to pick metrics that most closely resemble what you’re hoping to achieve.

We’ve already walked you through the metrics that pertain to each main goal.

Step 3: Select the best tools for tracking performance

Next, decide which tools you’ll need to enlist to help you track your performance. A few to consider include:

• Socialinsider for monitoring your social media analytics;
• Google Analytics for measuring your website traffic;
• Linktree for creating a trackable bio link;
• Zoho CRM for monitoring customer relationship with your business.

Find the best stack of performance monitoring tools and get them connected to your platforms so you can quickly get started.

Step 4: Create a performance dashboard

Once you’ve selected a social media analytics tool, you’ll want to get your performance dashboard set up. Having a dashboard that showcases all of your most important metrics at a glance makes gauging your strategy’s effectiveness quick and easy.

Step 5: Analyze data & adjust strategy based on insights

Keep an eye on your performance so you know when it’s time to make strategy adjustments. However, give yourself some time before pivoting.

For example, if you’re hoping to increase your social media reach over the next three months, give yourself a few weeks of monitoring before you start to make changes.

It’s important to understand that your strategy adjustments won’t make a difference overnight. You need to give yourself time to see if you’re making an impact before you switch tactics.

How to improve social media marketing effectiveness?

Now that you know how to measure your performance and gauge effectiveness, let’s talk about how to make improvements if you’re not happy with your current results. This takes us back to the main question at hand: is social media marketing effective?

Our answer is yes—but you have to test, measure, and execute different strategies to figure out what’s going to be the most effective for your business.

So let’s cover a few actionable tactics for improving your strategy’s effectiveness.

Create platform-specific content

Your social media strategy can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. While you can cross-post some content (i.e., videos that you create for TikTok are perfect to post on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts), most platforms require their own individualized strategies.

Your TikTok video isn’t going to have the same impact on X/Twitter. Your short anecdotes on X/Twitter won’t appeal to your audience on Facebook.

By creating platform-specific content based on what performs best on each social media network, you’re able to get better results and more engagement.

Leverage AI and predictive analytics

Using AI and predictive analytics can help you organize your content into pillars or categories. You can then look at those categories to see how each one is performing.

One category performing better than another? Create more of that content and watch to see if it impacts your overall results.

For example, U.S. retail brands are talking about exclusive offers & promotions, seasonal & themed campaigns, and product showcases over on TikTok.

Additionally, you can use Socialinsider’s AI tools to create your own content pillars, automatically categorizing your content and breaking down your performance analytics into those categories. Use this data to your advantage to make actionable changes to your content strategy.

Take advantage of community-driven marketing and UGC

UGC stands for user-generated content, and this plus community-driven marketing tactics are great ways to boost your strategy’s impact.

Internet users feel that UGC creates a more authentic connection with a brand, so incorporating that into your content plan can help you foster better relationships.

More than that, fostering a brand community can also help customers feel more connected to your business. 77% of consumers say they desire access to brand communities, as they want direct brand interaction to feel better about their purchases.

Sharing UGC is one way to start interacting with your community. Look around for real customers who are sharing photos and videos of your products online, then ask if you can reshare them.

Not only does this help you build a stronger relationship with your existing customers who have created that content, it helps you reach an even wider audience.

Employ micro-influencers and social proof

Although UGC has a bigger impact than influencer marketing as many social media users are getting bored with seeing endless influencer content, there are still indicators that tell us that working with smaller, micro-influencers has a similar effect as UGC.

Micro-influencers have less than 100K followers, but typically have hyper-engaged audiences.

So even if you work with someone with 20K followers, you’re likely to reach just as many people as you would working with an influencer with 150K followers—but those people will be much more engaged with the influencer you’ve partnered with.

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that states that people are more likely to work with your business if they see others doing so first.

Partnering with influencers gives you some of that social proof, increasing the chances that those influencers’ followers will become more interested in your product or service.

At the end of the day, brands can still make an average of $5.78 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. So investing in influencer marketing is still worth it.

Boost performance with social media advertising

Maximize your ROI with paid social media strategies. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising delivers an average ROI of 200%, meaning businesses earn $2 for every $1 spent. More than that, Facebook ads have an average conversion rate of 9.21%.

Social media and digital advertising tactics can play a major role in your social media marketing effectiveness. Test different digital ads platforms (i.e., Facebook vs. TikTok, or social media vs. search engine) to find the best performance for your business.

Integrate social media strategies into your sales processes

Make sure your sales and marketing departments talk to each other.

Your marketers should know how your sales team works and vice versa. While this is important for all companies, this is especially crucial for B2B or service-based companies who rely on the sales team to close every lead the marketing team brings in.

Integrating social strategies into your sales process can help boost conversion rates even more. Things like creating a social media product catalog for direct social selling or hosting a live shopping event on TikTok can have a big impact.

Just to show how effective this strategy can be, let’s look at a real-life example. TikTok Shop hosted a Black Friday event in the U.S. that included more than 30K live-selling sessions, generating a total of more than $100 million in sales.

Social media is for building connections, but it can also be for making sales. By pulling your strategies together, you can vastly increase effectiveness.

Common mistakes that hurt social media effectiveness (and how to fix them)

As you work to improve your social media effectiveness, you want to avoid common pitfalls as well that can hinder your growth. Keep these mistakes in mind to make sure you’re not falling victim to them in your strategy.

Overlooking audience insights & trends

Your audience isn’t going to remain stagnant year after year. New trends pop up and product/service needs change over time.

Continue to monitor audience insights by using benchmarking tools, social listening tactics, and direct customer feedback so you stay ahead of the curve.

Relying too much on vanity metrics

Vanity metrics are metrics that may look good, but don’t necessarily mean anything. Some examples of vanity metrics are:

• Follower count
• Video views
• Free trial signups

If you have a large follower count or a video goes viral and reaches millions of people or you see an influx of free trial subscriptions, that looks great on the surface. But if those people aren’t engaging with your brand or becoming paying customers, those metrics mean nothing.

We still recommend tracking these KPIs, but keep in mind that you need to focus more on metrics like engagement and conversions that actually have an impact on your business.

Ignoring personalization & AI recommendations

Incorporating personalization into your social media strategy is a key method of increasing engagement with your audience. And AI recommendations can be a huge part of that. Don’t ignore AI tools that are meant to help improve your processes and your strategy.

Case studies: brands winning at social media marketing (real-world examples)

Want to see some amazing social media marketing in action? Here are a couple of examples that prove social media’s effectiveness in 2025.

Canva

The graphic design tool Canva does a great job using its visual nature to increase reach and engagement on Instagram.

If we go into a little analysis of Canva's Instagram performance over the past three months, we'll see that its engagement numbers have been improving, signaling a potential shift in strategy, which proved to be successful.

The brand has discovered that Reels and carousel posts are its sweet spot, so it creates way more of that than any other type of content. In fact, within the last three months, just three posts were solo images.

One of the ways that Canva boosts its reach and engagement is by partnering with content creators.

Take this post, for example, where a creator uses Canva to build a presentation, videoing herself so that Canva can share the progress on its Instagram.

Notion

Notion makes a great example of a brand that does a great job of balancing fun and professionalism in its social media strategy, for which we can see evidence in this post.

Now, let's quickly see how this type of communication approach translates into numbers.

As we can see, right around the same time that the post was shared, we saw a major spike in engagement, which indicates this type of messaging resonates with the brand's audience.

An important lesson here is that even for a B2B company, the brand still knows how to have fun with its content. This is important if you want to get people to engage with your content. Ditch that stuffy formality and learn how to let loose on social media.

Final thoughts

How effective is social media marketing in 2025? Well, it depends on your strategy. But if you incorporate our tips for measuring your performance and improving effectiveness, you should be able to make a tangible impact with your social media strategy. Just make sure you have the help of Socialinsider’s analytics dashboard first.

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