ROI on social media is one of the most searched questions in marketing. It's also one of the most badly answered.
The bad answer usually goes like this: track your engagement, monitor your reach, watch for traffic to your website. If those numbers are going up, social is working. That answer isn't wrong exactly. It's just incomplete in the way that makes it useless for making decisions.
Tessa's conversation on the Leap Ahead podcast is the longer answer. Not longer in a padded, meandering way. Longer in the way a full argument is longer than a summary. She moves through what ROI on social actually means for a brand that's trying to use it as a business tool, not a brand awareness channel running on autopilot.
The starting point is a useful one: most brands are measuring the wrong things. They're tracking metrics the platforms surface easily, because those are the metrics available. Impressions. Followers. Likes. Those numbers are real. They just don't map cleanly onto revenue. A brand can have excellent numbers across all of them and still see no meaningful commercial outcome.
The metrics that matter are the ones that sit between attention and purchase. What percentage of people who see the content take a next step? What does that step look like? How many steps does a customer take before they buy? Where does social fit in that chain? Those questions require more work to answer than pulling a dashboard. But they're the questions a business has to ask if it wants to know whether social is generating a return.
Tessa talks about the brands that have figured this out and the ones that haven't. The difference isn't budget or platform or content quality, necessarily. It's whether there's a system connecting the content to the commercial outcome. Content without a system is just presence. Presence is easy to maintain. It's also easy to mistake for performance.
The episode also goes into what a realistic social media ROI looks like for different types of businesses. Not every brand will see social as a direct response channel. For some brands it's a trust-building layer. The question is whether you know which one you're building, and whether your content strategy reflects that.
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