If you’re selling your service or product through social media and can’t figure out how everything you’re posting brings in revenue, that isn’t “dark social”—it’s just value you haven’t measured yet.

France-based social media management company Agorapulse has spent more than a decade helping companies organize their social inboxes, publish content, define trends and cull data. Lately, however, its clients have been looking for ways to prove that the work they’re doing on organic social media actually earns money for their companies. 

During the pandemic, Fiona Abrams of fashion firm Delta Galil’s Brayola lingerie brand was receiving a lot of intent-based questions from consumers on social media. What colors and sizes does this come in? What is your return policy? Where do you ship? Abrams took the time to attach UTM codes to the Brayola URLs in her social media replies and began tracking where consumers were coming from and what they were buying.

The time consumed by building and adding all of those codes manually resulted in more than $2,400 worth of labor costs for Brayola. However, the data that came back as a result indicated that Abrams’ work on social media brought in nearly $4,900—making her efforts a nearly $2,500 success.

Adams later approached Agorapulse and noted that if the links from marketing email, social media ads and affiliate programs can all be tracked through software, social media links should be tracked in similar fashion. Not only are marketers leaving some of their teams’ value on the table when they don’t track their work on social media, but few marketing tech firms are currently helping them do so. That’s some lost opportunity for all parties involved.

“Social media is another channel like any other channel, it shouldn’t be treated differently,” said Agorapulse CEO and co-founder Emeric Ernoult. “Unfortunately, the fact that we have looked at social media as just a branding play, or visibility play and have not accepted it as a business-generation play has been very negative to [the marketing] industry, in my opinion.”

Arriving early

At the Business to Business Marketing Exchange attended by Adweek in Scottsdale, Ariz., earlier this month, there were numerous companies offering marketers ways to streamline their business and break through noise. Only one was talking about the potential return on investment still hidden in social media marketing, and Agorapulse CMO Darryl Praill laid out the bleak numbers to a small breakout session of marketers.

“Historically, most CMOs view social media the same way they view communications: ‘I’m going to issue a press release and forget about it, hopefully, the press will pick it up, and I’ll get a story or a mention or a backlink’… It’s a good optics thing, but it’s not driving revenue,” Praill said, adding only 10% of the brands at the conference have a dedicated social media person.

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