Is Your Social Media Strategy Actually Working? Here’s How to Tell

19 August 2025

Is your social media strategy actually working? Discover the key signs of success, metrics to monitor, and how to refine your approach for better engagement and ROI.

Social media strategy is a crucial element in almost any marketing approach today. But you can’t just be on social media. You must have a clear strategy aimed at growing your following and engaging with your audience.

Which begs the question: Is your social media strategy actually working? Finding the answer to that question might be more complex than you think because so much of social media is about awareness and less about sales.

To make sure you aren’t wasting valuable time on a social media strategy that isn’t working, the expert team at New Light Digital has put together a guide to knowing whether your social media strategy is effective. Here’s a look at a smart way of assessing your success or shortcomings.

1. Outline What Success is to You

Before you can decide whether your social media plan is working for you, define what that means. Each company will have different views of success. Setting goals for your marketing initiatives will help you track them and their effectiveness. Some common objectives individuals choose to focus on for their social media include:

Brand awareness: Gain greater reach and build visibility for your brand.
Engagement: Start conversations and encourage interaction.
Lead generation: Convert followers into contacts and customers.
Customer service: Support your customers by answering their questions. It’s always better to hear about any issues directly from customers instead of waiting to hear more about their problems via reviews or word-of-mouth.
Sales: Drive purchases through targeted campaigns or retargeting ads. This is most effective for e-commerce businesses, though some service-based businesses can find success with social media sales by making their services more transactional.

Lacking clear goals can lead to only tracking likes instead of being disciplined in setting impactful KPIs and holding your social media agency or employees accountable for those outcomes.

2. Track the Right Metrics

Your goals will dictate which metrics you follow. Here are the metrics you might follow based on the goals listed above.

Metrics for awareness-focused goals:

Impressions: This is how many times people see your content.
Reach: Follow this to understand how many unique users saw your posts.
Follower growth rate: Review how fast your audience is growing (or shrinking).

Metrics for engagement-focused goals:

Likes, shares and comments: But when reviewing this data, be sure to compare it to total reach.
Save and click-through rates: Similar to likes, shares and comments, this metric can tell you that individuals are enjoying your content.

Metrics for sales and lead-focused goals:

Click-through rate: You should see good traffic from your social media posts to your landing pages.
Conversions: Use UTM codes and tracking pixels to track leads and sales from your social posts.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): When engaging in paid campaigns, this will tell you how much it cost to earn a new customer.

The closer you tie your social media activity to business outcomes, the more successful it will be.

3. Audience Fit

Ensuring that you are reaching the right audience is important in your quest to see better outcomes from your social media. Reaching large numbers or seeing good engagement won’t matter if they aren’t the people who buy your products and services.

This is a more challenging metric to follow though because it shows in the absence of good data. For example, you likely will see limited likes, comments, shares and saves on your social media if the audience is a poor fit.

Likewise, you might see impressions and reach for your posts, but be lacking in sales and leads from social media. That’s why having deeper metrics matter. If all you track is impressions and reach to decide whether your social media is actually working, you might miss on the fact that the wrong people are seeing your posts.

4. Is Your Content Engaging?

Content is an essential element of just about any social media strategy. You should be choosing your posts and visuals carefully to ensure they will resonate with your audience.

Likewise, you should ensure that your content speaks to the interests, pain points and needs of your audience.

Social media plans that only include promotional posts will see limited engagement. Likewise, the voice and tone that your posts use could impact engagement. For example, using formal language on platforms like Instagram might not resonate with your audience and their frame of mind when on the platform.

Healthy engagement includes consistent likes, shares and comments. Plus, you should see DMs from posts that request responses. Some companies also use the frequency of people tagging others as a metric. This can be of great value because it can increase your reach.

5. Do You Post with Purpose?

If your feed is filled with posts for the sake of posting, you are only creating noise and not valuable interactions. So before you post, ask yourself these questions:

Does my post support a clear goal?
Am I effectively varying my content types, including posts that are educational, promotional and community-driven?
Do my posts have a clear brand voice where a customer could pick them out even if our brand name was not associated with the post?

As you build your content calendar, a good way to design posts with purpose is to consider the customer buying journey and map your posts to the area of the funnel that the customer might be in.

6. Scrutinize Your Paid Social Results

Strategic use of paid ad campaigns on social media can improve your reach. However, there are a variety of ways to reach your audience with paid initiatives and social media might not always be the right fit. To evaluate whether your paid search is working, look at these crucial metrics:

Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Click-through rate and cost per click
A/B test performance
Lead quality

New Light Digital structures paid campaigns with smart segmentation and retargeting to experience the largest return on investment possible. So if your paid social isn’t driving conversions, you should re-evaluate the campaign or bring in an expert in the space to help look at your campaign’s strategy.

7. Are You Putting Effort into the Right Platforms?

You should be where your audience is. Failing to be selective about the social media platforms you engage in could lead to wasting time. Every social platform won’t be a fit for your brand. If you’re unsure where you should be, here’s a quick look at the strengths of the top social media platforms.

Facebook and Instagram: Good for B2C businesses, visual brands, storytelling and building community.
LinkedIn: Good for B2B businesses, thought leadership, recruiting, high-ticket services.
TikTok: Helps brands interact with Gen Z, good for fast engagement, successful for creative-first brands.
Pinterest: Ideal for e-commerce businesses, inspiration-driven industries, those focused on design and lifestyle.
X: Used for news, customer services and real-time updates.

8. Ensure You’re Tracking ROI Effectively

Social media ROI is rarely instant. But you can still measure it. You should follow leads from start to finish to better understand how social interactions and other marketing initiatives impact them.

Track campaign performance using UTM parameters and CRM integration. Ensure that you are attributing social media touchpoints to your social media engagement.

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Work with Social Media Experts

Social media success should not feel like guesswork. Instead, you should have clear indications of what’s working and how well your marketing is contributing to leads and sales. New Light Digital will help you build a strategy framework that will remove the guesswork and eliminate unnecessary work. Schedule a free consultation now to begin building a more successful social media strategy.

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