Social media ROI calculator

Social media ROI is a ratio. Take the money you can trace to social, subtract what that work cost, and divide by the cost. Multiply by 100 if you want a percent. In symbols: (earnings minus costs) divided by costs.

A result of 0 means you got back what you spent. A positive number means the traced earnings were larger than the costs. A negative number means they were smaller. The calculator at the top does that arithmetic with the figures you type. It does not look up your accounts, and it does not predict a future post.

Use a time window you can close. A month is long enough for a cafe or a salon to see bookings. A single post is usually too short, because the message and the visit do not land on the same day. Write the window next to the number.

A neighborhood cafe wants to know whether social is paying for itself in a quiet month. They type these figures, which are an illustration, not a benchmark.

Traced earnings: $1,200. That is catering orders where the customer said they came from a post or an ad, plus a private-party booking that used a code from the bio. It is not every dollar that passed through the till.

Costs: $400 of ad spend, $50 of apps and stock photos, and 8 hours of the owner at $30 an hour, which is $240. There is no freelancer invoice in this example. Total cost is $690.

ROI is ($1,200 minus $690) divided by $690, which is about 74%. Put another way, each dollar in that cost pile came back with about $1.74 traced to it. The food cost of those orders is not in the $690. If the food and packaging on the $1,200 was $400, the honest earnings figure is closer to $800, and the ROI falls to about 16%. The calculator cannot know your food cost. You have to decide what "earnings" means before you trust the percent.

Change any input and the percent moves. That is the point of the tool. If the owner values their time at $0, the ROI looks wonderful and the decision is wrong, because the hours still happened.

Count money that left the account because of social, and time you would otherwise have spent on something else.

Ad spend is the invoice from the ad platform for the same month, not the budget you meant to spend. Include boosted posts if you paid for them.

Tools are the apps you would cancel if you stopped posting: design, scheduling, stock, music licenses. A shop subscription you use for the counter as well as for posts can be split, but write down the split.

Labor is the expensive one people skip. Multiply hours by a rate you believe. For an owner, use what you would pay someone else to do the same hours, or what you could earn doing other work. Include filming, writing, replying, and the time you spend approving a draft.

Freelancer and agency invoices belong in full, including revisions. If you still spend two hours a week briefing them, those hours are yours and belong in the labor line too.

Content costs include a photographer, a printer for a QR card, a prop you bought only for the photo, and the product you gave away. Rent and wages for the shop floor are not social costs unless you hired someone whose job is social.

The cleanest return is revenue you can connect to social without squinting. A code, a "how did you hear about us" answer, a booked link, a wholesale inquiry that names a post. Add those up for the same month as the costs.

Some returns are real and still hard to price. A landlord who saw the feed, a hire who said they applied because of it, a journalist who called. You can leave them out of the percent and note them beside it. Stuffing a made-up dollar value into the earnings box makes the ROI a story, not a calculation.

Do not count impressions as money, and do not multiply likes by a dollar figure from a blog. Engagement rate is a different formula. Organic posts and ads can share one month. If you cannot separate them, say so next to the percent.

Attribution is messy. A customer may see a post, walk by the window, and book a week later. Your percent will miss them, or it will credit the wrong post. That does not make the formula useless. It means a single month can lie, and a trend over several months is the figure worth keeping.

A huge ROI on a tiny spend is not a strategy. Ten dollars of cost and fifteen dollars of traced revenue is a 50% ROI, and it will not pay the rent. Read the dollars beside the percent. A sloppy post can also cost you a regular without ever showing up in the earnings box.

Beevi does not calculate this for you and does not promise a return. The percent on this page is only the numbers you entered. The comparison under the article is a separate question: what the work costs per month if you do it yourself, hire help, or use software. Cost is not ROI.

ROI needs a cost. This comparison prices four ways to get the posting done in a month: doing it yourself, a freelancer, an agency, and Beevi. It is a cost, not a promise of return.