Featured image by Kampus Production

If you are looking for a way to determine the ROI of your social media efforts, you should explore what your earned media value is. Simply stated, earned media is the dollar equivalent of paid media you have accumulated through your social media campaigns and activity. You can determine a tangible measured value of the reach and influence you have achieved, based on your activity. This dollar value can then be related to management or clients validating the ROI of work performed. Reach and sentiment can be measured, as well as a possible prediction of future growth. The effectiveness of influencer campaigns can be determined so improved optimization can be developed. This all based on the activity of third-party activity for your social media postings.

There are many approaches to measuring EMV. According to a blog by Lucas Carval on the website https://mention.com/en/blog/earned-media-value/ by AgoraPulse, a simple formula to use is:

EMV = IMPRESSIONS x CPM/1000 (where CPM is your cost to reach 1,000 people with paid media)

For more detailed determination of value, especially by platform, you can turn to one of the leading services, the Ayzenberg Social Index. This service provides a dashboard and breakdowns by various platforms, with values for clicks, likes, shares/reposts and comments, that can vary daily. It is a lot like having a stock ticker giving you constantly changing values. Shares on LinkedIn today could be worth $5.35 each, and tomorrow they could be $4.75, for example. It supports eight platforms: Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube. The values may be calibrated by region reflecting local social media economics. This does come at a cost for the services. As of May 4th, 2026, their website quotes a price of $750/month or $7500/year. This might be far out of reach based on your budget. Companies like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and Julius already integrate Social Index data into their measurement products, so you may have this data already and not know it.

For those that do not have the aforementioned tools, or the budget for the Ayzenberg Social Index, I found a website from a company called Influence4You that has a free EMV calculator (https://www.influence4you.com/en/emv). It supports Facebook, Instagram (posts, reels, stories), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok Stories, Twitch, X and YouTube. The site is in English, however the fields are in French in the calculator. Here is a real example from one of my LinkedIn posts that had 19,839 impressions, 183 Likes, 207 Clicks, 19 comments and 5 Shares. I entered the values, scrolled down to the bottom, gave my “campaign” a required title, supplied my email address and hit the blue calculate button:

This is the result I received:

My one post generated the equivalent of $4226 in earned media, meaning I would have to pay that much to achieve the same results using paid media. This tool, and the other resources on the site can be useful information in day-to-day operations and help you generate a tangible ROI for your efforts. That ROI could be used as a means to achieve KPIs or reach other benchmarks. The site states it does update the values periodically. While they may not be as accurate or region-specific as the Ayzenberg Group, they still exhibit staggering numbers which you can use as a baseline for measurement.

EMV is a very important tool to measure the impact of a campaign and a way to compare creators and content. It offers you a way to test your effectiveness with results based on the content posted, and should give you a clearer picture of your true performance with a tangible ROI as the bow on the package.

Author Bio:

Joe Cannata has 25+ years of experience in the certification industry, architecting and running three different programs. His extensive experience with the exam development process and item writing best practices includes blogs and presentations on the subject of certification, as well as the use of generative AI. Using various platforms and strategies, he also ran the social media marketing for his programs. Joe was a community manager and champion for showing how social media can lead to certification program growth. He authored a chapter in the eBook, “Best Practices for Creating a Hot Certification Program (that Makes your Product Stickier)”. Joe is a member of a few industry trade organizations, a frequent speaker, and is a past Chair of the NISM Advisory Board where he helps lead the exam development for NISM and OMCP. He also serves on the NISM Scholarship Committee. Joe has a Bachelors Degree in Elementary Education, and a Masters Degree in Applied Science and Computing. He lives in the North Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek.