Social media has become an essential part of the modern customer journey, underlining the importance of social media marketing for businesses of all sizes.
Even as economic constraints bear down on marketing budgets, executives are still prioritizing social media investments—and with good reason. As consumers spend more time on social media, the channel offers unparalleled access for brands to influence purchase decisions at every stage, from discovery to advocacy.
Today, your social media marketing strategy can make or break your brand. The following statistics from The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ showcase where brands fit in the context of online culture and how these consumer preferences will drive business forward in 2025 and beyond.
Why social media is important for businesses across industries
Savvy brands across industries use social media to wow their audiences, grow their market share and boost sales. The following statistics demonstrate social media’s impact on businesses of all shapes and sizes.
1. Social media marketing builds brand community and reputation
Reputation is everything, especially in a challenging economic environment. According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index, 93% of consumers agree it’s important for brands to keep up with online culture. But this doesn’t mean jumping on every fleeting social media trend. Instead, consumers expect brands to understand what trends resonate with their niche interests—a critical step in building an engaged community.
Social media’s role in reputation management has never been more vital. As users spend more time online, these channels are essential for shaping the narrative around your brand. While many consumers describe themselves as “chronically online,” 30% plan to increase their social media usage in 2025 and 56% expect to maintain their current levels.
Social media allows brands to connect with their audience on a more personal level, creating authentic and lasting connections that can withstand both good times and bad.
2. Social media data informs stronger competitive positioning
Getting an edge on the competition today can inform stronger business decisions tomorrow. However, if you’re not using social media to keep tabs on what your competitors (and their customers) are prioritizing, you’re missing out.
The real-time nature of social media offers an unrivaled opportunity to observe and analyze competitor strategies. If you’re not familiar, here’s what social media marketing’s role in competitive intelligence can look like:
- Aggregate data on customer care interactions reveals strengths and weaknesses of competitor products or services.
- Content themes provide insights on the unique value props that competitors are highlighting, as well as opportunities to further differentiate your brand.
- Share of voice data measures the market your brand owns online compared to your competitors.
Of course, doing this work manually is time-consuming even for the most well-resourced teams. Luckily, Sprout’s AI-driven social listening tool enables teams to uncover critical insights quickly through automated, presentation-ready competitive analysis reports.
3. Social media data creates a more customer-centric business strategy
Social listening data allows brands to keep up with the trends and conversations that impact their audience in real-time. These insights, in turn, inform stronger, more customer-centric business strategies.
If you want to see what this looks like in action, check out Goally—a technology company on a mission to ease the lives of families with neurodiverse individuals. They use Sprout’s listening tools to keep up with their audience’s evolving needs.
With Sprout, the Goally team surfaced a common need of parents raising neurodiverse kids: They want to see their children become independent. This finding has helped validate and enhance their company vision, informing everything from content to customer care.
4. Social media marketing supports better public relations outcomes
The 24-hour news cycle has done away with old methods of public relations. Today, it’s not enough to simply pitch some journalists a press release. You need to establish a compelling brand narrative that proactively generates media interest, otherwise you’ll get lost in the crowd.
Social helps brands stand out by offering a variety of engaging ways to present a steady drumbeat of thought leadership and brand storytelling. The channel plays an increasingly large role in executive communication strategies, providing business leaders with new opportunities to share insights and showcase their expertise.
Building your brand’s social presence, including that of your CEO and executives, leaves you with more than just followers and likes—it provides you with an owned channel for PR amplification, enabling you to influence narratives, engage with your audience directly and drive positive media coverage.
5. Social media marketing plays a critical role in crisis management
Crises are no longer reserved for major brands. Social media opens businesses big and small up to a new level of scrutiny.
Social media crises can unfold on various scales, whether it’s an insensitive employee comment amplified by an outraged audience or a surge of customer complaints after a service slip-up. The most effective way to manage these risks is by having a social media crisis plan.
The importance of social media marketing in crisis management is two-fold. Firstly, by monitoring and listening to social media, you can proactively manage risks. Secondly, adopting a social-first crisis management strategy provides brands with an opportunity to address issues before they escalate into a larger problem.
6. Social commerce introduces your products and services to customers looking to buy
Why invest in social media marketing? Because social media marketing is an investment in your business’s future.
According to the Index, most consumer-brand interactions begin long before a purchase is made. Many start researching products on social media up to six months before they buy. Each interaction with your audience on social potentially guides them along the customer journey to a sale.
If you’re not investing in a data-driven social commerce strategy, you’re missing out on a major source of potential revenue. Think of your social channels as an interactive, community-centric catalog of your products and services.
7. Social media marketing supports wow-worthy customer experiences
More consumer-brand interactions are going digital, creating a massive opportunity for businesses looking to make an impression with their target audiences. One-on-one interactions now take place on a public stage, and their impacts are one-to-many.
That’s why it’s so important for brands to create social media customer care strategies that support proactive and reactive community engagement. Even something as simple as responding to a customer’s inquiry makes a big difference: 73% of social users agree that if a brand doesn’t respond to them, they’ll buy from a competitor.
Timely, personalized responses are key to social media success. Respondents in the 2025 Sprout Social Index say companies should make personalized customer service their top social media priority. Engaging directly with consumers on social media gives you endless chances to surprise and delight your audience. When you exceed their expectations, you reap the benefits of their loyalty.
8. Social media marketing generates leads and revenue
Social media networks have evolved to do more than spark conversations—they drive culture. Consumers are using Facebook (39%), TikTok (36%) and Instagram (29%) to make purchases. Broken down into age groups, TikTok emerges as the front runner: 54% of Gen Z and 47% of Millennials have bought something through TikTok. About one-third of all consumers anticipate making more purchases from social networks in 2025, a number that rises to nearly half among Gen Z audiences.
Though only 13% of consumers purchasing on social media buy directly from the social networks themselves, that’s likely to grow. People are now more likely to make impulse purchases thanks to integrated shopping experiences. If the price is right and the path to purchase is easy, consumers are happy to spend money. Make sure your check out options are set up and offer a smooth process for buyers. Additionally, focus on developing content that puts your products front and center. Sixty-three percent of consumers say a brand’s product or service is what stands out on social, so it’s worth making sure you’re making a stellar impression in your posts.
How 3 brands maximize the importance of social media marketing with Sprout
The data is there, now let’s see it in action. Here’s how three brands are realizing the potential of social media with help from Sprout.
How Sprout’s social team proves social ROI to our leadership
Leadership buy-in is crucial for social media success. Whether implementing new tools or launching a creative campaign, having leadership’s support ensures projects stay on track, secure the necessary resources and overcome obstacles.
At Sprout, when we wanted to switch our reporting to a multi-touch attribution model to better capture the value of our social media campaigns for our lead pipeline, we first sought the support of our CMO and VP of Brand and Social. Having these executives in our corner helped prioritize getting this new approach off the ground. The focus on multi-touch attribution was driven by goals around improved reporting infrastructure that could more clearly highlight the value our social media networks bring.
“Social teams are driving revenue,” says Sprout’s Senior Social Media Strategist, Olivia Jepson. “But last-touch attribution only tells part of the story. Strategic discussions about how social impacts the entire funnel—spanning top-of-funnel engagement and reach metrics to down-funnel demand—are essential for building a more effective reporting infrastructure.”
With leadership’s guidance, we reworked our KPIs to areas like earned media value (EMV), cost per action (CPA), leads and cost per lead (CPL) to better understand brand discoverability and revenue pathways. These are sourced from Google Analytics, Salesforce, Employee Advocacy and our solution, Sprout Social.
Using Sprout’s My Reports premium add-on, we measure cross-network performance, campaign performance and how well we’re engaging specific audience segments and product focus areas. Thanks to diligent UTM tagging within Sprout, combined with our Salesforce integration, we can tie social media efforts directly to revenue—highlighting social as a key revenue driver.
Atlassian uses social listening to better understand their audience
The Atlassian social team strives to be present wherever people are talking about work—whether they’re tagged or not.
“We jump in on conversations that are happening about teamwork, work management or agile development—not necessarily our products,” says Loren Siegel, Atlassian’s Community and Social Engagement Senior Team Lead.
Joining the broader industry conversations that surround their products helps humanize the Atlassian brand, creating deeper connections with their target audience. Siegel and her team use Sprout’s social media listening tool to identify and act on the conversations that move individuals along on their customer journey.
For example, one of their social listening queries listens for specific game developers on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“We want to listen to what they’re talking about and provide solutions when they’re talking about Jira, Confluence and [other Atlassian] products to build their relationship with the brand. It’s been a fun new path for my team to focus on building community with a particular segment of professionals,” she says.
This proactive approach to social engagement builds community around the business, fostering brand loyalty and a superior customer experience across the funnel.
Casey’s uses social media integrations to drive higher customer satisfaction
For Casey’s, creating stand-out social customer care experiences is a collaborative effort. To ensure no customer request goes cold, they use Sprout’s integration with Salesforce.
“The integration has been a game-changer,” says Jasmine Riedemann, Casey’s Social Media Manager. “It’s opened a floodgate of communication right within the tool between our social and Guest Relations Teams.”
Before Sprout, it took the Casey’s team up to three days to respond to social customer care messages. Siloed team structures made it difficult to know what was being addressed and when, leading to longer wait times for the customer.
Now, Casey’s guests receive responses to their messages within three to five hours, on average, according to Riedemann. This represents a 90% faster response time.
“I cannot applaud the Sprout Social and Salesforce integration enough for what it’s done for our teams,” says Ridemann. “The communication between our Guest Relations Team and social team has improved tenfold because we can see who addressed a case and what actions were taken.”
The importance of social media marketing ripples across a business
Social media’s impact has expanded well beyond marketing, touching nearly every corner of a business. More teams, from customer service to product development, benefit from the rich market insights the channel can provide. Marketing leaders must work to establish a consistent flow of social data and insights throughout their organizations to further support these partnerships.
To make this happen, you’ll need a social media management platform designed to effectively break down internal silos. Request a personalized demo of Sprout Social today to find out how our tool empowers more collaborative workflows that enable businesses to make better, faster decisions with social.
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