How to calculate the real dollar value of organic social media posts

One way to make the case for investing in organic social is to run the earned media math. On LinkedIn, the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for paid advertising is around $22. That means even a small account with 500 followers, generating roughly 1,000 impressions per post, is effectively capturing about $20 worth of free media with every single post. At scale, this compounds quickly — and on platforms like YouTube, you're not just avoiding ad spend, the platform is actually paying you through AdSense to produce that content. As Greg Isenberg puts it, you're getting paid to build your lead pipeline, which is a genuinely remarkable inversion of how most people think about marketing costs.