A social media report is a document based on extracted data from various social media networks, showing how your efforts perform over time. This report includes metrics such as the number of followers, likes, views, engagement, post-performance, and conversions.
Social media reporting plays a huge role in digital marketing, so you want to be sure to include it in with all your other monthly reports. Here are some important reasons why social media reporting can be beneficial for your brand:
- Smarter content creation: Through social media reporting, you can identify your top-performing posts and segments of your audience are engaging with specific content. This helps you create more engaging content on your platform based on actual data.
- Results-driven schedule: Based on past performance, you can strategically schedule your posts and deliver campaigns to maximize the results of your marketing efforts.
- Tailored targeting: Reporting gives you insights to tailor your strategies to each platform instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing efforts.
How to Create a Social Media Report
Reporting is a crucial practice for every social media account and every social media manager. You might think it’s as simple as exporting data from social media tools and sending that data off to your boss. But data has no meaning without context and interpretation, so effective reporting is a much more complex task.
Social media marketing covers a wide range of plans, content, campaigns, and strategic initiatives. Social media reporting serves as a project deliverable that opens your eyes to vast information that can help generate leads, cultivate long-lasting relationships with customers, create viral content, and boost brand awareness levels. It also provides clients and/or company leadership with the results of your collaboration.
Creating a social media report doesn’t have to be tedious, and a social media analytics report template can make things easier. All you need is to break this big task down into smaller, simpler steps that include:
- Identify your target audience
- Set goals
- Consider SMART questions
- Determine metrics to track performance
- Decide on reporting timeframes
- Present your findings
The goal of creating a social media report is the optimization of your social media marketing efforts to benefit your bottom line.
Who Is the Target Audience?
The very first step in creating a social media report is knowing the person you need to address the report to. Different departments have varying requirements. So, you have to tailor your results to different teams based on their goals. They could be stakeholders, senior management, sales, PR, or customer support departments. So, create a specific report to include only the relevant metrics for that particular stakeholder, rather than forcing them to go through a general report to find what they need.
What Information Is Most Relevant in This Context?
Social media helps increase sales, engagement, leads, and brand awareness, and provides many other valuable benefits.
Identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs) is the most crucial aspect of measuring the ROI of your social media activities. Your KPIs depend on your requirements and the social media platforms you use. Here are some of the metrics that you can use to make more informed decisions:
- Leads
- Conversions
- Reach and impressions
- Volume
- Engagement
- Audience
- Posts
- Click-through with bounce rate
- Share of voice
These indicators are critical for measuring the success of your marketing strategy efforts.
What your Social Media Report Should Include
First, a social media report should be easy to understand as well as aesthetically pleasing. It is crucial to keep the report as simple as possible. Second, to figure out what you should be including in your report, you need to have a full understanding of what your company’s social media goals are. Once you have your goals set, you can determine if your social media strategy is achieving those goals with the metrics you include in your report.
If you want your social media reporting to stand out, you need to do more than just hitting people over the head with text and numbers. You should visualize your talking points to make your reporting more exciting and easier to digest (just like all your fun and engaging social media posts that went viral this quarter!). Visual reporting through graphs and charts can help you quickly convey information such as shout-outs from influencers and engagement spikes.
Here are some key points that every social media report should include:
1. Introduction
Begin your report with a brief summary of the key takeaway message, including your strategy, goals, and key metrics. This will serve as the backdrop for the rest of your report.
2. Success Snapshot
You should also provide a compelling snapshot of your performance. A specific campaign or weekly or monthly performance data may work well depending on the particular purpose of the report.
Highlighting essential data, such as total engagement, total web traffic, or new followers, may be effective for providing a powerful overview of your efforts.
3. Data Tracking
As you may guess, this part focuses on your numbers. It always helps to provide context. So if you are reporting on a specific campaign, compare your results to similar campaigns you have done. If you are reporting weekly or monthly data, compare your number to previous results. Doing so helps identify performance trends more easily.
Your social media report should include data that depends on your goals and the metrics you use. Some of the more common areas to include for each social media platform include:
- Net gain or loss in followers
- Post reach
- Number of posts
- Number of comments
- Total shares
- Number of profile or page views
Also, it is a good idea to focus on the overall data by stating:
- Traffic to your website from social channels
- Number of conversions sourced from social
- Total amount spent on advertising
- Number of new leads that were generated
- Total amount of revenue that was generated
4. Other Standout Results
At times, the numbers alone fail to capture your campaign results. Such accomplishments as establishing a collaboration with a prominent influencer may deserve mention in your social media report.
It may be surprising to you, but social media reporting does not necessarily only include your key points but also information about your competitors. For example, you might want to compare your brand’s social performance to your closest competitors.
If you want to include your competitors in your reporting system, you may use benchmarks such as:
- Audience growth
- Share of voice
- Content performance
Get more customers with this free social media analytics report template
Social media reporting is without a doubt a very important task for every company that is looking to leverage their socials for growth. With the help of this free template you will be able to “wow” your boss and use key insights to grow your accounts.