Social Media Reports: 9+ Templates & Examples

Imagine you're the captain of your brand's online voyage, steering through stormy comments and basking in sunny engagement across social platforms. In the shifting ocean of social media, how do you ensure you're on course? Social media reporting acts as your trusted navigator.

For enterprises, social media reports turn numbers into stories that surface winning strategies, opportunities, and patterns. They provide the full picture that ultimately helps justify investments to stakeholders, optimize social media campaigns and align social strategies with business goals.

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a detailed document that tracks key social media metrics, trends and audience behaviors across target social platforms. It depicts the outcomes of your social media activities to stakeholders, painting a meaningful story that justifies your investments and answers questions.

For instance, a social media analytics report may indicate traction from a specific geo untapped in your audience targeting. Backed with data, you can confidently pivot your social media strategy to address this geo and reap rich dividends. In short, comprehensive and timely social media reports simplify trendspotting and informed decision-making, among many other benefits.

👉Bonus read: Understanding Social Media Business Intelligence in 2025

What to include in a social media report

Here are the key template components for an effective social media report:

1. Executive summary: Provide an overview or snapshot of what the social media report has to offer. This will provide quick insights and help readers navigate to the most useful sections.

2. Performance snapshot: Break down performance during the selected period using key metrics like impressions, reach, engagement and follower growth. Also include a comprehensive social media audit with performance by platform, content and recent campaigns including traffic and conversion details.

3. Key metrics and KPIs: These are quantitative measures such as reach, impressions, engagement (likes, shares, comments), and click-through rates (CTR). These social media metrics and KPIs should be differentiated as leading and lagging, based on their weightage in your larger social strategy.

4. Recommendations: Above and beyond standard observations, reports should provide recommendations for your future strategy. These are actionable tips to meet business goals via social media, such as flagging underperforming platforms, content types, and influencers.

Advanced analytics tools like Sprinklr allow custom metrics, widgets and dashboards personalized to your brand, courtesy of its generative AI integration.

5. Competitive benchmarking: Include a comprehensive competitor analysis to benchmark your performance against the industry and competition. It helps understand relative performance and highlight areas of improvement.

How to create a social media report in 5 steps

Guided by a visionary plan, creating a social media report can be painless. Use the following steps to set your enterprise up for reporting success.

Step 1: Define the purpose and audience

The first step is to understand why you’re creating the social media report and for whom. This will also determine the type of report to create like an engagement report, competitor report or content report. We’ll take you through these later.

Goal: Define the social media report’s purpose clearly - is it to assess a recent social campaign, influencer performance, market research or something else?

Audience: Who will use it? This will determine what to include in the report. For instance, marketers seek platform-specific metrics while C-suite executives prioritize ROI.

Pro tip: Include a brief “How to use this report” section for clarity.

Step 2: Set the KPIs

Depending on your goals, choose metrics that align. For instance, if the goal is to assess a recent campaign’s performance for marketers to understand its efficacy, then social media KPIs like reach, impressions, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion and cost-per-click would be most relevant.

Overarchingly, the primary social media KPIs that an enterprise should track are:

• Engagement rate
• Reach and impressions
• Follower growth rate
• Social media ROI
• Click-through rate

Step 3: Gather social media data

Collate data about performance, audience or other relevant areas from all social media platforms your brand is active on. Apart from platform-specific data, deep-dive into:

• Content-specific data for more ammunition to work with. For instance, analyzing video completion rate versus carousel swipe-through rate can indicate the audience’s content preferences.
• Paid, owned and earned data to get a holistic performance picture. For instance, data from user-generated content and influencers is as vital as advertising numbers since all channels collectively shape brand perception.

While you can use in-platform analytics, they may not provide the advanced capabilities offered by advanced social media analytics and reporting tools. A unified platform like Sprinklr can aggregate insights across 30+ platforms on one dashboard and allow data customization.

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Related read: The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Data Collection

Step 4: Spot trends and hypothesize

Mere numbers don’t convey the whole story. Extrapolating trends and hypotheses from metrics and qualitative information tells a compelling story of what went right (or wrong) for your brand, competitors and industry in general. Say your engagement rate spikes or plunges after a rebrand, using social media sentiment analysis indicates the nature of engagement - positive, negative or neutral. From here, you can craft narratives for different departments, from creative to brand.

Get insights faster with disruptive technologies like generative AI. Create social listening queries to capture stated and unstated emotions behind comments on posts, reviews, and direct messages. Here’s how Sprinklr’s genAI-enriched platform does it:

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Step 5: Determine reporting frequency

Once the findings to present are sourced, it’s time to think about reporting frequency. The frequency of generating social media reports depends on your goals, the pace of your campaigns, and the needs of your stakeholders. Here are some common practices:

1. Weekly Reports:
   • Purpose: Track short-term performance and quickly identify any issues or trends.
   • Use Case: Ideal for active campaigns, social media managers, and teams that need to stay on top of daily or weekly changes.
2. Monthly Reports:
   • Purpose: Provide a comprehensive overview of performance over a long period.
   • Use Case: Suitable for presenting to management, clients, or for internal reviews to assess overall strategy effectiveness.
3. Quarterly Reports:
   • Purpose: Analyze broader trends and the impact of longer-term strategies.
   • Use Case: Useful for strategic planning, budget reviews, and high-level stakeholder presentations.
4. Annual Reports:
   • Purpose: Summarize the entire year's performance, highlighting major achievements and areas for improvement.
   • Use Case: Best for annual reviews, setting goals for the next year, and reporting to executive teams or investors.

How to choose the right frequency

• Campaign intensity: For high-intensity campaigns, more frequent reporting (weekly or bi-weekly) can help make timely adjustments.
• Stakeholder needs: Consider how often your stakeholders need updates. Some may prefer monthly summaries, while others might need quarterly insights.
• Resource availability: Ensure you have the resources to consistently generate and analyze reports. It's better to have fewer, high-quality reports than frequent, rushed ones.

9 types of social media reports

Social media reports can vary based on focus areas and stakeholder needs, to name a few factors. Here are 9 types of reports commonly used by social media teams:

1. Audience engagement report

An engagement report gives a detailed breakdown of how audiences interact with your content on social media. Using engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares and clicks, it gauges how involved and responsive your audience is. By identifying patterns in interactions, it can uncover themes, topics, formats and tonalities that garner engagement.

Used to:

• Determine audience preferences and behaviors
• Identify and amplify successful content, platforms and formats
• Refine content and targeting strategies based on trends

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2. Reach and impression report

A reach and impressions report tracks your content’s visibility by measuring reach (unique users exposed to your content) and impressions (total displays of your content). It shows how effectively your content reaches audiences, how widely it's distributed, and how often it's seen by the same users. This report reflects how far your content is reaching and how often it is being viewed by the intended audience.

Used to:

• Determine the best posting times and frequencies for every target platform
• Use reach data to determine which audience segments are the most engaged
• Optimize under-performing campaigns, so they grab more eyeballs and mindshare

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3. Follower growth report

A follower growth report tracks changes in your social media follower count over time, monitoring trends like acquisition, retention and churn. You can also segment growth by platform or specific campaigns for a more granular view. This report reveals insights into what drives the brand’s audience growth, helping understand the effectiveness of your social strategy.

Used to:

• Track overall follower/ audience change
• Evaluate campaign, content and brand effectiveness in boosting follower numbers

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4. Sentiment analysis report

A sentiment analysis report gauges your audience’s perception of your brand by classifying social media mentions as positive, negative or neutral. This can help you understand how people feel about your brand, product or campaign. It can be used to identify trends in audience sentiment over time and across different segments of your audience to help you adjust messaging to boost brand sentiment.

Used to:

● Monitor public opinion and audience sentiment

● Adjust content messaging to improve sentiment

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5. Competitor analysis report

A competitor analysis report benchmarks your social media performance against competitors to understand how your brand compares to others in your industry. By analyzing metrics like engagement, follower growth and content strategies, it identifies where competitors excel or fall short. This highlights opportunities to differentiate and improve your own approach.

Used to:

• Identify competitive strengths and weaknesses
• Ascertain demographics and interests of competitors' followers
• Refine your own strategies

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6. Campaign-specific report

A campaign report analyzes individual campaigns using metrics like ROI, click-through rates, conversions and cost-per-click. It evaluates the campaign’s impact, cost-effectiveness and success or failure. For example, if engagement is high but conversions and ROI are low, the report identifies areas for improvement, such as messaging, targeting or ad spend efficiency.

Used to:

• Evaluate individual campaign success
• Understand justifiable resource utilization
• Direct future campaign strategies

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7. Channel-specific report

A channel-specific social media performance report showcases performance metrics of individual platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn to analyze how content performs on that channel. It provides unique insights for each social platform so that you can refine platform-specific strategies for optimal results. For example, video completion rates on YouTube are more important than on LinkedIn.

Used to:

• Understand audience behavior on platforms
• Analyze metrics unique to each platform
• Create platform-specific strategies to boost engagement and performance

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8. Content analytics report

A content analytics report analyzes content-specific performance of posts, videos, stories or reels for each platform It identifies which formats engage your audience the most. This helps focus on the most popular and effective formats, providing a plan for future content prioritization.

Used to:

● Identify most impactful content types

● Understand audience preferences for content

● Maximize engagement by focusing on top-performing content

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9. Custom reports

Custom reports are tailored to specific business goals that may not be standardized. For instance, you may want to study the success of influencer campaigns or crisis management efforts. These reports are customizable to highly specific intent. Some examples are:

• Influencer reports: Measure success of influencer-driven campaigns by tracking reach, engagement and ROI.
• Advocacy reports: Assess the impact of employee or customer advocacy on brand visibility and engagement.
• Social care reports: Tracks effectiveness of social customer service using metrics like response times and satisfaction.
• Hashtag performance reports: Outline the reach, engagement, usage and popularity of specific hashtags.
• Crisis management reports: Analyzes the PR response to a social media crisis using response times, audience sentiment and messaging.

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Social media reporting tools

Effective social media reporting requires robust reporting tools that provide relevant and actionable insights. Here are three tools to optimize your social media reports:

1. Sprinklr Social

Sprinklr’s AI-driven social media analytics and reporting tool aggregates data from 30+ digital channels. With over 7,500 pre-built queries and a unified platform, it can provide a 360* view of your social performance. You can monitor trends and engagement, audience sentiment and relative performance.

With Sprinklr, you can:

• Monitor over 500M digital conversations across 30+ social and digital platforms
• Access paid, earned and owned reports on a single dashboard
• Create custom metrics, widgets and dashboards personalized to your brand
• Integrate web analytics and critical third-party data
• Eliminate data silos across teams

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2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics deep dives into social media performance by tracking metrics like referral sources, user behavior and conversion rates from social platforms. You can evaluate ROI, optimize campaigns and understand audience engagement beyond social channels with this tool. Google Data Studio’s free data visualization allows creation of custom reports and dashboards using data from sources like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. It has a user-friendly interface, making visually appealing reports easy to design.

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Helpful read: A Step-by-step Guide to Setting up Google Analytics for Social Media

3. In-platform analytics tools

Native analytics tools like Meta Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics and YouTube Insights cater to platform-specific insights. These tools offer metrics like audience demographics, engagement rates and content performance. For example, Meta Business Suite allows advanced audience segmentation and sentiment analysis, while YouTube Insights tracks video retention and traffic sources.

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Need more tools? Read Top Social Media Analytics Tools for 2025

Quick tips to improve your social media reports

Highlight key takeaways with a findings summary on top to save stakeholders time.

• Leverage visualizations with charts, graphs and heatmaps to highlight key metrics for quick comprehension.
• Incorporate storytelling by framing data as a narrative — for example, instead of simply stating audience engagement grew 20%, talk about strategies that led to it, like driven by reels and live sessions
• Customize the social media report for the audience — for example, simplify with actionable content for executives but go deeper for marketers and analysts

Ready to build better social media reports?

Social media reports are essential to understand social performance and trends so that you can optimize strategies for better results. By leveraging tools like Google Analytics and in-platform analytics, you can gather accurate data to uncover actionable insights. Presenting this data with clear visualizations, relevant KPIs and in the right context for your target audience ensures your social media performance reports drive impact.

By unifying cross-channel reporting with tools like Sprinklr, you can measure, analyze and optimize your marketing performance across 30+ digital and social channels from a single AI-powered dashboard. With features like AI-driven ROI optimization, integrated data sources and robust taxonomy, you can uncover timely insights and align campaigns with business goals. Start creating smarter, more insightful social media reports today to unlock your full potential!