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Social media reports: A basic-to-advanced level guide
Imagine yourself as the captain of your brand's online voyage, skillfully navigating the ship through stormy comments and reveling in the sunny engagement. You are riding the waves of Facebook, X, formerly Twitter and all the other digital waters with confidence and finesse.
But in this vast and ever-changing ocean of social media, how do you ensure you're always sailing in the right direction? How do you stay attuned to the tides and currents that shape the digital landscape? Well, without the guidance of social media reporting, you may find yourself adrift, unsure of which direction to take.
That’s why having a seasoned navigator by your side becomes crucial to survey your horizons and chart a course for success. This is where social media reporting proves invaluable for your brand.
Social media reporting provides you with a panoramic view of your brand's online performance, enabling you to identify effective strategies and areas that require improvement. These invaluable insights empower you to recognize opportunities, navigate obstacles and make timely adjustments to keep your brand sailing smoothly.
What is a social media report?
A social media report is a detailed internal document highlighting key metrics, trends and audience behavior associated with your brand’s social accounts. This allows you to understand the impact of your social media strategy on key business outcomes.
In other words, your social media report is a compilation of snapshots that gives you a clearer picture of your brand's online performance. It gathers real-time data and analytics from all your social media accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and X, formerly Twitter.
You can have different social media reports to demarcate the different sets of audiences or social media goals.
When it comes to tracking social media metrics, it's essential to choose the ones that align with your goals. Below are some of the key metrics you should track.
- Reach: the number of unique users who see your content, indicating the potential reach and visibility of your brand
- Engagement rate: the percentage of users who engage with your content through likes, comments, shares and other actions, reflecting the level of interest and involvement
- Conversion rate: the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as filling out a lead form or making a purchase, measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns in generating leads
What should you include in a social media report?
Social media reports should be clear, precise and include relevant insights about every post you’ve made thus far — whether it's monthly, quarterly or yearly. This enables you to effectively showcase the impact of your social media efforts to a wide range of stakeholders.
A few key elements should be incorporated into any social media report, no matter the brand or the platforms used. Let’s look at what those components are and how they can be customized and expanded upon to align with your brand's specific reporting requirements.
1. Social media strategy
To begin with, include your social media strategy to provide your stakeholders with the necessary context behind your actions. Typically, it outlines your goals, target audience, content plan, platform selection and metrics and how to optimize them for social media success.
Learn More: How to create a social media strategy from scratch
2. Social media goals
Next, breakdown your strategy into well-defined social media goals. These are specific objectives you aim to achieve through your social accounts. Whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic or improving engagement, be sure to identify the specific goals you’d like to pursue and how they shape your social media initiatives.
For instance, by highlighting the purpose and action plan for your social media goals, you can ensure that your efforts are aligned with your overall marketing objectives.
Learn More: How to set social media goals for your business
3. Social media KPIs
Add your social media KPIs to track your progress toward your goals. They reflect the effectiveness of your social media efforts and determine your social media ROI.
There are various KPIs using which you can gauge the growth of your brand's social media presence. Some of them are:
Reach KPIs
Reach KPIs indicate the extent of audience exposure to your social channels, serving as a measure of audience growth over time and facilitating the assessment of brand awareness expansion.
- Impressions: the number of times your content is displayed, providing insight into how frequently users come across your brand's messaging
- Follower count: the increase in the number of your social media followers, reflecting the growth of your brand's online community
- Audience growth rate: the rate at which your follower count changes over time, providing insight into the growth curve of your brand's following on social media
- Brand mentions: instances where your brand is mentioned on social media, indicating organic conversations and brand visibility
- Share of voice: the proportion of your brand’s online conversations, mentions or discussions, providing insights into how well you stack up against your competition
Engagement KPIs
Engagement KPIs measure the level of interaction, involvement and responsiveness generated by your social media content.
- Likes, comments, shares: quantitative measures of the interactions your content receives, showcasing the level of engagement and reach your posts achieve
- Mentions: instances where your brand is mentioned by users, indicating the level of brand awareness and the potential for conversions and collaboration
Conversion KPIs
Conversion KPIs measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts in driving the desired action(s) from the audience.
- Click-through rate (CTR): CTR measures how often people click the links in your social post that lead them directly to your website, providing insight into the relevance and quality of content
- Bounce rate: measures the percentage of the audience who clicked on a link in your post, but left that page without taking any action
- Lead form submissions: the number of users who submit their information through contact forms, indicating the volume of potential leads
- Downloads: the number of users who download the gated asset by providing their contact information, indicating lead generation potential
- Email sign-ups: the number of users who subscribe to your email list, demonstrating their interest in receiving additional communication and being nurtured as potential leads
4. Social media key takeaways
Wrap up your report by consolidating your top findings and key takeaways. Create a checklist of what worked well and what didn't, and refine your strategy accordingly. Be sure to include the following:
- Achievements: With comprehensive data at your disposal, you can showcase your noteworthy accomplishments, such as your top-performing posts, trending hashtags and compelling visual content that have contributed to your social media success. These invaluable insights illuminate what resonates with your audience and enhance engagement. For instance, you may have observed that posts featuring user-generated content or ones containing videos and infographics consistently do well in terms of engagement. By carefully analyzing this data, you can identify winning strategies and replicate them to optimize your content for maximum impact.
- Challenges: Identify and acknowledge your roadblocks. If you’re dealing with low engagement rates or struggling to stick to a set schedule, try to figure out the possible reasons to arrive at a solution.
- Growth opportunities: Digging deep into your data might also open exciting doors. Let's say you look into your engagement metrics and find that your target audience is constantly asking for video tutorials or product demos. You can use this particular insight to create engaging and informative video content to meet their needs and enhance your brand's connection with your audience.
How to create a social media report in 5 steps?
Creating a social media report becomes a breeze when you follow these five simple steps.
Step 1: Determine your reporting audience
Take the time to figure out the key stakeholders or decision-makers who will be reading and using the report. Consider their familiarity with social media concepts and metrics. By doing so, you can ensure that your report delivers valuable insights that can make decision-making simpler and easier.
For instance, when presenting to executives or senior management, they may prioritize high-level details and understand the overall impact on business goals. Conversely, when sharing the report with marketing or social media managers, they may value granular data that delves into specific performance metrics.
Step 2: Set clear objectives
Determine the purpose of your social media report. What do you want to achieve with it? Whether it's showcasing campaign performance, evaluating social media ROI or identifying areas for improvement, having clear objectives will guide your report's content and structure.
Step 3: Choose relevant metrics
Consider metrics that provide meaningful insights into your objectives and help you quantify the impact of your efforts.
Say your objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media content in driving website traffic. Then your reporting data should include click-through rates, bounce rates and average time spent on the website by social media referral traffic.
Step 4: Gather and analyze data
Collect data from your social media platforms using analytics tools or platform insights. Analyze the data to identify trends and patterns.
For example, you can analyze the engagement metrics of your Instagram posts, such as likes, comments and shares, to discover your most successful content. By examining the performance of different types of posts (e.g., images, videos or carousels), you can determine which formats resonate best with your audience.
Step 5: Present the findings
Compile all your findings into an easily digestible report. Use visuals, graphs and charts to make it compelling. Explain your insights, highlight successes, address challenges and make actionable recommendations for future improvements.
3 best practices for effective social media reporting
When it comes to effective social media reporting, three key practices can take your reports from meh to great.
1. Benchmark against goals and competitors
By analyzing and including information about your competitors' social media performance, you get to know how you measure up in your industry.
While reporting, choose brands that operate within your industry or target a similar audience. This allows you to gain insights from those who are facing similar challenges and opportunities, enabling you to learn from their strategies and adapt them to your own brand. This way, you can set realistic targets.
To provide competitive context in your social media reports, present metrics such as follower growth rates, engagement rates or content performance comparisons between your brand and others. By doing this, you can spot your strengths, uncover areas where you can do better and tweak your social media strategy accordingly.
Learn More: 9 ways to leverage social media data to drive business growth
2. Focus on actionable insights
Instead of merely presenting numbers and metrics, focus on extracting valuable insights and recommendations from your data.
If your report reveals that a video has gone viral, you can provide actionable insight by examining the characteristics of that video post. What made it tick — is it the storytelling approach, the visual elements or the call-to-action that resonated with the audience?
Based on this insight, you could incorporate more storytelling elements in your content, or experiment with similar visual styles in your social media posts. This will help optimize your content strategy and drive better engagement with your audience.
3. Streamline your reports
Focus on the most relevant metrics and insights that align with your objectives and key stakeholders' needs. Avoid cramming your report with excessive data or unnecessary details.
At the same time, you don't have to create reports from scratch. You can use automation tools and templates to simplify your reporting process. Leverage social media management platforms that offer built-in reporting features. These tools can automatically gather data from your social media accounts and generate comprehensive reports with just a few clicks. Save your valuable time and effort to focus on analyzing the insights and taking action.
Examples of analytics tools for social media reporting
There is no dearth of social media analytics tools in the market, each offering unique features and capabilities. Some popular tools include:
Meta Business Suite
Meta Business Suite provides robust reporting capabilities to track and analyze your performance across various Facebook-owned platforms.
The suite offers advanced features like audience segmentation, sentiment analysis and competitor benchmarking, providing in-depth insights to drive strategy and achieve your marketing goals.
Learn More: How to get started with Facebook monitoring
Youtube Insights
It is a specialized analytics tool for YouTube content creators and marketers. It provides detailed metrics and analytics specific to YouTube videos, channels and audiences. With YouTube Insights, you can track video views, watch time, engagement metrics like likes, comments and shares, and audience demographics.
YouTube Insights also provides valuable information about traffic sources, playback locations and viewer retention. It helps refine your video marketing efforts for maximum impact.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr’s AI-powered analytics and reporting tools uncover insights from billions of data points across 30+ digital channels. It brings them together in well-structured reports that empower your team to make smarter business decisions. You can integrate all this data and insights into your workflows to create a more comprehensive view of your brand, customers and competition. This unified approach reduces the inconsistency and siloed reporting experiences typical of point solutions.
Tableau
With Tableau, you can connect various data sources, including social media platforms, and design stunning visualizations to present your data in a clear and meaningful way. The tool offers a wide range of chart types, interactive filters and drill-down capabilities, enabling you to explore data and unearth actionable insights.
Google Data Studio
It is a free data visualization and reporting tool that allows you to create custom reports and dashboards using data from various sources like Facebook, X, formerly Twitter and YouTube. Google Data Studio provides a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy to design visually appealing reports. The tool comes with data visualization options, such as charts, graphs, tables and maps. This allows you to present social media metrics and insights in a visually-compelling format.
Types of social media reports
Each type of report serves a specific purpose and focuses on different aspects of social media metrics. Let’s explore what each report entails.
Monthly performance report
A monthly performance report summarizes your social media activities and key metrics for a specific month. For instance, you can highlight the total number of new followers gained during the month and compare it with previous months to assess audience growth. This report helps you track your progress over time and gain new learnings to optimize your social media efforts.
ROI report
The ROI report measures the financial impact of social media activities. It involves tracking and analyzing the costs associated with your social media campaigns or initiatives and comparing them to the generated revenue or other desired outcomes. This report typically includes metrics such as conversion rates, lead generation, sales attributed to social media efforts and customer acquisition costs. By understanding the ROI of your social media efforts, you can determine the performance of your campaigns and allocate resources more efficiently to achieve better results.
Content performance report
A content performance report assesses the performance of individual social media posts or content pieces. It helps you identify which types of content resonate most with your audience and generate the highest levels of engagement. This report may include metrics such as likes, comments, shares, click-through rates and average engagement per post. By analyzing the content performance report, you can identify trends, replicate successful content strategies and make data-driven decisions to optimize content creation and distribution.
Campaign report
A campaign report focuses on evaluating the success of a specific social media campaign or initiative. It analyzes a campaign's objectives, strategies, tactics and outcomes. This in-depth report includes metrics related to campaign reach, engagement, conversion rates and KPIs specific to the campaign's goals. It helps you understand which aspects of the campaign were effective and which areas need improvement.
Competitor analysis report
A competitor analysis report compares your social media performance and strategies to those of your competitors. It involves analyzing metrics such as follower growth, engagement rates, content types and campaign tactics deployed by your competitors. By understanding the social media landscape within your industry, you can adjust your strategies, differentiate your brand and gain a competitive edge.
Final thoughts
As you embark on your brand's digital expedition, always remember that insights, data and informed decisions chart the course to social media success. Embrace social media reporting as your brand’s compass, guiding you to forge profound connections, amplify brand visibility and drive unparalleled growth.
With Sprinklr’s reporting arsenal of over 500 custom AI models, you can make smart business decisions quickly and witness the results firsthand.
Bon voyage!
