No matter how many social media channels you’re using or how well your company is performing on each social media channel, creating a social media report will help you make intelligent decisions based on the data you’re seeing. In this guide, you’ll learn the essential and must-have elements, key points, and components of a successful social media report.
An effective social media report takes a little time to create, but once you make a template, you can use it repeatedly for all your social media reporting. Using the same template will also help you stay consistent in your reporting. See here what components a social media report should have.
Social Media Report Components
You’ll also have to determine how often you want to create a report. You may decide to create weekly news and then offer up a monthly report as well, and each of these may have different information because you’re looking for other things.
An annual social media report will look different than a weekly report.
How often you choose to pull reports depends on your goals and the information that stakeholders are looking to see. Please consider all of this as you’re looking through our social media report components here.
The Data Points: Components of a Social Media Report
What you decide to include in your report depends on your social media goals. For example, if one of your main goals is to increase brand awareness, you’ll probably want to include the number of new followers and maybe even the number of lost followers since the last pulled report.
You may also look at how many impressions your posts are getting.
Here are some possible data points you may want to include in your social media report, depending on your goals: In this guide, you’ll learn the essential and must-have elements, key points, and concepts of a social media report.
- Leads: Visitors that are also potential customers
- Conversions: Visitors that complete something you were aiming for, such as clicking through to your website or making a sale
- Reach and Impressions: The number of people who see each post
- Volume: Conversion size and the number of brand mentions
- Engagement: How people are interacting, including clicks, comments, and shares
- Comments: Make a note of any that are good or problematic
- Audience: Any available demographic information
- Content: What types of content are you posting, and how often?
- Click-thru-rate: The number of visitors who clicked through the post to your website
- Bounce rate: The number of visitors who came to the website and/or social media page and quickly left
- Share of voice: How many people are talking about your brand?
- Lessons learned: Anything learned between the time the last report was pulled and now
- Executive summary: Takeaways from the report and next steps
Getting Closer to Reaching your Goal
Remember to choose components that will help you see if you’re getting closer to reaching your goal or moving further from it. If you’re running a social media campaign to target something specifically, you may want to include any data associated with that in your report.
Note any benchmarks, such as getting a certain number of followers or having a certain number of views on a video. Note these things as they happen so you can easily spot trends now and down the road.
You should also consider who will be looking at this report and the kinds of data they’ll be looking for. While it is possible to adjust your reporting template over time, getting retroactive data for some platforms or data points may not be possible, so try and cover all of the bases from the start.
The Look of a Successful Social Media Report
Depending on who you’re showing this social media report to or what it will be used for, that will lend itself to the look of your report. Should it be more visual, or is a spreadsheet more fitting?
Depending on your social media goals, using charts, maps, and graphs to show off your data might be beneficial. You can use PowerPoint, Canva, or other simple design tools to make your report presentable if needed. In this guide, you’ll learn the essential and must-have elements, key points, and concepts of a social media report.
The Presentation and Explanation
If you are required to present your report, or you’re using the report presented as a jumping-off point to set new social media goals, go for a visual approach as you talk through the data. With this kind of presentation, you’ll want to share layers of data that cover weeks, months, and years to see the big picture.
Even if you don’t have to present your report, you’ll want to be able to offer some critical takeaways for whoever will be looking at a successful social media report.
These takeaways can be provided in writing (in a simple email) or verbally during a meeting. Regardless of how the information is presented, you’ll want to be able to provide some insight into the numbers instead of just giving the raw data. Be able to answer questions such as:
- What are the numbers telling you?
- What content is getting you closer to your goals?
- Are your social media efforts getting you closer to your goal or further away?
- Are there other goals you should be setting surrounding your social media accounts?
- How can you use the popular posts to continue on an upward trend?
- Should you be on other social media platforms?
- Should you remove your presence from a specific platform?
- Are you able to respond to customers in real time?
- Are you posting enough?
Answering these questions (or others, depending on who will see the report and your goals). It will help you focus your social media reporting and use the numbers to improve your weekly efforts. Month after month and year after year.
You’d be surprised how many people make a report but tuck it away. Without using the information to help focus their marketing strategy.
Community Performance
Whether or not it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, tracking the evolution of the community sizes is crucially important as a metric. A successful analysis of community development should attempt to answer the following questions:
- What is the increase in the size of my social communities via channel?
- How significant are social groups within my overall marketing strategy?
- How does my media’s share of voice compare to that of competitors?
Important KPIs
Measuring your organization’s total number of followers on all social media platforms is essential, but it’s not the only metric worth considering. This analysis must also consider the number increase over time and the effects of campaigns, events, and marketing content on this increase.
Community development analysis can be broken down by individual social channels (e.g., Twitter versus Facebook, a typical example) or geographic region.
Ultimately, this segmentation should focus on the primary goals of your organization. If a campaign focused on developing a Canadian audience had just been launched, segment and monitor the growth of that community in specific geographic areas.
