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Imagine spending weeks devising and executing a creative social media campaign without knowing its impact. Whether you are an experienced marketer or just starting to learn the algorithms for your individual profile growth, tracking your social media performance is crucial. This is where social media reporting becomes necessary for every digital marketer.
About 89% of social media managers selected "Analytics and Reporting" as the topmost feature they'd want in a social media tool. A social media report's analytical base empowers you to design compelling content strategies, putting you in control of your social media journey.
Are you not sure what a social media report encompasses? Don't worry! We bring a comprehensive guide to simplify every aspect. Read on to learn the metrics that matter, decode the mysteries of engagement, and uncover the secrets to turning data into actionable insights.
What Is a Social Media Report?
A social media report showcases a brand's social media content performance across different social media platforms. It analyzes vital metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your content. It aids in identifying what works for your target audience.
A social media report consolidates your wins and failures, providing a clear basis for enhancing your strategies. It's not just a report; it's a tool that guides you towards campaign improvement. It is helpful for client updates or sharing within the team as a reference point to appraise campaign results and drive future efforts.
The format of a social media report can differ depending on the platforms a brand is active on, the tracking metrics, and social media goals. The insights it provides can help you confidently strategize for social media growth.
10 Things To Include in Your Social Media Report
An effective social media report is pivotal for dissecting your social media performance footprint and refining your strategy. To ensure your report is informative and instrumental in optimizing your social media content, it must include the following elements:
1. Summary
Instead of starting with numbers and graphical representations, summarize the key findings of the data. Start your report with essential pointers. This gives an idea of what lies further, and often, clients just need a gist of the report before delving into the details.
2. Social Media Goals
What is the report trying to highlight? Give context to the social media goals for the particular account.
For example, do you use a brand's Instagram account for sales and Twitter for customer service? Mention these primary objectives for each platform so the reader knows how successfully they have been achieved.
3. Time-Bound Goals
Mention your goals during the period highlighted in the report. For example, if you create a monthly social media report, specify your goals for that month. It helps to narrow down the successes/failures in the time frame.
4. Metrics and KPIs
Your social media report relies on the metrics and KPIs you choose to compare. These measurements must align with your social media goals. You can track the success of each objective by studying a different set of metrics.
For example, you should measure your posts' likes, comments, and shares to analyze your engagement. To tabulate your conversions, you should consider metrics like click-through rate, cost per click, and cost per impressions, as well as incorporating UTM parameters.
5. Performance Updates
Review the criteria and note the numbers (likes, shares, retweets, website clicks, etc.). This section directly addresses whether you have achieved your social media goals and provides an overview of how well your strategy has worked to accomplish the desired results.
6. Campaign Insights
If you run a specific campaign during the duration covered in the report, you must also include its effectiveness. Mention the initiative's objectives and state how it fulfilled those. It can lay the foundation for designing more such campaigns.
For example, if you created a hashtag campaign on Twitter, mention the reach, visibility, and impressions it received.
7. Competition Analysis
A social media report is not just about measuring your performance against your past goals but also about gaining valuable insights from your competitors. Understanding what has worked for them is a strategic move that can help you target the same audience more effectively with your content.
If you can access competitor reports on social media trends related to your niche, compare them with your findings. Have you emulated a similar approach that worked for you? Mention your observations.
For instance, if your competitor's collaboration with an influencer led to a significant increase in sales, your social media report can inspire you to discuss and implement similar influencer marketing strategies in the next quarter.
8. Target Audience
Every brand has a fixed target audience, but does your content successfully tap into those? If you see a surge in followers, mention the demographics—location, age group, gender, etc.
The client needs to know whom their company is reaching, while the team must consider the latest demographics when planning a new launch or event announcement on social media.
9. Content Review of All Platforms
A social media report covers a brand's overall performance on all its social media platforms. The kind of content updated on each of these mediums differs. Scrutinizing the performance of all posts across these mediums helps to identify what type of posts work best on which platforms. Short-form video, images and GIFs are just the tip of the iceberg of the most engaging types of content you can post in social media.
Did adding multimedia video enhance the visibility of a post on Twitter but less on Facebook? Do long posts work better on LinkedIn than on Instagram? Jot down your findings so you can map your content accordingly.
If you achieve a monthly goal set for Instagram but not for Twitter, you can evaluate the content and make necessary adjustments.
10. Suggestions and Recommendations
A report would be incomplete without suggesting a course of action. If you have identified some problems, conclude with proposed solutions that can be implemented soon.
If you need client input, you can leave space for recommendations about improving social media strategies.
Tips to Create a Social Media Report
Creating a social media report may seem daunting, with so many things to highlight in a report. Don't worry, it isn't. Just follow these tips to craft an insightful document:
1. Consider the Reader
Who will read your social media report? Do you want to share it with your social media team or new interns, or does the client want to know what's transpiring? A team working on the tasks will observe the content performance, while the intern should comprehend the basics. The client will need a detailed overview of the past months.
Remember, you have the flexibility to select what to include in your report, empowering yourself to create an insightful and highly relevant report for the reader.
2. Select a Time Frame
Depending on the extent of your social media presence, you can prepare a social media report for a week, month, quarter, or year.
If you start from scratch by creating new accounts, you may not get as many insights in a week as in a month. Choose a time frame depending on your prioritized social media goals.
3. Add Attractive Visuals
Incorporate charts, graphs, and infographics into your report. Visuals can communicate data trends more effectively and make the report more engaging.
4. Use Reporting Tools
Leverage the power of social media analytics software. Most social media platforms offer some form of built-in analytics that give an immediate overview of your post performance.
You can also use third-party management software equipped with an additional suite of tools to provide analytics. Consider Highperformr, a social media management software integrated with AI capabilities to create and schedule creative content.
5. Highlight Your Learnings and Predictions
Towards the end of your report, summarize the key takeaways and give logical predictions. Highlight what you have learned and how you plan to work on it. Give examples of what you will do and how it will improve the results by the next reporting stage.
6. Package It Well
Social media reports deal with a lot of numerical data. The final step is collating it all well to present it comprehensively. Don't cram too much information on a single page. Break down into straightforward, concise sections for each social media platform. Alternatively, you can create an appealing template to follow from the next cycle. This will make arranging all the data even smoother.
Remember, a social media report is more than just a roundup of numbers. It's a purposeful resource that tells the story of your brand's journey in the digital landscape.
Types of Social Media Reports
There is no definite type of social media reporting. Your goals, the number of client profiles, social media platforms, and metrics are some factors considered while determining the types of social media reporting. Some popular ones are discussed below.
Time-Based Reports:
As the name suggests, these reports are limited to a specified duration. They include
- Daily reports
- Weekly reports
- Monthly reports
- Quarterly reports
- Annual reports
Profile Performance Reports:
These reports track your brand's overall performance across all social media networks. The data to be analyzed here includes follower growth, engagement rates, and impressions. This type of report is more suited to handling individual profiles or company pages.
Competitor Reports:
These reports present a comparative analysis of your performance versus your competitors. They analyze the posts of both you and your rivals and are limited to 1-2 of your top competitors in the industry.
Paid Performance Reports:
If you run ad campaigns across different platforms, you should maintain paid performance reports. These reports compute the ROI of paid advertising campaigns. They give you an idea of where to spend more and whether the ads help generate leads. The key metrics in such reports are cost per impression, cost per engagement, web conversions, etc.
You can customize more types of reports as per your requirements. Social reporting tools can further automate the process of making such detailed reports.
Top Social Media Reporting Tools
Social media reporting tools that provide regular insights ease the process of designing a social media report. These tools make amassing information very convenient. They have various features to track the relevant metrics to make data-backed decisions. You can rely on the following top tools:
In-Built App Analytics
When you create a business account or subscribe to a premium service on any social media platform, you can access its inbuilt analytical dashboard. These analytics offer impressive features for studying the impact of your posts.
Twitter Analytics can track tweet-specific details and engagements with a range of metrics. The Meta Business Suite can help you manage both Facebook and Instagram accounts. Instagram also offers separate analytics categorized into post activity, content, and audience demographics.
LinkedIn Analytics can help you determine your campaign's success. It also provides a competitor analysis to compare your page's performance. You can even generate a report on your content, visitors, leads, and more.
You can get the best out of these built-in social media analytical tools available on almost all social platforms.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is primarily used for website traffic analysis but has features supplementing social media reporting. If one of your social media goals is to drive more traffic to your website, you can pinpoint which social media platforms are the most beneficial for this purpose.
Once a consumer lands on your website, it provides in-depth insights into their behavior. You can see which social media channels drive users to purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or fill out contact details.
Its integration into Google Ads measures the effectiveness of your paid social campaigns. It provides a holistic view of your social media performance, enabling you to fine-tune your campaigns for better results.
Highperformr
While many analytical tools only help with numbers, software like Highperformr also enables you to create campaigns.
Suppose you want to promote a newly launched product. Ahead of the launch, you must make creatives that can be posted with compelling content. With Highperformr's collection of AI tools, you can write creative copies, select the correct hashtags, adjust the tone of your messaging, resize images to optimum sizes, and post them on your desired platform. You can tweak this content for different platforms. And the best part is it is all for free!
This social media management software is one of the best for creating content and studying its effectiveness. The analytics module processes the latest trends and provides daily, weekly, and monthly insights.
It has an AI coach that automates the tedious process of social engagements and guides users on who to engage with for a safe social media experience. You can get warnings if a particular user is unsafe to engage with or is a bot. Your engagements will be organic and driven with purpose with the help of the app.
Buffer
If you want to build an organic audience and receive recommendations on increasing reach and engagement, check out Buffer. Its intuitive analytics dashboard provides performance data from all platforms.
You can check your follower growth, number of likes, shares, and impressions, compare paid vs. organic results on boosted posts, and obtain answers for your specific account queries. Its predictive analysis tells you the appropriate time to post on a particular platform.
Keyhole
To fully automate your social media analytics, check out Keyhole. It accurately tracks real-time and past social media data, which is beneficial for monitoring your overall performance. You can engage in social listening and stay ahead of the curve by keeping tabs on competitors, industry trends, and consumer insights.
It has a robust system for measuring the true impact of your ad campaigns across all social media. It can also create customizable reports within minutes.
These are some of the tools that can simplify your work of gaining insights and formulating them into well-defined reports.
Conclusion
Social media reporting isn't a one-time event but a continuous process to fine-tune your digital strategy. Every report is a tool for strategy improvement. You can bolster your brand's online presence and success with actionable data. Heeding all the above-stated steps to craft detailed reports will yield invaluable support for growing and flourishing in the dynamic social media landscape.
Make the most of social media management tools like Highperformr to gather data not only about your content but also about your engagement and followers. It has some dedicated tools showing your top followers, replies, and more. If you link your social profiles with the software, you can get detailed engagement analytics. Its AI capabilities are worth a try. Get started today!
