What Should Be Include in a Social Media Report?
This question has been a hot topic for our agency. Let’s start with one simple fact: your business needs a social media presence. It doesn’t matter if you run a small local shop or a big national company. Social media is?more than just a trend. It is an essential piece of your business marketing strategy.
Social platforms can help you connect with your customers, increase awareness about your brand, and boost your leads and sales. But how to you know what's working and what's not? What platform is performing better for your business? Do you really need all those social media platforms? The only way of knowing is by running a social media report.
Your social media report reveals how well your brand's social media content is performing across channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.?Make sure the report is clear, precise, and includes relevant insights whether it is a monthly, quarterly, or annual report.
A social media report will contain different information depending on your goals. However, most will have the following metrics:
The bulk of your time should be spent on your key opportunities:
To build an effective social media strategy for your business, you need to understand why your content performs the way it does.
So let's go through the Top Two Best Practices that everyone knows about but spends little time on.
Best Practices for Building Your Social Media Report
When building your social media report, keep these two best practices in mind:?
Best Practice #1: Identify Your Social Media Goals
Your?social media goals?will set the stage for what’s included in your monthly report.?
If you’re a new brand looking to build awareness, your follower growth, reach, and engagement will be the most important metrics to track. However, if you’re trying to drive people to your website, you’re going to focus a lot more on link clicks and conversions.
After you have established your goals, you can set clear benchmarks for measuring your success.?
Best Practice #2: Focus On the Insights That Matter
Reality check: people tend to doze off when it comes to talking numbers, so you’ll want to keep things concise. Remember, they can always refer back to the numbers on their own later.?
This is an opportunity to highlight your wins, express how you support the company's objectives, and highlight trends or opportunities.
How to Create a Monthly Social Media Report
Action #1: Choose Which Metrics You’ll Report On?
Remember: your monthly report is all about sharing a high-level check-in. So, with your social media goals in mind, choose which metrics you’ll report on for each platform.?
Once that’s decided, it’ll help you frame and fill out the rest of the report, including whether you’re on track to hit your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals.?
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Action #2: Include a High-level Overview of Your Progress
Right off the bat, always include a snapshot of your progress with a monthly check-in slide.? Example of monthly check-in numbers for a social media report, including follower growth, number of sessions, and engagement rate.?
This shows a high-level overview of how you’re tracking towards your goals and can help inform your strategy for the months to follow.?
Additionally, always adding your top-performing posts slide will give some great insight into what content drove the most sessions, got the most engagement, and reached the most people. Briefly explain why each post performed so well, and call out any trends you notice.?If the same post drove the most sessions and engagement, then you know you’ve hit the money spot.
Action #3: Monthly Performance Breakdowns & Metrics?
Next, it’s time to add your social media analytics to the report.?
The majority of social platforms have built-in analytics dashboards, but for more flexibility and peace of mind, you should keep track of your metrics in a spreadsheet that you own. You can export your Instagram analytics from your dashboard as a CSV file directly to your desktop.?
This will make it easier for you to see all of your data in a spreadsheet format, which you can then copy and paste into your report.
*Every report template needs to have a separate performance breakdown. Let's use Instagram as an example for the three sections needed:
You will have the same breakdown for all the social media platforms your business is on: Other Platforms (Organic): Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn. The same applies to any paid ads: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google.
Separating the data in this way will help you get a clear picture at-a-glance. It also lets you segment certain metrics for easier comparison.?
Action #4: Calculating Your Monthly Changes Correctly??
To calculate your monthly percent change, subtract the previous month from the current month. Then divide the result by the previous month and multiply by 100.
For example, if you had 436 Instagram followers in February and 562 followers in March, your equation should look like this:
Action #5: Summarize Your Key Learnings and Monthly Takeaways?
To close out your monthly report, it’s important to reflect on what worked and what didn’t — so you can drive your strategy forward:?
1st Up - Wins: What worked this month? Did something perform exceptionally well??
2nd Up - Challenges: What didn’t land this month? This is a great time to present “tweaks” to your strategy. What can you try differently next month?
3rd Up - Opportunities: Share new platform features that you want to experiment with, upcoming holidays or events, or key learnings from your wins and challenges.?
So there you have it, a step-by-step guide for creating your own monthly social media report.?
Whether you’re presenting to the executive team, presenting to a client, or presenting to another department, you want your reports to be easy-to-read and easy to follow across the board.
I hope that this has helped you improve your social reporting.? Until next time... keep social!