Your social media strategy doesn’t end with posting content and watching the likes and shares roll in. At some point, you need to step back from your campaigns and see how well you’re performing. That’s where social media reporting comes into play.
Social media analytics tools are essential for tracking your engagement, activities, and other important metrics. Some tools, like Meltwater social management software, go a step further — compiling metrics and insights into presentation-ready, easy-to-understand reports.
With comprehensive and consistent social reporting you can answer deeper-level questions about your performance, make decisions on how to improve, and illustrate how social media is contributing toward your wider business goals.
Read on for an all-in-one guide on how to use social media reporting in your strategy.
Don't forget to download the ultimate guide to social media reporting and use our social media report template below to start implementing these reporting tips!
Table of Contents
What is Social Media Reporting?
Why is Social Reporting Important?
What Metrics Should You Include in Your Social Media Report?
Social Metrics and Analytics by Platform
How to Summarize & Present Your Social Media Reporting (free sample template)
Download Our Social Reporting Template
What is Social Media Reporting?
Social media reporting is defined as using analytics to create reports regarding your social media campaigns and activity.
Here's a quick overview of some of the data and metrics a social report can include:
- Audience size
- Net number of followers
- Metrics for specific campaigns
- Engagement metrics like shares, likes, comments, etc.
- Number of people reached
- Post clicks
- Number of video views
- Most popular content
The actual items in your report may vary by social channels. Each platform has its own set of built-in analytics that track activity on your behalf. You can run reports in each of your social platforms to see which platform is the most valuable to your social strategy.
But checking individual platforms analytics can be time consuming and cumbersome — which isn't exactly sustainable as you scale your social program. To help your team manage their time more efficiently when pulling reports, consider using a social media management platform like Meltwater.
And to eliminate fragmented marketing reporting all-together, read our guide on Unified Reporting!
Why is Social Reporting Important?
Let’s say you share your latest blog post on your Facebook page. You notice it gets a few likes and shares. Now, let’s say you share another blog the next week and it gets even more likes and shares than the first one. Why is the second post out-performing the first?
Is it because more people saw the second post? Did you gain some new followers since last week? Was it a more intriguing blog title?
The best way to answer these and other questions is to run a social media report on your key social media metrics.
Social media reports collect and compile the data behind your social marketing efforts. They provide quantitative insights, such as the number of mentions, engagement rate, and audience size. They can also give you qualitative data, such as your most popular content and brand sentiment analysis.
Reports are the difference between knowing with confidence how your campaigns and marketing strategy are performing versus going on a hunch.
If you’re an agency, your clients want to see what you’re accomplishing on their behalf. You can present them with a social media metrics report demonstrating how you’re helping them achieve their goals.
Or if you’re working on an in-house team, reports can show your boss exactly what you’re doing on the company's social media channels. You can analyze reports to see where you’re doing well and where you can improve.
With up-to-date social media data in hand, you can make better use of your time, budget, and energy and leave much of the guesswork behind.
Tip: A social media report may also help you answer questions like, "What is the best time to post on social media?" or "How is cross-posting impacting my social engagement?".
What Metrics Should You Include in Your Social Media Report?
Before you can start leveraging social reporting, you first need to consider which metrics you want to measure. Social media managers don’t create reports because they look nice — it’s what’s in those reports that matters most.
Let’s look at some things to consider including in a social media report:
- What are the use-cases of the report? You might want to measure the in-depth performance of a specific campaign, high-level engagement on LinkedIn, or how many new followers you get on Instagram. You might want to look at real-time data or short-term vs long-term gains. Focus on metrics that support your goals so that non-essential details don’t get in the way.
- What time period are you covering? You can generate a weekly report, quarterly report, or look at progress month-over-month. Or, you might want a longer report that covers your all-time stats.
- Who is the report for? Just like creating content for your target audience, your social reports should be tailored to the person who needs to know what you’re sharing. If it’s your marketing manager, they’re likely familiar with the metrics and analytics terms. If it’s for a boss who doesn’t spend much time with social media marketing, you may need to spell out the role and importance of certain metrics.
- What do you need to measure? Circle back to the goal of the report and think about the quantitative and qualitative metrics that support your goal. For example, if you’re running a campaign to increase sales, then you might look at sign-ups, audience growth, post reach, and click-through rates. On the other hand, if your goal is to get new email subscribers, looking at new followers wouldn’t be relevant.
Once you know what metrics and KPIs to measure, you can start creating your social media report.
Note: The metrics you focus on in your report may vary based on the objective of the report. For example, a social listening report can help you determine how your content, brand, and campaigns are being perceived online, which is very different than a social media report analyzing your content's performance.
Social Metrics and Analytics by Platform
Let’s look at social media reporting through the lens of each platform’s analytics:
Facebook Page Insights and Audience Insights
Facebook offers two types of analytics: Page Insights and Audience Insights.
Facebook Page Insights offer engagement-related metrics, such as post clicks, comments, views, post reach, and video views.
Audience Insights shares more information about your audience as well as the Facebook population at large. You can drill down into metrics like age, gender, geographic location, education, interests, and other useful data.
Both can be helpful as you’re planning your content marketing and ad campaigns. Use these reports for market research to learn more about the people you’re targeting.
Instagram Analytics
Because Facebook owns Instagram, you can track paid ads on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. In addition, Instagram has its own set of analytics. Get insight into metrics like:
- Profile visits
- Click-through rates to a landing page or website
- Clicks on Call or Email links
- Number of unique users that have seen your posts
- Number of impressions of your content
- Number of interactions with your content
Similar to Facebook, Instagram also offers Audience Insights. Learn more about your audience demographics, such as age, location, gender, and times of day when your followers are most active.
Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels also offer analytics to track audience reach, impressions, and more.
X (Formerly Twitter) Analytics
Twitter Analytics offers basic insight into your content’s performance, such as:
- Tweets with the most engagement
- Impressions over the last 28 days
- Profile visits
- Follower growth
- Ad campaign performance and conversion tracking
As with other social media analytics tools, you can use these details to drive your user-generated content program and inform your social publishing strategies to appeal to the right people.
LinkedIn Page Analytics
LinkedIn offers built-in analytics for business pages. Some of the metrics provided include:
- Page visits
- Number of followers
- Engagement metrics such as clicks, comments, and shares
One of the more unique aspects of analytics on LinkedIn is the content suggestions. The platform will recommend types of content to create to increase engagement. This can be very useful information to publish in a social media marketing report.
How to Summarize & Present Your Social Media Reporting (free sample template)
Many marketers choose to create separate reports for each of their social networks. This allows you to separate your social media metrics by platform so you can judge each one’s performance individually.
Once you have your data, it’s time to put it together into a clean, usable format and share it with the right people.
Here’s a helpful format you can follow that captures all the details in a logical flow:
Performance summary by channel
Starting with a simple summary that shares engagement, follower change, and impressions by channel is a great introduction to a social media report. From here you can present your hypotheses, insights, and takeaways based on what the numbers say.
Other overview slides that are useful to include in your intro include: paid, earned, owned performance, brand mentions report, and brand tracking report.
Key insights and takeaways
The intro presents the numbers. Then you need to present the why behind the numbers, what they mean and how they will influence the strategy going forward. Here you can also talk about any wins, accomplishments, or learnings.
You could also dive into the results of various experiments you're currently running on social, such as specific hashtags or using more of a particular post style to see if it generates more engagement from your followers.
Visuals
Whenever possible, including charts, graphs, or other visuals to help tell your story. Take screenshots of your analytics dashboards to make your report more compelling.
Opportunities
Try to include some actionable takeaways from the report. Talk about ways you might improve your efforts in future campaigns. For example, if you notice that engagement on Instagram has really taken off, you might consider allocating more resources to advertising on Instagram next time.
Download Our Social Reporting Template
To help you get started with your social reporting, we developed this template to help you capture essential metrics. Download the free template.
To truly take your reporting to the next level you may want to consider using a social media management platform that can automate your reporting.
With templated dashboards, as well as customizable dashboards, that can be downloaded or shared via email, a solution like Meltwater can eliminate the work of manual reporting — giving your more time back in your day to optimize your social media strategy.
Get in touch by filling out the form below to demo our social media reporting and analytics available.
