Reporting

What is a Social Media Report?

A social media report offers a means of extracting value from data based on various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) and metrics (follows, likes, reach, growth, awareness, post-performance, engagements, etc.) over various time frames. Social media marketing reporting is based on a curated collection of data and statistics that are customized based on your business’s social marketing activities and goals. By using social media management reporting software to track, measure, and refine your socially-driven efforts, you will make better, swifter, and more informed decisions while maximizing your ROI with every initiative or interaction you make.

Why Is Social Media Reporting Important?

Social platform marketing covers a wide range of platforms, plans, campaigns, content, and strategic initiatives. Being able to make intelligent decisions that will streamline your efforts will pay dividends. That said, social media reporting will open your eyes to a wealth of information that will help you generate leads, cultivate long-lasting customer relationships, and create content that is shareworthy and will boost your levels of brand awareness. In the digital age, shooting in the dark and hoping for the best just won’t do. You have to use data to your advantage, and use it well by choosing the right digital marketing KPIs that will help in your overall social strategy. Whether a  social media report for Facebook or a social media analysis report for any other platform, here are the primary reasons you should use digital dashboards for your social media reporting:

Smarter content creation: Content creation is the base for any social media strategy. But publishing content just by intuition is not the smartest way to approach your strategy. With the help of social media reporting, you can identify relevant information such as your top-performing posts, if your target likes videos or images, posts or stories, and several other insights. This will help you create and promote more valuable and engaging content on each social platform based on real information.

Results-driven scheduling: A monthly social media report can offer invaluable insights into the best times of the day, week, or month to interact or share content with your audience, as well as which topics are likely to resonate with prospects. By understanding this information, you’ll be able to schedule posts and deliver campaigns strategically, and in turn, enjoy maximum results from all of your social marketing efforts. This should be done by selecting accurate social media KPIs which we will explain later in more detail.

Tailored targeting: Social media reporting gives you a level of insight that will allow you to drill down deep into platform-specific data and ultimately plan strategic efforts and activities tailored to each platform rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to your promotional efforts. With the help of an online data analysis tool, this targeting can be built up significantly.

Customized tracking and performance measurement: Tracking your efforts and target-setting is the key to ongoing growth and success, and these kinds of reports provide a host of insights that will help you tackle specific roadblocks, overcome challenges, and discover fresh information that will help you drive the business forward.

Identifying trends and new opportunities: Social media is all about conversations and customers expect brands to be a part of them. With the help of social media reporting, you have the possibility to conduct research that you might not find in other channels, like what topics your customers are talking about, connect with other international markets while keeping expenditures on a minimum level. Discovering new consumer behavior and detecting new areas of potential selling points, can, and will, increase the reach of a brand.

Delivering added value to audiences: Another undeniable benefit of tracking your social platforms’ activities is the fact that you will stand a greater chance of leveraging trending hashtags, viral movements, and trends, finding unique ways to inspire, entertain and deliver value to your audience.

Prove the value of your strategy: Rather if you are working for a client or your own brand there is no better way to understand if your social media strategy is successful than with a social media report. By making sense of your social metrics you can prove if your content was successful, if your budget was spent effectively, and most importantly if the investment in your strategy was worth it.

Identify seasonality effects: Our last benefit speaks about seasonality which in marketing is defined by fluctuations occurring during specific seasons or days of the year. For example, Easter, Christmas, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, among others. These events are commercially critical for businesses as they represent opportunities to increase sales and gain new customers. In order to achieve their seasonality goals, brands need to perform detailed analyses and plan quality campaigns with content that aligns with their target audience. For this purpose, social media reports are an invaluable tool. You can use data from previous years to understand what types of holidays your customers interact with the most, which types of strategies worked and which ones didn’t, and prepare yourself accordingly.

Best Practices For Successful Social Media Reports

1. Define your stakeholders

The first step to start creating powerful social media reports is to answer the simple question: who am I addressing my report to? With social media being such a versatile tool, it is possible that you may need to account results to different departments based on different goals. To put your data into perspective for each stakeholder involved, no matter if it’s from sales, marketing, or an external client you can create a specific report only including the metrics that are relevant for that specific stakeholder. Try to always include only your KPIs to avoid losing time and resources in analyzing numbers that are not useful. You can include other metrics from time to time if you notice a hidden opportunity or if it can provide context to your main KPIs. 

2. Choose the right metrics

The metrics you choose should be adjusted depending on the social platform. Although they’re all social, each network has its own set of rules and best practices. With the help of a KPI tool you can better understand what kind of operational metrics you want to track, whether you need to focus on strategic and high-level KPIs or you need a combination of both? Apart from considering different parameters for each platform, you should also consider choosing the metrics that align with the main goal of your strategy. For example, if one campaign was created with the goal to drive sales, then followers or likes will not be a useful parameter to track, better leads or conversions. 

3. Concentrate on impactful data

Defining and analyzing the right KPIs is not the only determining factor you should consider when creating your social media reports. You should always try to look at your information from different perspectives, explore and filter your data to uncover hidden insights that could optimize your performance. For example, if you filter your data by country and realize that 70% of your traffic is coming from one specific country then you can create targeted strategies for that country or focus your budget a little bit more on it. It is important to consider that you need to be careful when filtering your data to not create misleading reports. 

4. Visualize all your data in one place

If you work with several social media platforms in your strategy it means that you will need to extract data from many sources, making the reporting process tedious and time-consuming. Modern business intelligence tools such as datapine offer data connectors to help you visualize all your relevant metrics in one place, this way you can compare how strategies performed in different platforms and extract meaningful insights for improvement. In addition, the tool will update your data from your social media reports automatically, this way you can invest your time in analyzing your information instead of extracting it. We will give an example of how showcasing all your social media data into one automated report can be beneficial soon in the article. 

5. Identify your reporting schedule

While social posts can go viral in no time, it is also important to keep an overview of the big picture. It’s advisable to schedule regular reports while connecting to your social accounts on a daily basis (don’t forget about community management, although this can be a subject on its own). Reports can be sent on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis but you need to decide this based on your social schedule. With the help of automated reporting techniques, you schedule reports at a specific time interval without the need to update the information manually each time.

6. Pick the right social media reporting tools

There are numerous data reporting tools on the market that can help you in presenting your information, but just a few provide features that will make your work extremely simple and straightforward. Especially if you need to combine numerous social networks, you need to be careful in choosing the right software. A tool that will enable you to access real-time data, automate your reports and simplify your sharing processes might be a better solution than a traditional spreadsheet. datapine is a BI reporting tool that allows you to create powerful, interactive reports to perform advanced data analysis. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to use by anyone in your organization. Thanks to its automated reporting feature and data connectors you can see all your data live and in one place, making it the perfect solution for your social media reports. 

7. Integrate predictions in your report 

Apart from tracking the performance of your strategies, you should also use your social media reports as a tool to predict future outcomes in your data. Unlike many other BI solutions in the market, datapine offers a user-friendly predictive analytics feature that will allow you to extract advanced insights through the recognition of trends and patterns in your data that you wouldn’t get with traditional reporting techniques. By using predictions, you can understand things like customer’s demands, sales promotions, and others. Modern businesses are using more and more predictive analytics technologies to get an edge on the competition.

Manual social media reporting

The main advantage of a manual social media report is that you have the option to personalize and brand it as much as you’d like. However, the big downfall is that it’s extremely time-consuming to go through each platform one by one and piece so much data together.

Facebook Analytics

In the “Insights” section from your left bar, you’ll have access to all of your performance metrics for your page, posts, followers, ads, stories. And you can download that data as an Excel or CVS report.

Instagram Analytics

Going to the “Insights” button of your profile page will give you a glimpse into your reach, interactions, followers, posts or Stories. There’s tons of data at your fingertips. However, Instagram analytics are only available on your phone. The desktop app does not provide that information. This means that when creating an Instagram report you need to manually write down every insight you need.

Twitter Analytics

In the Analytics section, Twitter will offer information on engagement, impressions, your top posts, your top mentions, as well as the top people who mention your brand. However, you cannot download the data, and you’ll have to copy-paste it into your own report directly from the app.

LinkedIn Analytics

Moving your business to LinkedIn offers amazing opportunity, especially if your company offers business to business services or products. You can tie your business page to your personal account and watch how many unique visitors, new followers or post impression you receive. You’ll also be able to feature products and get information on your posts, as well as how your followers respond to your content

YouTube Analytics

YouTube Studio will offer all the information on your views, watch time, impressions CTRs, subscribers or top posts.When accessing Channel Analytics, you’ll get in-depth information on Reach, Engagement and Audience. Just like with Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you cannot download the data directly from the app and will need to manually fill in the information you need in your report.

Top metrics to include in social media marketing reports

Followers or fans growth

This stat will offer you an overview of how your page is growing or shrinking. You can watch how many followers per month you gain or lose, and which months have had a noticeable increase or decrease. You can then go back to the content you’ve posted those months to better understand what makes you successful and what has performed below expectations. If you’re losing following, that’s a clear sign that your page needs a make-over content-wise.

Engagement and engagement rates

Engagement is one of the most powerful metrics you have at your disposal, essential to include in a social media report. There’s a few ways to look at engagement:

• The overall engagement shows how much people have liked, commented and, depending on the platform, shared the entirety of your content.
• The engagement rate per post shows how people interact, on average, with one of your posts
• The engagement rate per profile – shows the percentage of your followers who engage with everything on your profile.

In other words, engagement tells you how interesting your posts are, and if they manage to spark an action from your audience.

Posts’ and Stories’ reach and impressions

These two metrics are crucial in understanding how far your messages can go. Engagement might mean nothing if your posts don’t really reach a wide audience. These two metrics tell you how many times your post has been viewed and how many unique views it has had. You can access that information both the total amount, as well as percentage-wise, to fully understand your posts or stories’ ability to reach your followers.

Brand hashtags’ performance

You can see how your brand’s hashtags are used and the engagement they might bring. Below you can see the most used hashtags by H&M, and also their top hashtags ranked by average engagement. This information helps you keep track of the brand hashtags you use in your posts and how your audience engages with posts that include them. By adding these metrics, you will create a social media analytics report that’s going to be worth the hype.

Story retention rate

When it comes to Stories, there’s another key metric besides engagement: retention rates. This metric shows you if your audience is interested in your stories enough to watch every last one of them. The retention rate is calculated as the impressions from the last story divided by impressions of the first story. But tools also show you the retention rates by the number of stories published per day, which will help you understand where your biggest drop-offs happen.

Post types

It’s also important to understand what type of content your followers are expecting from you: images, videos or carousels. Not only is it important to analyze how you divide your content between images, videos and carousels, but you must also look at what type of post results in higher engagement.

Top posts

A lot of insights can be gained just by looking at your top-performing posts when doing your social media reporting, and understanding what are your social account’s strengths.

You’ll be able to see:

• what type of content you’ve used
• how long the captions were
• what were the main topics of interest
• what hashtags you’ve used
• engagement metrics
• impression metrics
• likes
• comments