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EXPERT INSIGHTS
Mar-01-2024
Khoros Staff
Every social media strategy hinges on data — otherwise, how can you determine if your campaigns are successful? From concrete KPIs to insightful analytics, numbers don’t lie when it comes to follower counts, clicks, shares, and other markers of social media success.
But compiling all of this data isn’t always easy. After all, what information should you choose to focus on? Which numbers align best with your goals? How do you account for the unique factors associated with different social media platforms? You can find all these answers and more in this social media report guide.
A social media report explains the performance of your social media accounts within a designated period. It gives you a deeper understanding of the posts that land well with followers and generate traffic. It also highlights areas of improvement that are slowing your strategy down.
Not all social media analytics reports will look the same (nor should they). While there are templates available, you should use those as a point of reference, focusing on your unique marketing goals for each social media platform and updating these documents accordingly. Remember, the main objective is to identify patterns that speak to whether or not you’re achieving your benchmarks and help inform decision-making processes with stakeholders.
Depending on the data your business chooses to track and how often you want to check in with your social performance, your reports will vary in structure and content. Here are several types of reports to consider that accommodate either short-term objectives, long-term goals, or both.
These reports give you an overview of how your accounts are doing as of late. They’re great for tracking real-time performance and the progress of short-term goals, and you can use their insights to adjust your strategy.
Quarterly reports cover three months’ worth of information to give you an extended look at how your strategy has performed. These reports give you a unique perspective into whether short-term milestones have been achieved, and the position of your business as it works toward long-term objectives.
Ideal for EOY reflections, annual reports provide you and your stakeholders with an in-depth view of your strategy in various seasons and applications, informing how your marketing plans should take shape for the following year.
As the name implies, campaign-specific reports allow you to hone in on the performance of a specific social media campaign, either on a single type of social media account or across several, to focus on how well it resonates with your target audience.
What works for one social media platform may not work for another — this is where platform-specific reporting becomes useful. These types of reports help you understand your performance on individual platforms, including your overall presence and any campaigns you’re running on them. These reports can help you see which platforms you have the strongest presence on and how you’re growing on each. The reports can also help you pinpoint the subtleties that determine how successful a strategy is on Instagram as opposed to TikTok, for example, enabling you to tweak your campaign as needed.
In short, everything that’s most important to you. Below is a social media report example to take inspiration from, but remember to only include the insights that will help you better understand the impact of your social media strategy to avoid clutter and confusion. For further guidance, check out our Social Media Metrics Guide and Social Media Analytics Cheat Sheet.
Executive summary: A short brief (usually a few sentences long) that gives an at-a-glance overview of your social media performance.
Social media objectives: Gives context to the metrics being analyzed.
Period-specific goals: Outlines the benchmarks your business aims to achieve within a certain timeframe.
Metrics and KPIs: Includes followers, conversion rates, website clicks, and any other concrete data that help explain the success (or struggle) of a campaign.
Performance analysis: A section that connects the dots between data points to identify trends, patterns, and big-picture assessments.
Campaign insights: Breaks down analyses by campaign to see how well each social media strategy is doing.
Competitor analysis: Incorporates performance metrics from competing businesses to help you measure how well your campaigns are faring.
Audience insights: Uncovers the demographics of your audience so you can learn about the type of people you’re engaging with.
Content analysis: Segments performance data based on content type, such as images, articles, videos, interactive posts, etc.
Platform performance: Provides social media performance stats for each social media platform for granular insight into the efficacy of a strategy.
Actionable recommendations: Presents social media best practices to help improve performance or keep up with successful campaign tactics.
While a social media report is meant to be meticulous and comprehensive, developing one doesn’t have to be daunting. You can create a valuable report using these eight simple steps.
Note: If you need some extra help (or just need to save time), you can also use a tool like Khoros Social Media Management to automatically create social media reports for your business based on the data you want to monitor.
The first question is: Who will be reading this report? Are you planning on sharing this with higher-level executives? Or will this report just be used for internal teams to gauge performance? The answer will help frame what data will fill your report and the goals you choose to highlight for your audience.
The data you present won't mean anything without an aspiration to reach or benchmarks to gauge success. Explicitly outlining the goals and objectives you’re trying to achieve gives you guidance for your strategy. Otherwise, there won’t be a way to measure how well your campaigns work or pinpoint the areas that may be keeping you from accomplishing your goals. When setting goals, include a mix of short-term milestones and long-term goals that will help you understand if you’re on pace to achieve the desired objectives.
Leads generated. Social media ROI. Share of voice. Whatever you’re wanting to improve, make sure you create a list of social media metrics that will help inform you of your progress in achieving your goals. For example, if you want to boost traffic to your Instagram account, start monitoring your follower count for the next several months; or, if you want to make sure certain messaging sticks, keep an eye on social media engagement and conversion rates.
Gather performance data for all of the relevant metrics you want to track across the social media platforms your brand uses. You can use analytics tools that are built into most social media platforms or a third-party tool with more advanced capabilities like Khoros Social Media Management.
For common metrics like traffic and engagement that most tools have pre-configured, you’ll likely be able to pull historical data to see performance over time. However, goals for unique metrics or new campaigns may require you to set up custom tracking and will require waiting time so you have enough data to analyze.
With data at your fingertips, you can start looking at the information to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies. Look for anything that stands out like spikes or drops, then dig into the data to figure out what caused those shifts. Determine which campaigns or efforts are most effective to see what you should be doing more often, then do the opposite to find which strategies aren’t working and should be tweaked or abandoned.
Take note of any notable metrics or findings that you want to include in your social media report, including signs of success and areas for improvement.
Looking at a long list of numbers can cause informational fatigue and make it difficult to understand audience behavior. Get straight to the point and engage stakeholders with visualizations of your data that tell the story of your campaign in digestible, easy-to-share chunks. You can manually create charts and graphs through tools like Excel, Google Sheets, and Canva — or pull visuals directly from the social media analytics tools you’re using.
All efforts center around a target audience, but how can you ensure your content consistently attracts the right people? Start looking into who is interacting with your posts and why. Collect demographic data and take time to analyze consumer behavior on your posts to understand the kind of interest your campaigns generate. Relay key findings in your social media report to help stakeholders understand if you’re engaging with your target audience, or which groups are engaging with your content the most and why.
There’s always something to learn from the competition. If your metrics aren’t measuring up to what you expected, take a look at how other companies are doing online. Look at metrics like their profile’s follower base, audience growth over time, and post engagement rate. This report will help you understand how your brand is doing relative to competitors including who’s ahead or behind you.
Once you know who’s outperforming you, you can dig into how they’re doing it and replicate their strategy to improve your own performance.
After sorting through the data to understand how things are going and taking notes on key findings, it’s time to compile the crucial information in a report that you can share with stakeholders.
Consider your audience and how this report will be presented. For example, you can make a shorter report with less explanation if you’ll personally review it with others in a meeting. However, it’s better to add an explanation if the report will simply be shared over email so that others can have the context to understand what’s going on.
Divide the report into sections based on metrics that can be grouped together, such as covering all KPIs relevant to traffic in one part and focusing on conversion metrics in a separate section. With all of the insights you share, include recommendations for the future, even if that means keeping things the same when things are going well.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, let Khoros take care of social media reporting for you with our Social Media Management solution. Trusted by leading industry giants, our solution simplifies the social media management process and helps you achieve goals.
From collecting and analyzing metrics to monitoring negative conversations to AI-driven marketing recommendations, Khoros’ Social Media Management solution automates these tasks for you so you can focus on tailoring strategies as needed. Plus, our software centralizes all of your social media accounts in one place for quick visibility and troubleshooting in real-time. Need to change up the metrics you’re monitoring? No problem. Customize reports, add campaigns, and shift benchmarks to accurately reflect your priorities.
Khoros Social Media Management could be the missing key to your social media marketing strategy — request a demo today to get started.