So you’ve begun your social media marketing journey. You post daily on social media. Sometimes people like, share, and comment on your posts. And sometimes they don’t. You want to know the real reason behind why people are engaging or not with your content.
Of course, counting the number of likes and comments will give you a vague idea of your social media progress. But there are too many social media business accounts with too much data to track. According to Google and Forrester’s research, half of the marketers struggle with managing loads of data.
Besides, how will you show these figures to your client or boss?
Only if you have something more accurate to prove the value of your social marketing plan.
Are you looking for something like that?
Enter social media reporting.
What is a social media report?
A social media report is a document containing multiple social networks and metrics (including reach and impressions), showing the overall performance of your social media channels. The document can be anything from an Excel spreadsheet to a slide presentation packed with insights. Furthermore, social network scripts can be used to automate the collection and analysis of this data, making it easier to generate regular reports and track changes over time.
Why do you need a social media report?
Imagine spending the past three months on YouTube when none of your videos generated traffic, let alone leads. On the other side, your LinkedIn posts are attracting potential customers. This scenario paints an insightful picture: you need to know what’s working (or not) and tweak your social marketing strategies accordingly.
And how do you do that?
Social media reports come with a collection of data and statistics you can use to track, measure, and refine your efforts.
Let’s reimagine the above scenario with social media reports in hand. The reports tell you that your YouTube videos haven’t generated any results in a month while your LinkedIn posts are excelling. Won’t you double down your efforts on LinkedIn marketing and identify what’s going wrong with YouTube marketing?
The icing on the cake is you can show the same results to your boss or client and help them see the ROI of their social media spend. Here are some awesome social media reporting & analytics tools you can start using.
Before we get into the details of making a social media report, it is essential to know that you can create different types of reports depending on your goals or targeted audience. Here we’ll show you the essential metrics you should include in your social media reports to make smart decisions and streamline your efforts.
Top metrics to add in your social media reports
The right metrics go beyond surface-level data like shares and retweets to help you make data-driven decisions and assure your social media efforts have a bottom-line impact on business. You collect the data and label with data labeling tools and AI models assist in making clever decisions.
Here you’ll learn the most important metrics you should include in your social media report and why they’re important.
1. Reach and impressions
Reach indicates the number of unique social media users seeing your content. Impressions refer to the number of times your post shows up on social media users’ timelines—the total number of times people see your content.
Impressions and reach signal the performance of your social media engagement. Low impressions and reach indicate that only fewer people are seeing your posts. In that case, you should look at your social media content to ensure it’s targeting the right audience.
2. Followers growth
Followers’ growth shows whether you are growing your followers or losing them. It enables you to detect common patterns in your followers. For instance, you may find out that some of your social media accounts have higher follower growth than others. Thus, you can focus on the accounts attracting a more targeted audience and cut the cords with low-performing profiles.
3. Engagement rate
The engagement rate helps you understand how users are engaging with your content on social media. Engaged users interact with your brand’s content through likes, comments, social sharing, and other means. The engagement rate also tells you the best days and times when your content performs at its peak.
To calculate your engagement rate, you need to monitor multiple metrics, including:
- Likes, comments, retweets and shares: the more people interact with your content, the better.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR is the number of people who click on your link after seeing your post.
- Account mentions: Monitor the number of times people mention your brand on social media.
A low engagement rate suggests fewer people are engaging with your posts. With proper analysis, you can identify the real reason and increase the effectiveness of your content.
4. Share of voice
Share of Voice measures the number of people talking about your brand online and how they feel about it compared to your competitors. It includes two metrics:
- Volume indicates how many times people mention your brand online. The mention can either be like “@starbucks” or indirect like “Starbucks.”
- Sentiment shows how people feel about your business. They show their feelings through specific keywords or messages associated with your brand. For instance, the keyword “iPhone” reflects the Apple brand.
These social media metrics tell you where your brand stands against your competitors when it comes to online discussions.
5. Top posts
Top posts tell you about the type of posts grabbing maximum attention on your social networks. With top posts metrics, you can figure out what makes these posts go viral and recreate more of such content in the future.
To find out your top-performing posts, you need to rely on multiple metrics, including:
- Likes represent the posts your users enjoy at a glance
- Comments and replies show the content users are excited about
- Shares and hashtags signal the content worth putting in front
- Impressions and reach help you figure out the messages worth spreading
- Link clicks determine the content driving customers’ action
- New followers indicate the posts responsible for growing your fan base
And here we know the social media metrics matter most.
Now let’s jump into where to find these metrics for each social platform and how to create a fully-fledged social media report in 2022.
How to create social media reports manually?
Your social media report should be easy to understand, almost like storytelling. You don’t need to dive into intense formatting unless you want to dive deeper into data to create an executive summary for a report.
In this section, we’ll learn to collect important metrics from each social platform and put them together to create a social media report.
1. Twitter analytics
To collect data from your Twitter account, open your Twitter profile and click the three dots on the left:
Then, click Analytics.
You’ll get the key data on Twitter’s Analytics dashboard.
For in-depth information, click the options available at the top menu of your Twitter Analytics screen to get the visual data.
From here, you can click “Export” to download the information as a .csv file to use later for your social media report.
2. Instagram analytics
Open your Instagram profile on your mobile device and click the three dash icon at the top right corner of the screen.
Then, click on Insights. It will show you total interactions, number of followers, accounts reached, etc.
Note: The Insights section is available for business or creator accounts only.
The Instagram mobile app doesn’t have any option to export analytics data, so you have to enter the data manually in your report.
3. LinkedIn analytics
Open your company page on LinkedIn and click Analytics from the top menu:
LinkedIn Analytics is available to Page Admins only. As you can see in the above image, LinkedIn has three main categories: Updates, Followers, and Visitors. You can choose any of these categories to open the metrics.
To export the data, click the blue button Export on the top right corner of the analytics dashboard:
4. TikTok analytics
For TikTok Analytics, you first need a TikTok pro account. Once done, open your TikTok profile on your mobile and click the three dots in the upper corner of the screen.
Tap into Settings and Privacy. In your Account, click Creator Tools and select Analytics.
You’ll get three types of data in your account, including account overview, content insights, and follower insights. If you want to download this data, you can do this only from the desktop dashboard.
5. YouTube analytics
Log into your YouTube account. Click your profile icon and then tap in YouTube Studio.
You’ll see the summary of metrics on your Channel dashboard.
If you want in-depth analysis, click “Go to Channel Analytics” on your dashboard.
Here, you’ll get your YouTube channel’s overview, reach, engagement, audience, and revenue details. Select the Advanced Mode in the right corner to get metrics of individual videos.
Click the pointing arrow in the upper right corner to download the data in Google Sheets or .csv file. Using Google Sheets for reporting is also an excellent way to organize and analyze your social media data, enabling easy collaboration and customization of reports with advanced features like filters, pivot tables, and charts.
Now that you know where to get the metrics for each social channel, let’s create your social media report in an Excel sheet format.
6. Manually enter data into a spreadsheet
To begin, open an Excel sheet and create 8 columns with the following categories:
- Date
- Network
- Reach
- Impressions
- Followers growth
- Engagement rate
- Share of Voice
- Top Posts
Next, collect required data from each social network and enter it in the spreadsheet manually.
Once you fill in the data, your report will be ready to show your boss or client. For absolute professionalism and security, we recommend presenting your report as a pdf QR code. That way, only the right eyes will have access to your report. Finally, you can make a weekly, monthly, or yearly report, depending on your requirements.
How to create automated social media reports using Keyhole?
The benefit in using tools to automate social media reports is that you don’t have to use spreadsheets or manually enter data anymore thereby saving your time.
Another powerful feature of Keyhole social media analytics reports is that you can benchmark your brand’s performance against competitors.
Lastly, you don’t have to be a data expert to create these reports. Built with real-time data, Keyhole’s social media reports are accurate and easy to download presentation-ready PDFs.
Let’s see how you can automate social media reporting with Keyhole.
Keyhole’s Twitter analytics
Keyhole’s Twitter analytics feature allows you to track accounts & hashtags on Twitter in real-time. Aggregated engagement metrics such as reach and impressions are tracked instantly, saving you hours of manual work. You can select the most relevant metrics for your social media business accounts and display them as easy-to-read reports.
Additional information such as tracking competitor profiles and accounts and instant trend analysis helps you understand how your competitors are performing not only by follower count but also by engagement.
Instagram analytics
Track your Instagram influencer campaigns, measure the influencer’s ROI and collect metrics such as engagement reach, impressions, and Instagram Stories analytics using Keyhole’s Instagram analytics.
Real-time data collection capabilities enable you to improve your campaigns on the fly, especially when it comes to influencer marketing.
The most powerful Instagram reporting feature of Keyhole is measuring influencer metrics to know who you’ll rehire for the next campaign. Account tracking captures and analyzes data like the follower insights and engagement rate.
Facebook analytics
While Facebook marketing is critical for a business, what’s also equally important is understanding how your business is performing on Facebook, monitoring competitor pages, and tracking hashtags to understand what businesses are saying about a particular topic.
Keyhole’s Facebook Analytics does all of this along with giving recommendations on how to grow your Facebook page.
YouTube analytics
A great way to increase engagement on YouTube is by understanding how your YouTube channel is performing, how engaging it is, and how often are your videos getting likes.
Keyhole’s YouTube Analytics tracks conversations by unlocking sentiments and the like/dislike ratio. Lastly, it recommends the best time to post on social media, the right tags, and more.
Wrapping up
Whether you’re presenting analytics to the client, boss, or team, tracking the metrics in a social media report is critical to get a complete picture of your account’s performance.
With a neat social media report in hand, you can skip the guessing game, tap into insights and make informed decisions about your social media strategy. Use Keyhole’s automated social media reporting features to save time, effort, and resources and get real-time presentation-ready social media reports.
Related Articles:
Free Social Media Report Template for Marketers
13 [Free + Paid] Social Media Reporting Tools
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a social media report?
A social media report is a document containing multiple social networks and metrics (including reach and impressions), showing the overall performance of your social media channels. The document can be anything from an Excel spreadsheet to a slide presentation packed with insights.
Why social media reports are important?
Social media reports come with a collection of data and statistics you can use to track, measure, and refine your efforts. The icing on the cake is you can show the same results to your boss or client and help them see the ROI of their social media spend.
What are the top metrics to add in a social media report?
Here are top metrics to add in a social media report:
1. Reach and Impressions
2. Followers Growth
3. Engagement Rate
4. Share of Voice
5. Top Posts
