Unless you have a data-driven social media reporting strategy, posting on social media can feel like a black hole.
But whether you’re running social for your employer, as a marketing agency, or as a freelancer, you will be asked to report on the results of your campaigns.
Figuring out what’s working and what’s not is challenging enough on its own. Having to communicate and prove that value to other people is an even bigger challenge.
We’ve made your life easier by creating a free social media reporting template. This free-to-download resource makes it simple to:
- Summarize your social strategy
- Highlight your wins
- Communicate key metrics
- Focus on next steps
But before you start building out your report, we’ll share some tips on how to make social media reports that really get your point across.
8 Social media reporting tips you must know about
What data you choose to put in your report is obviously important (and we’ll get to that), but how you present your social media data is going to make or break your social media reporting strategy.
Here’s the thing: people are emotional creatures.
We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear—especially when it comes to data. So the more you can effectively and accurately frame the data you’re presenting, the more everyone will get out of your report (yourself included).
Ultimately, the goal of a social media report is to assess your successes or failures and communicate the results effectively to key stakeholders. And then make smart, data-driven choices for what comes next.
Here are eight tips for creating a showstopper report.
1. Define clear goals & KPIs
Goals matter because they hold you accountable, guide your decision making, and keep your social strategy focused on outcomes.
Start by clearly defining your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your social media campaigns. These goals should be quantifiable and easily measurable, and they should align with your overall marketing and company objectives.
For example, if your high-level marketing goal is to grow brand awareness, your social goal may be to increase impressions by 20% over last quarter. Or if your goal is to build an audience, you may set a goal of earning 1,000 new followers this month.
The key here is to determine which social media metrics will help you measure your success. For example, common social KPIs include:
- Brand awareness: Impressions, views, and clicks
- Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, and engagement rate
- Building an audience: Fan or follower count
- Website traffic: Clicks and page views
- Leads and sales: Form submissions, revenue generated
When creating your report, stay relentlessly focused on these goals and KPIs. If a piece of data doesn’t explain how you got closer (or further) from your company or campaign goals, consider removing it.
Not only will this impress your key stakeholders that you’re aligned with the business’s goals, it will also help you stay focused on the desired outcome, allowing you to make smarter decisions.
2. Determine your audience
Speaking of stakeholders, you also have to figure out who this report is for.
Is this a report you’re putting together for your data-savvy marketing team?
Will it be presented to a manager who may be less familiar with social media analytics? Or are you just creating this report for yourself?
Determining your reporting audience will help you determine what elements to focus on and the level of detail to include.
For example, if you’re presenting to a marketing team, you may want to focus more on tactics and new things you learned.
But if you’re presenting to a business higher-up, you may want to skip the fine details and stay focused on how you’ve supported the company’s business goals.
3. Determine your reporting frequency
What time frame are you going to use for your reports?
You can choose to report on your social media metrics weekly, monthly, quarterly, or a combination of any of the above. Your reporting frequency will affect how much time you spend on the report and the level of detail you include.
Short-term, weekly reports tend to focus more on quickly getting across the key metrics and top-performing content. But because they’re over a smaller time frame, it’s harder to make meaningful takeaways.
Long-term, quarterly reports offer a larger sample size for true data analysis and meaningful takeaways, but take longer to put together and typically require a full presentation.
Overall, it’s good to have a balance of short-term and long-term reporting. For example, a quick weekly report for the marketing team and a quarterly report for leadership.
4. Add context to your data
You should provide as much context as possible when presenting your social media data. Most data points are fairly meaningless on their own unless there’s an explanation or comparison.
For example, instead of presenting raw impression numbers of your Facebook posts, it’s much more meaningful to compare those numbers to your previous week, previous year, your competitors, or your benchmark data.
Or if there’s a sudden spike in followers on a certain day, add an explanation of why that happened. This will be especially helpful in your quarterly reports where your audience may have not looked at any social metrics for three months.
5. Say what you did and what you’ll do next
Too many social media reports leave out what you actually did. Focusing only on the results takes away from what earned you those results.
In your report, summarize your strategy, what content you posted, and what may have changed since your last report. Use plenty of examples where you can, and include what you plan on doing next based on what you’ve learned from this report.
6. Keep it visual
Your audience’s eyes may start to glaze over if you just present slide after slide of data tables.
Try to make your report as visually appealing as possible. Here are some easy ways to make your report stand out:
- Use screenshots of graphs, top-performing content, and stand-out comments
- Stay on-brand with your company’s colours and fonts
- Don’t visually overload a page or slide with tons of text or stats
- Use lots of whitespace
It’s recommended that you create your report in slideshow or PDF format rather than in a spreadsheet—our social media reporting template makes that easy!
For an easy way to instantly create beautiful charts and graphs of your data, try a free trial of Keyhole.
7. Stay objective and analytical
If you’re new to presenting data, it’s tempting to manipulate the data to prove a point, or to try to see things in the data that aren’t there. But it’s crucial to be as objective as possible when analyzing your social media metrics.
For example, if your impression count was 1% higher than normal, you don’t have to “sell” it as a rising trend.
Avoid drawing conclusions or making dramatic changes in your strategy due to small sample sizes. Week-over-week data fluctuations are totally normal.
Remember: your goal is to learn from the data, not to make the data work for you.
8. Present before you email (If Possible!)
Lastly, your social media report is going to have a far greater effect if you present the data before you email it.
When you present the data—either in person or over a video call—you control the messaging and the pacing. You can also more easily field questions and key into what generates interest from the stakeholders.
When you email the data, it greatly increases the odds of the person on the other end just skimming through the data or just skip out on reading it altogether.
If you view data reporting as a nuisance, that may sound like a blessing, but we highly recommend using your social media reporting to prove your value to your client or your boss.
Therefore, it’s best to present the data and then send an email copy after the fact.
Now that we know how to create a compelling social media report, it’s time to build one!
What’s in our social media reporting template?
Before we break down everything that’s in our free social media reporting template, a quick disclaimer:
There is no one-size-fits-all social media report that works for every marketer. As we mentioned above, reports will vary based on your goals, audience, and reporting timeframe. You should liberally edit and add to our report as needed.
That said, we’ve built our social media analytics report template to be as flexible as possible to any social media manager’s needs. Here’s what’s included:
1. Start with a strong introduction
After a top-notch title page, start your report with a clear introduction.
In your introduction, include:
- Your high-level goals
- Your KPIs or success metrics
- Your current social strategy and what channels you’re using
- Your tactics and progress
- The reporting timeframe (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
If you’re reporting quarterly, you may want to quickly recap your major takeaways from the last report to refresh everyone’s mind.
If your report is long, you may want to include an agenda or table of contents.
2. Summarize your success
Don’t bury the major takeaways at the end of your report. After the introduction, jump right into your overall campaign performance and summarize your performance on your major KPIs.
For example, this could be:
- Total posts
- Total reach or engagement
- Total followers won or lost
- Website visits or leads
This is a good opportunity to combine metrics across platforms. For example, totalling all of your new followers or fans across every platform.
3. Walk through your key social media metrics
Next, you should go through your social media metrics, platform by platform.
As we mentioned above, don’t just dump a ton of data on your audience. Provide as much context as possible by comparing these metrics to your previous reporting period (or the previous calendar year if that’s more relevant).
The exact data you include will depend on your goals, but here are the most common metrics to report on by platform:
Your Instagram Analytics can be accessed through Keyhole, or you can view your Insights on the Instagram app.
Key Instagram metrics include:
- Number of posts/stories
- Story/video views
- Impressions
- Total engagements/engagement rate
- Followers gained/lost
- Bio link clicks
You should also include a screenshot and link to your top-performing post or video, including key comments or engagements.
If you don’t access your Facebook Analytics through Keyhole, you can access your page’s stats directly through Facebook.
Key Facebook metrics include:
- Number of posts/stories
- Page/video views
- Page impressions
- Total engagements/engagement rate
- Followers gained/lost
- Link clicks
Again, include a screenshot of your top post!
You can conveniently access your Twitter Analytics on Keyhole, otherwise they can be accessed directly from Twitter.
Key Twitter metrics include:
- Number of posts
- Likes
- Retweets
- Total engagements/engagement rate
- Followers gained/lost
- Link clicks
Other Platforms
You should continue this for every platform you’re actively posting on, including:
- Youtube
- Snapchat
- TikTok
If you’re reporting on a platform for the first time, be sure to explain why you’ve adopted this platform and what you hope to gain out of it.
4. Review your social listening findings
Beyond what you’ve posted, you should also report on what people are posting about you.
Here you can summarize:
- Hashtag analytics: posts, users, engagement, reach, and impressions
- Brand mentions: Notable mentions, number of mentions, % of mentions responded to
- Sentiment analysis: positive vs. negative mentions
5. Evaluate your influencers
If you’re working with influencers, you should also give an overview of the overall program success. Here, you can collapse all of your influencers into one report and/or break them down one by one.
You can use Keyhole’s influencer analytics to compare influencers by:
- Engagement
- Reach
- Impressions
- Followers
You can also take this opportunity to highlight any new potential influencers you’ve identified that you may want to work with next.
6. Cover other key categories and highlights
Here’s where you can get creative. Reflect on your goals and consider if you want to add reporting on any of these categories:
- New influential follows
- Trending content in your industry
- Competitor activity or results
- Channel-to-channel comparisons
- Customer service response time
- Video performance
- Social’s impact on website performance
- Audience demographics
For example, with respect to audience demographics, you may have a goal of increasing the number of followers in a specific country as you try to enter a new market.
7. Summarize your takeaways
Here’s what it all comes together. Based on all the social data you analyzed, summarize some notable takeaways from the reporting period. These should be more observation-focused than KPI-focused.
What stood out in the report? Why do you think it happened? How should you apply this knowledge moving forward?
For example:
- Takeaway 1: We’re investing a lot of time on Twitter but we’re not seeing as high engagement as we do on Instagram. We should consider shifting more of our time to Instagram.
- Takeaway 2: Our competitor is receiving a lot of traction on their weekly video series. Should we consider shifting to video?
- Takeaway 3: We gain more followers when we post on trending hashtags, but receive more clicks on our links on branded content. Our strategy should continue to feature a mix of both.
- Takeaway 4: We receive the most traction on Facebook when we post in the morning.
8. List your next steps
Finalize your report with your future-facing strategy.
What needs to be adjusted going forward? What new tactics are you going to try? What led you to this conclusion?
For example:
- Step 1: Test a weekly video series for two months to increase our reach.
- Step 2: Include more original photography to increase engagement.
- Step 3: Reduce our Facebook posts to once per day with a focus on higher-quality content.
And that’s it! Remember to leave room for questions if you’re presenting in a meeting.
Get started on your social media report
If you haven’t already, download free social media reporting template now.
Our report will make it easier to summarize your key findings, impress key stakeholders, and make smarter decisions moving forward.
If you want to make creating social media reports even easier, you should give Keyhole a try. Our social media reporting features make it easy to track data on the fly, prove your campaign impact, and easily make beautiful, branded reports.
Related Articles:
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Frequently Asked Questions
What should a social media template include?
Here's a complete breakdown of what you should include in your social media template:
1. Start with a strong introduction
2. Summarise your success
3. Walk through your key social media metrics
4. Review your social listening findings
5. Evaluate your influencers
6. Cover other key points and highlights
7. Summarize your takeaways
Which tool should you use for social media reporting?
The best tool to use for social media reporting is Keyhole. Creating social media reports is a lot easier with Keyhole. Its social media reporting features automatically tracks data related to your campaign, influencers, and profile. It then creates presentable branded reports, which can be either downloaded or shared directly with clients and team members.
How do you write a social media report?
Here are some steps on how to write a social media report:
1. Define clear goals & KPIs
2. Determine your audience
3. Determine your reporting frequency
4. Add context to your data
5. Say what you did and what you'll do next
6. Keep it visual
7. Stay objective and analytical
8. Present before you mail
