how to write a social media monthly report

How to Create a Social Media Report [Free Template Included]

A comprehensive social media report proves the value of your social marketing plan. It shows what you’ve accomplished, backed up by data.

Table of Contents

We’ll say it: if you’re not creating social media reports to track your progress and analyze your performance, you’re wasting your time. (Harsh? Maybe. But we’re all about that tough love when it comes to social media success.)

Collecting and analyzing data about your top-performing posts, your audience, and, yeah, even your humiliating flops, is the secret to improving your social media performance. Without this vital information, it’s almost impossible to grow your following or achieve your social media goals . As business bros love to say: what can’t be measured, can’t be managed.

Plus, social media reports are pretty much the only way to demonstrate the value of your social marketing efforts to your team and your boss. From staff morale to increased budgets to growing your team, it’s critical to have data that shows the importance of your work to the organization .

But here’s our little secret: social media reporting actually doesn’t have to be hard. Building social media reports is easy with a social media report template. (And if filling out that even seems like too much, Hootsuite Analytics can auto-generate the custom report of your dreams .)

It’s time to whip up some social media reports to prove your worth and set your social strategy on track for success — and we’ve got the tips, tricks, and social media report template to help you do just that.

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a document with an in-depth analysis of your social media performance over a specific period.

Social media reports help you track your key performance indicators (KPIs) , measure the success of your social media campaigns , and identify opportunities for optimization.

For instance, a report on your brand’s Instagram account might reveal that your followers comment more on videos than they do on photos. You might learn that your Instagram Reels are achieving a wider reach than your Instagram Carousel posts . You might see that you’ve received an uptick of followers from Latvia… and notice that they’re all teenage boys. (What’s going on over there?)

In other words, each data point will help you and your team identify patterns. And with these patterns, you’ll be better equipped to serve your audience more of what they like… online and offline.

TLDR: Whether you’re reporting to your team, clients, or stakeholders, a well-crafted social media report can provide valuable insights into your efforts and help contribute to informed decision-making.

What to include in your social media report

Every social media report is going to be a little different, depending on your business’ unique social media goals . What’s important to a fast food company might be different than what’s important to a university, right? (Hamburgers and followers; tenure and engagement.)

This list of things to include in your social media report is more of a suggestion than a rule. Pick and choose what matters to you!

Executive summary

Many social media reports start with a brief overview of the report’s findings and highlights. This is ultimately a snapshot of your social media performance — a few sentences that summarize the details that are outlined in full later in the doc.

Social media objectives

A quick overview of your social media strategy helps provide a little context, reminding readers of what we’re trying to do here. Does your company use social primarily as a channel for customer service ? Social commerce ? Brand awareness? All of the above?

Be sure to highlight any changes in strategy since the last time you reported, including any new channels you’ve incorporated into your social mix.

Beautiful reports. Clear data. Actionable insights to help you grow faster.

Period-specific goals

What were you hoping to accomplish during this reporting period? An increase in the number of followers, perhaps? Maybe you were hoping to increase traffic to your website. Whatever yours is, outline this so everyone reading the report understands what “success” specifically means.

Metrics and KPIs

Present the social media KPIs that you’re tracking. It probably goes without saying, but these metrics should align with your goals (above). Metrics you might want to showcase could include engagement, reach, followers, website clicks, or conversion rates.

Performance analysis

This is where the juicy stuff happens. To analyze your performance, you’ll want to review how your metrics and KPIS stack up against your stated goal. Identify trends, successes, and areas that need improvement.

Campaign insights

If you ran specific campaigns over the reporting period, create a separate segment to share insights about their performance. What worked well? What could be tweaked for next time?

Competitor analysis

You probably have a sense at this point of how your accounts have grown or changed over the weeks or months, but comparing your performance to your peers can provide some interesting insight as well. Consider including a competitive analysis to benchmark your performance against other brands in the industry.

Audience insights

Share up-to-date demographic information about your audience. Who are your followers? Where are they from, how old are they, what else do we know about their interests and behavior? Understanding who is consuming your content allows you to tailor future posts accordingly.

Content analysis

There may be some interesting insights to be found in the type of content that’s trending or flopping. Evaluate the performance of different types of content — text, images, videos, and so on. Identify which content resonated the most with your audience.

Platform performance

Different social networks may require unique strategies — your TikTok stats and your Instagram stats could tell two totally different stories. If you’re active on multiple platforms, assess the performance of each one in this section.

Recommendations

Welcome to the conclusion of your social media report. Based on your analysis and findings, suggest actionable recommendations for future campaigns or the next reporting period.

How to create a social media report in 11 steps

Creating a social media report isn’t as daunting as it sounds — particularly if you’re here on this blog post where we’re about to lay out the super-simple step-by-step instructions for building one from scratch. (If we were making a report about how great your day is going, our analysis would be: you’re crushing it.)

But if even that process feels overwhelming, don’t stress. Scroll down to find an easy-to-customize social media report template waiting for you.

(Or here’s a pro tip: sign up for Hootsuite to access custom, automated reporting, delivered in beautiful PDFs.)

Breaking it down into manageable steps can simplify the process. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create a comprehensive social media report:

Get the all-in-one social media performance engine for HALF OFF.

(This price won’t be around for long!)

Step 1: Determine who this social media report is for

Is this for your boss, or the sales team, or to get the new marketing intern up to speed? Is it for shareholders? Are you sharing this with the general public?

Understanding who is reading this report will help shape what information goes in it… and sometimes, less is more.

Step 2: Set clear goals and objectives

Begin by defining the goals and objectives you want to achieve through your social media efforts.

Then, break that down into smaller, more time-specific goals that individual reporting periods will aim to tackle.

Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or boost engagement? Clear goals will guide your analysis.

It’s a good idea to use the SMART goal-setting framework , since it ensures you create goals that are straightforward to track and report.

Step 3: Choose relevant metrics

Once you’ve settled on your goals, it’s time to decide just how you’ll measure your progress towards those goals. For instance, if your goal is to reach a younger demographic, increasing your followers on TikTok could be a great objective… and a number that’s easy to track and measure.

The metrics that matter will be different for every marketing team, but some key overall metrics to include for your social program are:

• Number of leads generated
• Number of conversions
• Total revenue generated
• Total return on investment (ROI)
• Total spend (on social ads )
• Social share of voice
• Social sentiment

If you’re using social media for customer service, it’s also a good idea to report on service metrics like net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and ticket resolution time.

Of course, you can include much more data if it’s relevant to your objectives. For a full breakdown of all the numbers you might want to include in your social media business report, check out our post on social media metrics that really matter .

Step 4: Gather data

Collect data for the reporting period, across all of the relevant platforms your brand uses. (Most social media platforms offer built-in analytics, but you can also use third-party tools for a more comprehensive analysis… like, ahem, Hootsuite Insights .)

If it makes sense for your team, you can get even more specific and break things down by format within a network, such as Stories vs. posts vs. Reels .

No matter what metrics you choose, provide some previous results for context. After all, data means nothing in a vacuum. If you’re reporting on a campaign, look for a similar past campaign to compare what you achieved.

If you’re creating a regular weekly or monthly report, track your results compared to the previous several weeks or months. This allows you to see ongoing trends. You could also compare your results to the same period from the previous year, to account for any seasonal trends.

Step 5: Analyze performance

Data doesn’t mean anything if you don’t think about it — and form conclusions or insights.

What do the numbers you’ve painstakingly compiled show you? What kind of patterns, trends, or anomalies do you spot here? Identify which content and strategies contributed most to your success… and where your weak spots still might be.

Highlight anything that went specifically well during this reporting period.

Look beyond the numbers here. Maybe you made contact with a key social media influencer for the first time. Or maybe a particularly compelling review came in through social that you’ll be able to use in future marketing campaigns.

Include room in your social media report to share all forms of success that are relevant to your goals.

Step 6: Create visuals

If you’ve got the tools to do so, visualize your data using graphs, charts, and tables. ( Hootsuite can generate these sort of things for you—just sayin’!)

Visual representations make it easier to understand complex information and trends at a glance. Google Sheets can crank out infographics out with a few taps of the button… Canva is an easy graphic design tool to use, too.

Step 7: Compare your data with previous periods

Once you’ve been doing this for a while, consider comparing your current performance with previous reporting periods in your social media report.

Seeing one year or one week compared to another can help you gauge progress and identify areas where you’ve improved or (gulp) regressed.

Step 8: Share audience insights

Collect information about your audience demographics, interests and behaviors, and share these in your social media report.

Who is your average follower at this specific moment in time? When are they online, and what do they do there?

You can find this information in most platforms’ internal analytics, but social media dashboards like Hootsuite can help pull info from multiple platforms together in one spot.

Step 9: Provide competitive analysis

Pull some recent data about your competitors and industry — where are companies thriving or struggling? This info can help you benchmark your own performance in a greater context.

Direct competitors are great to watch here, but it might also be helpful to keep track of non-industry accounts that you admire, too… there’s plenty to be learned from other brands who might be courting the same type of audience..

Step 10: Create a campaign evaluation

Chances are, at some point or another, you’re going to be running a specific campaign (either organic or paid) with the hopes of making a particular impact. If you’ve invested money or time into one strategic campaign, it’s time to evaluate its effectiveness.

Did your ad blitz totally falter on Facebook , but thrive on Pinterest ? Did you totally nail it with your target demographic for your Instagram Stories ads? Determine what aspects led to success and what can be improved in future campaigns.

Step 11: Recommendations and action plan

Now that you’ve soaked up all this juicy, juicy data, it’s time to make some educated suggestions on what should happen next.

Does your team need to invest in some targeted social ads to improve your reach? Should you double down on creating TikTok videos ?

Provide actionable recommendations for future campaigns, whether that means suggesting content ideas or adjusting posting schedules.

Types of social media reports

Depending on your specific goals or audience, your social media report can take a few different forms. Here are a few common types of social media reports:

Monthly reports

As you might’ve guessed from the name, monthly social media reports provide a snapshot of your performance over a month. They are useful for tracking short-term goals, and allow you to make adjustments to strategy in real-time.

Quarterly reports

Quarterly reports offer a more comprehensive analysis of your performance over (you guessed it) a quarter. These types of social media reports provide a broader perspective, and help your team identify long-term trends.

Campaign-specific reports

As mentioned above, it’s a good idea to report on and track campaign metrics in your broader social media reports, too, but you might find it useful to create a dedicated report for a particular campaign. With a hyper-forcused review like this, you’ll be able to offer detailed insights into its success and areas for improvement.

Platform-specific reports

Each social media platform has its own unique dynamic, so you may find it tricky to review the nuances in one generalized report. That’s where platform-specific social media reports come in. For businesses active on multiple platforms, creating platform-specific reports allows you to tailor your analysis more precisely.

Free social media report template

There you have it: everything you need to know to create a winning social media report.

But, hey, we get it, you’re busy keeping your social media content calendar full of engaging content. Let us give you a head-start. Use this basic social media report template to kick off a new romance with reporting.

Best social media reporting tools

Creating a social media report is made easier with the help of various reporting tools. Here are some of the best tools available:

In-platform analytics tools

Whether you’re diving into your Instagram numbers or your LinkedIn data, social media platforms feature an in-house analytics platform that will shed light on your performance.

Learn more about each of the social media platforms’ analytics tools here:

• Meta Business Suite
• TikTok Analytics
• LinkedIn Analytics
• X/ Twitter Analytics

Hootsuite Analytics

Hootsuite Analytics is a social media analytics tool that lets you easily track the performance of all your social channels in one place  so you can replicate what works and get more engagement.

The tool also makes it easy to create custom reports to showcase your results to your boss and share insights with your team.

Hootsuite Analytics collects your stats from Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Free 30-day trial

It helps you track metrics like:

• Engagement rate
• Impressions
• Video views
• New followers
• Total followers
• Profile visits
• Negative feedback rate
• Website clicks
• Average time watched
• Number of messages, calls, and emails
• Daily engaged users
• And much more

You can set up custom boards that give you an overview of your most important metrics at a glance, over a select period of time and look up much more granular information, down to individual post performance.

With Hootsuite Analytics, you can also:

• Find out when your audience is online
• Get personalized recommendations for your best times to post for each of your accounts
• Easily view industry benchmarks and see how you compare to competitors

Start free trial 

A fave here at Hootsuite HQ, Talkwalker leads the industry in social data intelligence.

Leveraging the prowess of artificial intelligence, its technology delivers actionable insights derived from real-time social media monitoring and sophisticated analytics.

Define and categorize conversations that matter using over 50 filters, and make informed decisions on how to engage with your audience.

To get more details on how to make the most of the data available through all of these social reporting tools, check out our blog post dedicated to social media analytics.

Google Analytics

If you’re using social media for business, you’re probably already on the case with Google Analytics… but if you’re new to the powerhouse data tool, allow us to fill you in.

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool offered by Google that provides valuable insights into website and app performance, and even can help track social media traffic. It’s widely used by businesses, marketers, and website owners to track and measure user interactions, analyze traffic sources, and gather data to optimize online presence.

Panoramiq Insights

Are you grammin’ hard? Those with a dedicated Instagram focus will find this tool invaluable for effortlessly managing essential metrics.

Seamlessly integrating with Hootsuite, Panoramiq Insights allows you to conveniently access crucial Instagram metrics directly from your dashboard. Panoramiq Insights offers comprehensive analytics for your entire range of Instagram actions, spanning posts, Stories, and Reels. It facilitates the tracking of user information, encompassing follower demographics and new follow interactions.

Hootsuite’s Brandwatch integration is a social media report gamechanger. Brandwatch’s powerful search scours the world’s largest pool of social data to return relevant data that actually matters. Industry-leading features segment and analyze your data to reveal actionable insights, thanks to easy-to-use functionality and unparalleled processing speeds.

Use Hootsuite to do all your social media reporting from a single dashboard. Choose what to track, get compelling visuals, and easily share reports with stakeholders. Try it free today.

All your social media analytics in one place . Use Hootsuite to see what’s working and where to improve performance.

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

Stacey McLachlan is an award-winning writer and editor from Vancouver with more than a decade of experience working for print and digital publications.

She is editor-at-large for Western Living and Vancouver Magazine, author of the National Magazine Award-nominated 'City Informer' column, and a regular contributor to Dwell. Her previous work covers a wide range of topics, from SEO-focused thought-leadership to profiles of mushroom foragers, but her specialties include design, people, social media strategy, and humor.

You can usually find her at the beach, or cleaning sand out of her bag.

Related Articles

17 Social Media Metrics You Need to Track in 2024 [BENCHMARKS]

Pin down the social media metrics that really matter and learn how to track them to build a winning social media presence.

How to Run the Easiest Social Media Audit [FREE TEMPLATE]

A social media audit is the best way to review and improve any social marketing strategy. Check in on your efforts with this free template.

How to Increase Social Media Engagement [Free Calculator]

Here’s everything you need to boost your social media engagement, including pro tips, free tools, and inspiring examples of engaging posts.

10 Instagram Analytics Tools for Better Results in 2024

Find out how Instagram analytics tools help you track performance and pin down opportunities for improvement, and review the best options available.

Copied URL to clipboard!

How to Create a Social Media Report in 2024 (+ Free Template)

Your reporting is about to get a whole new look.🔥

Social media reports are integral to monitoring your brand’s growth and informing your content strategy. 

But when it comes to sharing the month’s results with your boss, clients, or other teams, it can be hard to know what to include. 

Unlike the detailed spreadsheet or tracker you use, social media reports need a high-level overview of what worked and what didn’t, along with whether you’re hitting your goals. 

relationship status: ⚪️ single ⚪️ taken ⚪️ it’s complicated 🔘 doing my monthly report — Later (@latermedia) December 3, 2021

In other words, your social media report should be detailed enough to get you kudos, yet streamlined enough to keep it engaging. 

Enter: Later’s Social Media Report Template.

With it, you can include your most important metrics, key learnings, and wins. It's perfect for presentations, client updates, or cross-team sharing. 

Plus, the template comes with an example report, so you have a guide for filling it out.

So, if you’re a social media manager, freelancer, entrepreneur, or anyone managing a brand online, this template is for you. Download it now — for free!

Table of Contents

What is a social media report (+ what to include), how to access analytics to create a social media report.

• Best Practices for Building Your Social Media Report
• How to Create a Monthly Social Media Report

A social media report shows how your brand’s social media content is performing across multiple social channels like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and more. 

These reports should be clear, precise, and include relevant insights about everything you’ve posted — whether it's monthly, quarterly, or yearly.

me at the end of every month: oh, so we're doing this report thing again. 🤨 — Later (@latermedia) May 29, 2022

Depending on your goals, what you include in your social media report will vary. 

However, most will have the following metrics: 

Posts: Best-performing posts of the month 

Key learnings : Wins, challenges, trends, and opportunities 

Numbers : Follower growth, posts published, reach, engagement, link clicks, video views, sessions, spend, and month-over-month percentage increase or decrease

The bulk of your time should be spent on your key learnings and opportunities:

What do the numbers reveal about your content strategy?

What do they reveal about your audience? 

Have you run any experiments or major campaigns? How did they affect your performance?

Is it a certain time of the year? For example, summers may be generally slow for you.

What key takeaways can you implement for the following weeks or month?

Truly understanding how (and why) your content performs the way it does is key to building a successful social media strategy for your business.

P.S. Later's social media management tools are trusted by 7M+ marketers, creators, and brands to plan, schedule, and analyze their content. Sign up today — for free .

To create a great social media report, you first need to get a grasp on your analytics.

Most social media platforms (like Instagram ) have built-in analytics tools you can use to discover your weekly numbers, which you can then manually track in a spreadsheet.

However, with a third-party tool like Later , you’ll have an easier way to glean these insights — plus, more in-depth data too.

Later’s Analytics dashboard is easy-to-interpret, and lets you navigate different tabs including Post Performance. 

This way, you can filter by different metrics including engagement, followers, reach, likes, and more: 

Plus, you can export your Instagram analytics directly to your desktop (in a CSV file) making it easy to keep all of your numbers in spreadsheet format. 

Then, when you're ready to create your social media report, use this data and spotlight the most relevant metrics for your boss, team, or clients. 

Access in-depth details about the performance of your social media posts with Later's Analytics feature. Create an account today.

Best Practices for Building Your Social Media Report in 2024

When building your social media report in 2024, keep these two best practices in mind: 

Identify Your Social Media Goals

Focus on the Insights That Matter

Best Practice #1: Identify Your Social Media Goals

Your social media goals will set the stage for what’s included in your monthly report. 

The most effective goals are those that are SMART :

Specific:  Include specifics to help you track the success of your content.

Measurable:  The goal has to be measured in some way. This is where your key metrics come into play.

Achievable:  Is this goal in scope? Your goals should be challenging, but still within reach.

Relevant:  Is this goal working towards achieving your larger business objectives?

Time-sensitive:  What is the timeline for this goal?

TIP: For help creating SMART goals, read this blog — How to Set Social Media Goals (+ Free Course)

Once you know your goals, you can set clear benchmarks to measure your performance against.

This way, if you’re over or underperforming, you can adjust your strategy as needed. 

Best Practice #2: Focus on the Insights That Matter

Real talk: people tend to doze off when it comes to talking numbers, so you’ll want to keep things concise. 

This is your chance to highlight your wins, show how you’re supporting business goals, and point out trends or opportunities.

how i find the metrics for my monthly report is between me and god — WorkInSocialTheySaid (@WorkInSociaI) November 3, 2021

Remember: this is a monthly social media report. Unlike your quarterly or yearly analysis, this report should be much more succinct. 

It’s about showing high-level results, drawing insights, and making sure your strategy is on the right track. 

ICYMI: Later’s social media scheduling tools help brands and marketers manage their content, plan posts in advance, and analyze their performance. Sign up now .

How to Create a Monthly Social Media Report in 2024

Now for the fun part! It’s time to create your social media report. 

To help, we’re going to walk you through the main sections of our free reporting template . 

Similar to PowerPoint, this Google Slide can be edited at your leisure. You can duplicate or remove slides, change background colors, use our PNG stickers, and add your data insights. 

Once you’re done, delete the example report slides, and voila — you’re ready to present your findings. 

TIP: To share your report in PDF form, simply save the Google Slide as a PDF instead. 

So what are you waiting for? Start using our Social Media Report Template now!

Step #1: Choose Which Metrics You’ll Report On 

Remember: your monthly report is all about sharing a high-level check-in.

So, with your social media goals in mind, choose which metrics you’ll report on for each platform. 

For example, if you’re looking to build awareness, your follower growth, reach, and engagement will be important metrics to track. 

However, if you’re trying to drive people to your website, you’re going to focus a lot more on link clicks and conversions. 

This will help you frame and fill out the report — including whether you’re on pace to hit your monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. 

Step #2: Include a High-level Overview of Your Progress

Right off the bat, you’ll want to include a snapshot of your progress with a monthly check-in slide: 

This shows a high-level overview of how you’re tracking toward your goals and can help inform your strategy for the months to follow. 

Likewise, your top-performing posts slide will give more insight into what content drove the most sessions, got the most engagement, and reached the most people:

Here, you can briefly explain why each post performed so well, and call out any trends you notice.

For example, if the same post drove the most sessions and engagement, then you know you’ve hit the money spot.

Step #3: Monthly Performance Breakdowns & Metrics 

Next, it’s time to add your social media analytics to the report. 

Most social platforms have built-in analytics dashboards, but for more flexibility and peace of mind, you should keep track of your metrics in a spreadsheet that you own. 

With Later , you can export your Instagram analytics from your dashboard as a CSV file directly to your desktop: 

This will make it easier for you to see all of your data in a spreadsheet format, which you can then copy and paste into your report.

For the report template, we’ve separated the performance breakdown into three sections:

Instagram (Organic): Instagram, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels

All Other Platforms (Organic): Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn

Paid: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google 

Separating the data in this way will help you get a clear picture at first glance. It also lets you segment certain metrics for easier comparison. 

For example, Instagram Reels should be analyzed separately from other content on Instagram (e.g. static feed posts) because the reach potential is so much higher.

To calculate your monthly percent change , subtract the previous month from the current month. Then divide the result by the previous month and multiply by 100.

For example, if you had 436 Instagram followers in March and 562 followers in April, your equation should look like:

526 - 436 = 126

126/436 = 0.288

0.288 x 100 = 29%

This means that from March to April your Instagram profile grew by +29%.

Ready to level-up your performance tracking? Sign up to Later and explore your Analytics dashboard today.

Step #4: Summarize Your Key Learnings and Monthly Takeaways 

To conclude your monthly report, it’s important to reflect on what worked and what didn’t — so you can drive your strategy forward: 

Wins: What worked this month? Did something perform exceptionally well? 

Challenges: What didn’t land this month? This is a great time to present tweaks to your strategy. What can you try next month?

Opportunities: Share new platform features that you want to experiment with, upcoming holidays or events, or key learnings from your wins and challenges. 

And there you have it, a step-by-step guide for creating your own monthly social media report. 

Whether you’re presenting to senior leadership, giving a client update, or sharing with another department, you want your reports to be easy-to-read and easy-to-follow.

10s across the board.

Give your monthly reports a revamp with our free Social Media Report Template . It includes an example report and sticker pack too! Download now . 

Monique is a Content Marketing Manager with over 7 years of experience working in communications and social media. You can usually find her sipping matcha or adding another book to her TBR list. Say hi on Instagram — @wordsbymonique

Plan, schedule, and automatically publish your social media posts with Later.

Related articles, the secret formula for instagram success in 2024.

By Jillian Warren

How to Set Social Media Goals in 2024 (+ Free Course)

By Jessica Worb

The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Analytics in 2024

By Amanda Demeku

• Share on Twitter
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Facebook
• Share on Pinterest
• Share through Email

How to Write A Social Media Report + FREE Template

Social media reports are essential to making the best out of your social media campaign. Here's my sure-fire approach for putting a report together and a template you can use.

Social media reports are a powerful tool for optimizing your social media marketing plan , and as a CMO or marketing leader in a rapidly scaling SaaS company, they should be a key part of your strategy. 

With the average individual projected to be active on over six social networks monthly by 2024, brands are under pressure to adapt to the various trends, platforms, and content demands. 

A comprehensive social media report is fundamental for social media teams looking to stay on top of their game. You're in the right place if you’re new to social media reporting or looking to refresh your process. In this article, we’re breaking down everything inside an effective social media report, with the bonus of a free social media report template! 

Is your social media content effective? It’s time to find out.

What is a Social Media Report?

A social media report is a document that provides a breakdown of your social media performance over a specific period. It includes up-to-date analytics data, strategy analysis, and recommendations.  

Consider it as a report card for your social media strategy. There are many forms of social media reports, including but not limited to:

• Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly Reports

Competitor Reports

• Paid Campaign Reports 
• Organic vs. Paid Campaign Reports 
• Social Listening Reports 
• Post Performance Reports

By organizing your analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) within a social media report, you identify which aspects of your strategy deserve an A and where you require improvement.

What Should a Social Media Report Include?

Now, let’s look at what you put inside your report. From an executive summary to infographics, there’s much to consider when creating a social media report.

An Executive Summary

Your executive summary is a concise but informative overview of the key findings and analysis included in the report. Its goal is to provide busy stakeholders with a snapshot of your social media performance. Consider this a TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) for your report. 

Your Social Media Objectives

After your executive summary, revisit the original goals of your social media growth strategy . This establishes a foundation for your analysis and a benchmark for comparing results.  Use this section to highlight any changes to your plan and how social media fits into the broader marketing strategy and business goals. 

Social growth starts with robust social reports! Get started with our free social media report template.

• Your email *
• By submitting you agree to receive the requested content, and occasional emails. You can unsubscribe at any time. For details, review our Privacy Policy . Protected by reCAPTCHA; Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
• Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Your Goals for a Specific Reporting Period

What are your markers for success on the road to your broader social media objectives? 

Zoom in on your goals for a specific reporting period. Set goals that align with your reporting period. This can be either:

• Quarterly 
• From campaign start to end

Whether you are focused on follower growth or increased content production, align your short-term goals with long-term aspirations. This reinforces the strategic significance of your social media initiatives, which is crucial for gaining support from senior stakeholders. 

Audience Insights

In an era of growing distrust in social media, understanding your target audience and what they want out of social media content is not only important but crucial. 

According to Gartner, 53% of consumers believe social media's current state has decayed, with generative AI and bots cited as a top concern. 

To maintain viewership, expand reach, and improve brand awareness, your organization must create content that exudes authenticity, honesty, and relatability. And achieving this begins with a deep understanding of your audience.

Your organization must create content that exudes authenticity, honesty, and relatability to maintain viewership, expand reach, and improve brand awareness. Achieving this begins with a deep understanding of your audience.

Use your social media report to explore the details and makeup of your audience, including demographics like age, gender, and location, as well as psychographics such as interests, values, and pain points. 

Measurement Metrics and KPIs

Outline the social media metrics used to track and analyze performance during your reporting timeframe. This is the real-time data used to measure progress towards your social media goals. 

Consider including metrics such as engagement, reach, number of followers, website clicks, or conversion rates. The specific metrics selected for your report will depend on the goals outlined in your strategy. 

Performance Analysis

In previous sections, you’ve highlighted your marketing goals and data, but what does it all mean?  

Review your social media KPIs and relate each piece of data to real-world organizational impact. For example, are you seeing a rise in retweets on Twitter? Use your performance analysis to explore how this relates to a rising share of voice or expanded brand awareness. 

Campaign-Specific Analysis

If you ran specific campaigns during your reporting period, such as Black Friday or a product launch, highlight campaign performance data in its section. 

This is necessary to understand the true impact of individual campaigns. And avoid skewing the results of other social media data.

Content Analysis

While your social media metrics provide a helpful overview of your performance, it’s also necessary to highlight the specific pieces of content that contributed to this data. 

Which style of content performs best? Is it short-form video, static posts, or thought leadership? 

Call out your top-performing posts and identify similarities between them, such as powerful hooks or relatable stories, to understand why they connected with your audience.

Platform Analysis

Your company likely maintains multiple social media accounts, each catering to a different platform with distinct nuances, trends, and audience demographics. 

Conduct separate analyses for each platform to understand which networks yield the highest ROI for your marketing efforts.

For example, while your TikTok account may achieve greater organic reach, the audience demographics on LinkedIn could be better aligned with your business, resulting in a higher ROI from LinkedIn when compared. 

Analysis of Direct and Indirect Competition

Competitor analysis provides a basis for your brand's role within online communities and the digital sphere. Is your brand falling behind or leading the charge? Benchmark your performance against other brands to identify strengths, weaknesses, and emerging trends. 

Social media analytics tools such as Sprout Social , Hootsuite , or Rival IQ offer comprehensive competitor analysis features, providing an easy option for tracking this information (more on this later).

Recommendations

These are your final recommendations and conclusions for the report. Where should your social media teams go from here? Suggest actionable steps, improvements, and changes to your social media strategy.

How to Create a Social Media Report

Now that you understand what goes inside your social media report, it’s time to construct your own. We’ll break it down step by step so you can be sure your report effectively guides your social media performance.

Step 1: Specify the Readers of Your Social Media Report 

Consider your audience for the social media report, specifically their interests and priorities. If your audience includes shareholders and C-suite executives, they're most likely interested in the bottom line, such as ROI and the organizational impact of your efforts. 

However, if your report is for your marketing team, provide insights into audience engagement metrics and content performance to empower your team to improve in these areas. Tailor your findings to support the needs of your audience, and keep in mind that a long report only sometimes correlates to an impactful one. 

Step 2: Set Specific Goals and Objectives

Take the time to define your goals and objectives upfront. This aligns your readers with the report's purpose and helps you stay on track during the reporting process. It’s best to include the following information in this section: 

• Current Social Media Channels: Which social media platforms are you focusing on? Highlight any recent additions or changes to your social mix.
• Original KPIs: Outline the KPIs established in your social media strategy. These could include metrics such as engagement rate, reach, conversions, and brand sentiment.
• Alignment with Business Objectives: Is your organization seeking to expand market share, improve brand awareness, or increase revenue? Highlight how your social media efforts align with broader business goals.

Utilize strategies such as the SMART framework to create a set of well-defined social media goals. When your goals are clear, you are more likely to gain support from other stakeholders, as they’ll understand how social media impacts the business.

Step 3: Select Relevant Metrics

Next, select metrics that align with your goals and provide meaningful insights into your performance. The most important metrics for your business will depend on the nature of your goals, but the key metrics used in most social media reports include: 

• Audience Growth/Followers
• Shares/Reposts
• Brand Mentions
• Click-through Rate (CTR)
• Conversions 
• Top Performing Posts
• Social Sentiment 
• Social Share of Voice
• Revenue Generated/ROI

Of course, you can go much more in-depth than this. For example, if your objectives involve customer service, you might also look into net promoter scores (NPS) or customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). To learn more about selecting social media metrics that align with your digital marketing goals, check out our guide on measuring social media ROI.

Step 4: Collect Data for the Reporting Period

By now, you are clear on your audience, goals, and the metrics dictating your social media performance. Your next crucial step is data collection. 

To ensure thorough analysis, systematically collect and organize your data by social platform. Considering each platform's unique characteristics and benchmarks, this approach guarantees relevance and nuance in your report.

Every social media platform has built-in analytics, but third-party social media tools are often better for in-depth analytics reporting. Most social media tools provide automated reports for each platform, improving the efficiency of your data collection. If you’re looking to upgrade your social media analytics reporting, take a peek at our round-up of the 20 Best Social Media Management Software for 2024.

Step 5: Analyze Your Performance

With your data collected and organized, it's time to make sense of it all. Analyze the source of your engagement, impressions, mentions, and shares. Note the top-performing posts, including recurring trends and the type of content. 

“Here’s the thing most people miss about social media reporting,” Peter Murphy Lewis, Founder of Strategic Pete , explains, “It’s not just about the numbers; it’s about the narrative.”

Consider all relevant strategies, actions, and traffic sources that may have influenced the outcomes. This includes evaluating the impact of influencer campaigns, customer reviews, and other marketing campaigns launched during the reporting period. 

Step 6: Create Relevant Visuals and Graphs

Remember to include visuals in your report! Data visualization, such as graphs, charts, and infographics, is a great way to make your report more engaging and draw attention to important metrics and takeaways. 

Google Sheets, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Excel include features for creating charts and graphs, but if you’d like to create impressive infographics, head over to Canva . 

Canva offers hundreds of free, ready-to-edit design templates. But don’t overdo it. Intersperse your visuals throughout the report to maintain interest and impact.

Step 7: Benchmark Against Previous Reporting Periods

Benchmark your current performance against past campaigns or reporting periods. This comparison offers valuable insights into progress, growth, and areas for improvement. 

If you’re tracking performance regularly, such as with weekly or monthly reports, create a spreadsheet to track your results over time. Additionally, consider comparing results from the same period as the previous year to account for seasonal trends and fluctuations in audience behavior.

Step 8: Gather and Share Audience Insights

By now, you’ve collected, organized, and analyzed your data, but who are the real people behind your follower count? 

This data is undeniably among the most valuable in your social media marketing report, as it enhances your social media efforts and provides guidance for other marketing initiatives. 

Dive deep into your social media analytics to gather audience insights such as age, gender, location, interests, and purchasing behavior. Who are your new followers? Where are they coming from? Look into social media tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social , which are particularly useful for creating custom reports on your target audience. 

For this step, you can go beyond social media analytics. Consider conducting targeted surveys or collecting past survey data to compare your audience’s makeup across all marketing channels.

Step 9: Share Indirect and Direct Competitor Analysis

Analyze direct and indirect competitors to understand industry trends, audience preferences, and competitive strategies. When analyzing your competitors, look into their content strategy, engagement metrics, audience demographics, and unique selling propositions. 

Focus on identifying gaps and opportunities in your competitors' strategies rather than simply comparing metrics. This can uncover areas where you can differentiate yourself and gain a competitive edge.

Step 10: Prepare Campaign Evaluations

As you work through your report, separate your campaign performance, whether paid or organic, from your regular social media data. 

Paid campaigns, in particular, offer invaluable insights necessary to comprehend your ROI. Present your insights in a clear and organized manner, and highlighting important campaign metrics such as:

• Conversions
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Click-through rate (CTR) 
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Total ad spend 

This is a great place to insert visuals to represent key findings and enhance the impact of your campaigns.

Step 11: Write Recommendations and Next Steps

Translate your insights into actionable recommendations and next steps to drive continuous improvement in your social media strategy. 

Tailor your recommendations to address identified areas for improvement. Outline a social media management roadmap for implementing your recommendations, including assigning responsibilities and timelines to ensure accountability and progress tracking.

Step 12: Write Your Executive Summary

Finally, your executive summary. Write a brief and impactful overview of your key findings, insights, and recommendations from your social media report.

Highlight the strategic implications of your analysis and the actionable steps outlined in your recommendations. Keep the executive summary concise yet comprehensive, as the goal is to communicate the value of your social media efforts to stakeholders.

5 Types of Social Media Reports

We’ve covered the crucial steps to creating a social media report, but the contents and data within can differ depending on your reporting audience and goals. Let’s look at five common types of social media reports – paid campaign, competitor, organic vs. paid, social listening, and post-performance.

Paid Campaign Performance Reports

Paid campaign performance reports analyze the performance of your paid social campaigns across all social media channels. Paid social reports are often required for budget allocation and investment analysis. They also serve as a helpful tool for alignment between your sales, marketing, and finance teams. Key metrics covered in these reports include:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate
• Ad engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments)

In-depth competitor reports can serve as a basis for strategy improvement, market analysis, and target audience research. Your acquisition and product teams may also utilize these reports to identify gaps in the market and formulate strategies for customer acquisition and retention. 

Competitor reports are most often broken down by platform, prioritizing analysis of the following metrics:

• Follower growth rate
• Engagement rate
• Share of voice
• Top-performing content
• Audience demographics

Organic vs. Paid Campaign Reports

Organic and paid social media campaigns are different beasts, with organic referring to your “free” social media campaigns. Given the cost difference between the two, analyzing which path brings you closer to your goals is essential. A paid vs. free social media comparison offers valuable data points, especially regarding budget approvals or investment reviews.

Your engagement rates are the primary metrics for analysis of paid vs. organic campaigns, but it’s also important to cover:

• Organic reach vs. paid reach
• Conversion rate for organic vs. paid campaigns
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) for organic vs. paid efforts

Social Listening Report

Social listening reports analyze online discussions relevant to your brand, industry, and competitors. Social listening lets your marketing teams identify trends, monitor customer sentiment, track competitors, and measure brand perception. 

These reports are also helpful for lead generation, customer service, and uncovering partnership opportunities. Metrics covered in a social listening report include:

• Volume of mentions
• Sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral)
• Top hashtags and keywords
• Influencer mentions
• Emerging trends and topics

Post Performance Report

Post Performance Reports explore the metrics of individual social media posts. They provide a more granular look into your social media content and help you understand what resonates with your audience. 

Key metrics to cover in these reports include:

• Reach and impressions
• Engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares)
• Time of day and day of week performance

Best Practices When Creating a Social Media Report

Let’s take a minute to review the best practices for creating a social media report, including our pro tips for a smooth and efficient reporting process.

Use Social Media Reporting Tools to Make Your Life Easier

Social media reporting tools, also known as social media analytics tools, improve your ability to collect, analyze, and visualize data from multiple social media accounts. Incorporating these tools into your workflow enhances efficiency and accuracy, allowing you to focus on strategic insights rather than manual data collection.

Our top picks for social media reporting software are: 

• Brand24 : Ideal for social listening
• Agorapulse: Best for measuring ROI
• Rival IQ: Excellent for competitor analysis
• Sendible: Perfect for enterprise brands and agencies
• Cyfe: Offers customizable dashboards

Research and experiment with different social media software. Investing in the right tools can profoundly impact your reporting efficiency, ROI, and social media performance. Explore our guide on social media analytics tools for a detailed comparison and recommendations tailored to your reporting needs.

Prepare Your Report With Your Audience in Mind

Create your social media report to suit the audience you’re presenting to, whether that’s your C-suite, sales team, or marketing interns. Tailor the content and insights to address their specific needs and expectations. 

Conduct interviews or surveys with your team and stakeholders to better understand their reporting preferences and expectations.

Include Visuals in Your Social Media Reports

Visual elements such as charts, graphs, and infographics enhance the readability and impact of your social media reports. Use visuals to highlight key trends, insights, and performance metrics, making complex data more digestible for stakeholders. 

User-friendly design tools like Canva are great for creating visually appealing graphics and infographics for your social media reports.

Share Key Learnings and Next Steps

Conclude your social media report with a summary of key learnings, actionable recommendations, and next steps for improvement. 

Highlight successes, challenges, and opportunities identified during the reporting period and provide clear guidance on how to capitalize on them moving forward. 

Schedule follow-up meetings or workshops to discuss your report’s findings and develop innovative strategies. Engaging stakeholders in the decision-making process promotes alignment across the organization.

Social Growth Starts With Strong Reporting!

When it comes to social media reporting, remember that it's not just about the numbers – it's about the stories they tell and the actions they inspire. Your continued growth on social media hinges on your ability to monitor, analyze, and report on your performance. 

By following the best practices outlined in this guide and embracing a data-driven approach, you can unlock valuable insights, drive strategic decision-making, and ultimately achieve tremendous success in the hectic world of social media.

Ready to grow? Read our social media growth strategies guide or subscribe to The CMO newsletter . Stay on top of trends and get the latest tips, resources, and guides from our community of seasoned marketing leaders straight to your inbox.  

11 Marketing Campaign Types To Try (+ Examples And Tips)

What is b2b lead generation + 14 lead generation strategies, how to build an effective direct marketing strategy, how to use target market psychographics in abm.

How to Create a Social Media Report [Free Template]

Published: October 28, 2022

Social media is an undeniably powerful channel for marketing in 2020.

In fact, social networks are the biggest source of inspiration for consumer purchases, with 37% of consumers finding purchase inspiration through social channels.

However, if you're using social media as a tool for organic exposure and brand awareness, rather than just a channel for paid ads, it can be difficult to track the success of your efforts.

As any social media manager knows, successful implementation of a social media strategy is contingent on countless factors — and all companies prioritize different channels, metrics, and criteria for success.

For example, is paid more important than organic to your business, and if so, to what extent?

Is more importance placed on audience engagement, or audience growth?

Has a posting cadence been directly tied to revenue?

With so many areas of focus for social media marketers, it's crucial to choose, analyze, and report on your key social media metrics with a social media report.

A social media report can help you clearly convey what factors your social media team prioritizes, why those factors matter, and how you're performing against those goals.

In this post, we'll highlight the importance of a social media report, list the metrics you should consider including in one, and walk through a step-by-step process for building a social media report yourself.

For a quick and easy solution to your reporting woes, click here to download HubSpot's Free Social Media Reporting Template .

Why Use a Social Media Report?

A social media report is the best way to distill the key metrics your social media team is tracking on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and/or annual basis.

Since social media encompasses so much, gathering and reporting on the data and channels that you've determined are most important for your business provides a lens of focus for your social media marketing team, and delivers a necessary high-level overview for leadership.

Social media doesn't just affect marketing. Prospects ask questions, customers write reviews, and thought leaders follow you for company news. Because social media coincides with nearly every aspect of your organization, gathering and distributing the state of your social media channels is a move that shows transparency and encourages cross-company alignment.

You can also use a social media report to report on campaign-level analytics. If your social media account is serving as a cog in a larger company initiative, this report shows to what extent social media contributed to the project's success.

Featured Resource: Free Social Media Report Template

HubSpot's free social media report template has pre-made slides for you to report on all of your predominant social media metrics. Download the template today and simply plug in your own metrics to customize a social media report for your organization.

Social Media Metrics to Report On

Your business likely values some metrics over others when it comes to social media reporting. Likely, these metrics also vary between your channels — since LinkedIn doesn't let you retweet, and Twitter doesn't let you click a cry-face button.

Before you start reporting on your social media channels' performance, read through this list of options of social media metrics so you can determine which ones you should include in your report.

1. Audience Size and Growth

This metric tells you how large your reach is and how quickly that reach is growing. This is typically seen as the core social media metric, as it shows how large of an audience you can leverage with your posts and content.

2. Cadence of Posts

A rather self-explanatory example, this metric represents how many times you posted in a given time period. This metric is usually compared alongside other metrics — such as engagement rates — to help you determine the right cadence for your audience.

This metric should also be channel-specific, because it makes sense to post more frequently on some channels than others .

3. Post Engagement

Post engagement measures how your fans and followers are reacting to your posts with likes, comments, and shares. A healthy post engagement suggests you have a loyal audience — and that your content is reaching them.

You can also track engagement as a percentage of your audience to determine engagement rate.

4. Mentions

One metric you have a little less control over is mentions. You can track mentions from customers, prospects, and even news outlets to gauge perception of your business and brand online.

5. Clickthrough Rate

When a post links to a page on your website, you can measure how many people and what percentage of your audience clicked through to the page. A strong clickthrough rate shows you're sharing website pages that your audience finds relevant.

6. Conversions & New Contacts

Conversions comes into play if you're using social media to generate leads, subscribers, or even customers. If you want to attribute contacts to your social media team's efforts, make sure you're using proper tracking and setting reasonable goals, as it's rare in some industries to go straight from social media to becoming a customer.

Directly tracing ROI (return-on-investment) to social media efforts can be tricky. However, if you determine it's worth reporting on this metric, make sure you have proper expectations set and attribution models established.

8. CPM / CPC

This metric is essential for monitoring the performance on your social media ads. If you're solely reporting on organic social metrics, you can ignore this one.

9. Competitor Metrics

To provide a benchmark, consider analyzing the aforementioned metrics for your competitors. Obviously, these metrics can vary drastically based on publicity, paid budget, and the size of the company, but it's still worthwhile to make the comparison.

How to Make a Social Media Report

Step 1: choose your presentation method.

For consistency and clarity, make sure you're using a social media report presentation , spreadsheet, or memo template. This way, each time you update your metrics, you'll simply need to copy over your most up-to-date metrics onto that template rather than reinventing the wheel every time.

We suggest using a PowerPoint or Google Slide Deck template, because you can share it with your team via email, use it for an in-person meeting or presentation, or both.

Need a template to get started? Try this one .

Step 2: Determine the Metrics You'll Be Reporting On

Like we've established, different companies and different social media teams value different social media metrics.

It's your job to choose the metrics that matter most to your team and your organization.

Using the list from the section above, narrow down the essential metrics you believe are worth presenting to your team at large. Remember, you can change which metrics you report on for each of your organization's social media platforms.

If your social media report is campaign-specific, reach out to the project stakeholders to see if they're hoping to see reporting on any certain metrics in the social media report.

Pro Tip: For your first few ongoing social media reporting presentations, ask your peers which metrics they'd like to see, or which ones they need clarification on. Making these changes sooner rather than later helps you keep your team informed and engaged.

Step 3: Gather Your Data

Once you know what you're reporting on and how you're reporting it, it's time to start collecting data.

When you're first setting up your social media reports, create bookmarks for your data sources. Make a folder for the analytics page for each social media channel you're analyzing and/or your social media reporting software for an all-encompassing view.

If you're tracking click-throughs to your website, make sure you're analyzing from a single master location, such as your tracking URL builder or your traffic tracking tool like HubSpot or Google Analytics.

Step 4: Add in Some Visuals

A chart of numbers on a slide deck is, well, pretty boring.

While a numerical chart is important for sharing as much info as possible in an organized way, using visuals is a better way to convey the growth and success metrics of your social media performance. Try incorporating one or all of the following into your social media reports:

• Linear graphs to show followers over time.
• Pie charts to show clicks to different pages of your website (blog pages vs. case studies, for example).
• Bar graphs to show number of engagements on each platform.

These examples are more eye-catching than numbers on a slide and further illustrate what you want your team to walk away with. If data visualization is new to you, check out our Guide on Data Visualization for Marketers .

Step 5: Think of Your Story

A running social media report should always remind people about where you came from and where you plan on going. That said, make sure your reports make reference to how your numbers have changed since the last period of time on which you presented, in addition to why numbers have changed.

Did follower growth as a percent increase drop last month? Maybe that's because one of your posts from the month before went viral and resulted in unprecedented growth that was impossible to match. Make that clear and add context to the numbers.

Additionally, each report should contain clear action items about how you plan to continuously improve your social media performance. Social media is constantly evolving, so your approach and strategy for it should, too.

Now that you're equipped with the knowledge to build, design, and share your social media report, download your social media report template and get to work!

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

Social Media's Role in Reshaping Online Shopping, According to Retailers

290+ Social Media Holidays for Your 2024 Content Calendar [+Template]

Which Social Media Channels are Gaining and Losing Steam in 2024? [New Consumer and Platform Data]

How to Use AI For a More Effective Social Media Strategy, According to Ross Simmonds

The Future of Social Media [Research]: What Marketers Need to Know

Is TikTok Becoming the Next QVC? All About TikTok Live Shopping

The Most Effective Types of Content on Social Media in 2024 [New Data]

57 TikTok Stats to Know in 2024

70+ Social Media Demographics for Marketers in 2024

The 7 Types of Social Media and Pros & Cons of Each (Research)

Use our comprehensive social media report template to share the data clearly and effectively.

Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

• Competitive Analysis
• Brand Analysis
• Analytics & Reporting
• Campaigns Analysis
• Social Listening
• Data & Studies Social Media Studies What Data Says Social Media Industry Reports Social Media Stats
• Platforms Facebook Analytics Instagram Analytics Twitter Analytics LinkedIn Analytics YouTube Analytics
• Start 14-Day Free Trial

Socialinsider Blog

How to Create a Top-Notch Social Media Report in 2024 (Free Templates Included)

The world of social media might seem like a Van-Gogh-swirl of data, photos, videos and memes with a black hole at its end, absorbing users’ energy and attention.

When you’re in charge of your brand’s social media accounts and learn to develop a social media report, the struggle is real. And the picture becomes even more blurry.

Luckily for you and all digital marketers out there who are desperately looking for help, today we're going to learn together how to develop social media analytics reports and how to use reports templates to make our job easier.

How to make a social media report

1. What is a social media report? 2. How to create a social media report 3. What to include in a social media report 4. Metrics to cover in your social media reports 5. Types of social media reports 6. Download free social media report templates 7. Best social media reporting tools

FAQs about reporting on social media

1. What is a social media report?

A social media report is a presentation that includes social media data and insights gathered with the purpose of evaluating a brand's performance on social media.

Through social media analytics reports, marketers can glance at their strategies' effectiveness in achieving their social media goals , becoming a key factor in a marketing plan optimization process.

2. How to create a social media report

To benefit the most from their analysis time, when creating a social media performance report, digital marketers are recommended to follow a logical and structured framework in order to discover valuable insights.

So, moving forward, we'll describe the steps you'll need to cover to create a top-notch social media analytics report.

Choose the KPIs that are relevant to you

The very purpose of a social media report is to offer an overview of how successful your brand's content strategy was in getting more attention toward the business.

Depending on your social media goals - be it primarily to increase brand awareness , engagement, or sales - different metrics will land in your social media report.

Defining the KPIs you'll integrate into your performance analysis is probably the most important step of social media reporting, given that you'll draw some optimization strategies based on that further in the process.

Gather the data

Bringing together the data from all your analytics sources will allow you to get a broader picture of your brand's social media performance, providing a deeper understanding of how different tactics and mediums have worked.

To create an in-depth social media report while equally saving time on your analysis, you can leverage a data solution tool, such as Socialinsider, that helps you access your social media KPIs in just a matter of seconds while also providing visually appealing performance statistics.

Measure performance on a set time frame

After choosing the metrics you'll focus on for your social media reporting and having put together all the data you need, it's time to start analyzing the numbers to see if your expectations have been met and if your strategies were effective in getting the results you were after.

For specific campaign evaluation, it's recommended that you run your analysis over its specific duration.

Moreover, if we're talking about a recurring campaign, making a comparison between current and past data may come in handy for you to evaluate if, in the future, it's worth leveraging it any longer.

Get cross-platform insights

To get an in-depth understanding of how your brand is performing on social media and which channels are the most effective and deserve more investment in terms of attention and budget, we recommend integrating multi-platform data into your social media reports.

For example, a report for social media could include data covering a variety of channels and metrics, such as Facebook engagement , Instagram reach and YouTube volume of posts.

By using Socialinsider's Brands feature you can run a comparative analysis between you channel's performance in terms of followers, engagement, impressions and much more.

Here are the steps I've followed for this process:

• I added the brand's profiles within Socialinsider by adding the corresponding URLs.
• Then I went to the Home section and created the brand e.l.f Cosmetics, while selecting which brand channels I want to include in my analysis.
• In the end, I clicked on the brand created, displayed in the left-sided section of the menu, and scrolled down through the data.

Dive into audience demographics

Understanding your audience is key to your social media strategy's success. So, when you're creating your social media performance report, diving into audience data alongside other KPIs can offer you precious insights into the effectiveness of your social media content in attracting your buyer personas.

Here's what I mean: if your follower base is formed of your target audience (as revealed by the data), then looking into what post types are the most appealing will offer you some optimization directions. However, if you discover the opposite case, then that's a clear indicator of your need to revisit your strategy on a bigger scale.

Provide competitive data

Keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing on social media is only natural. And this is some valuable data you can include in your social media report.

This way, you will know how much you grow in relation to your past self, but you will also register your progress compared to your competition.

By using Socialinsider, you just have to go to Benchmarks and you will see how you stand in your market against your competition. Here is how to do it.

I create a project in which I included the Instagram profiles for Rare Beauty and e.l.f Cosmetics. By clicking Benchmarks, I can see their performance for the selected time frame.

Here you can select what metrics and insights to compare between your brand and your competitor.

By scrolling down, you will see metrics likes fan count, engagement, top 3 posts for each of the two brands, average engagement, average posts per day, distribution of engagement, distribution of posts and many more.

While this is a social media analytics report sample, Socialinsider offers a wider range of metrics you can look at once signing up for a free trial!

Include actionable insights

Once you have collected all the relevant metrics for your analysis and made correlations between the numbers, you have one final step you need to check for a top-notch social media report. That is coming up with improvement ideas based on what the data told you.

By looking at what you achieved in the time frame you’ve selected to look at examining what tactics proved to work and which didn't, you are now prepared for better predictions in the future.

Put them into practice, and you'll be on your way to great social media success.

3. What to include in a social media report

We have established by now that social media analytics reporting is done with the purpose of evaluating a strategy's results and identifying optimization opportunities.

And because there are multiple social media marketing areas that can influence a strategy's performance when creating your social reports, it's best to look at the data from multiple angles.  

Here are the main layers that a social media analysis report should cover.

Performance overview

First things first, when creating a social media report, you need to take into account that your clients (or superiors) will want to quickly understand if the current strategy is generating the results expected or not.

For this, it's recommended to start your social media insights report with an overview that includes the main KPIs.

At this point, it would useful to also take into consideration some fresh benchmarks for Instagram , Facebook, Twitter or any other platform you're currently focusing on.

Social media objectives and status

Be it to increase brand awareness, generate engagement, or drive sales, your social media marketing efforts are surely centered around a specific goal within a certain timeframe.

To get an idea of how close you are to achieving the objective you've set, in your social media strategy report, you should track the progress and KPIs related to that specific goal.

For example, if you aim to increase brand awareness, you should monitor reach and impression evolutions over a specific period. On the other hand, if you want to generate more engagement or sales, you should look at the growth percentage that will tell you how far from your target you are.

That is why setting SMART objectives from the beginning is very important, as it will allow you to track development over time.

Content and campaign insights

Content insights, such as the best-performing posts, are important to include in a social report, as they will reveal trends and best practices for KPIs improvement.

For example, if the data reveals that a certain post format is the most effective, that info should be used for future content creation.

Moreover, if you've had some specific campaigns, such as a product launch, you might want to analyze that specific data separately from the general content and get campaign-specific insights.

Track campaign-specific data!

Specific channel data.

Understanding which social platforms are best-performing is crucial for strategy and budget optimization. That is why specific channel data is mandatory in a social media summary report, as it will allow results comparison and insights gathering.

4. Metrics to cover in your social media reports

When doing social media reporting, you need to make sure you choose the most relevant metrics for your performance evaluation, meaning those KPIs based on which you can decide if your social media strategy was effective or not in achieving the goals you've set.

Here is a list of the key metrics you should monitor:

Followers or fans growth

This social media metric helps you assess how many followers you gain or lose in the timeframe you've chosen for your performance analysis.

Significant increases or decreases in your following can be correlated to certain social media campaigns you've run, which serves as a great insight into what type of initiatives work best when it comes to increasing your brand awareness.

Engagement and engagement rates

Engagement is a game-changing metric that you should always guard, like a princess in a tower. A high engagement rate can be correlated with a higher reach and a broader community.

If your content drives users to interact with it, then you’re winning at social media.

There are two main ways of looking 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

Reach and impressions

While reach represents the total number of unique users who see your content, impressions shows the total number of times your content is displayed in users' feeds, including repetitions.

Organic reach and impressions are crucial metrics to track, as they can reveal which posts are the best options for boosting later on.  

Top performing posts

Given that every social platform's algorithm rewards content diversity, mixing different post types is imperative for a successful strategy.

Naturally, some content formats are known to be trendier in a certain time period, like Reels on Instagram, for example, but ultimately, you need to adjust your posts' planning based on what works best for you.

Looking at your top-performing content is a great optimization tactic, as it will give you insights into what type of messages and formats your audience seems to appreciate the most.

By doing a post's performance analysis, you'll be able to gain a deeper understanding of the following:

• how long the captions were
• what were the main topics of interest
• what hashtags you’ve used
• how did your audience interact with your posts - by linking, commenting, or sharing it more?

Find out more metrics in this complete list you should follow

Traffic and leads

Certainly, one of your social media marketing objectives is to increase the traffic to your website, to widen your chances of getting purchases.

To monitor this KPI, Google Analytics is the best tool you can leverage to understand how your social content performs in terms of generating traffic.

When checking for leads, you have to pay attention to the actions users make after clicking a link from your social media posts.

Click-through-rate (CTR)

Whether you've been running an ad campaign or you just want to check how many people click on the links you include in your posts, CTR, or Click-Through Rate can help you measure that.

CTR helps marketers understand how attractive their content is and how well it resonates with their target audience.

Sentiment analysis

Social media sentiment is a metric that follows a customer’s perception of a brand, service or product.

Based on that customer’s opinion about a specific product or the brand itself, you can build your entire marketing and social media strategy around it.

You can leverage customers’ comments and posts about your brand to develop better products and services.

It is really important to find out what users say about your brand “behind your back”, when they don’t tag you.

This will help you get some honest opinions that you can use further when designing your content.

5. Types of social media reports

Depending on the purpose of the report (be it to evaluate a specific campaign or a quarter's strategy results), there are multiple types of social media reports.

While most digital marketers leverage quarterly social media reporting , some may need to check the data more often - to optimize on the go so that they could keep their competitive advantage - running monthly or even weekly social media reports.

Lastly, with yearly reports offering an overview of a brand's performance across an entire year, this type of social media report is also very important, highlighting what campaigns should be kept and improved over the next year and which shouldn't. It also offers great insights into how the budget should be allocated.

6. Download free social media report templates

When you're in a rush because the clock is ticking until you have to turn in your performance presentation, a social media report template can surely save the day.

Obviously, depending on your client's preferences or even your own company style, when looking for a social media analytics report template, you may be searching for a specific format, such as PDF, PowerPoint, or Excel.

In the end, it’s probably all a matter of what is more important to you: data flexibility or design.

So, to help you cut the search short, we've put together a couple of social media report templates at your disposal, which are listed below.

📌 Download your social media performance report template in an Excel format

📌 Download your social media analysis report template in a PowerPoint format

7. Best tools for reporting on social media

To develop the most accurate social media performance reports, you should take advantage of the wide pool of tools that could help.

Here is our list of the most powerful social media reporting tools you should try:

Native analytics

Every social platform's native analytics offers powerful data that can help marketers shape better strategies.

In TikTok's case, for example, by leveraging the platform's analytics, you can get in-depth data, such as profile views, demographic insights, and more detailed KPIs that will unlock more effective campaigns.

Socialinsider

Socialinsider is an easy-to-use social media analytics and benchmarking tool that enables quick yet thorough social media reporting.

Besides the metrics offered by any social platform's native analytics, this tool also provides a series of extensive KPIs, helping marketers get more in-depth data and gain a deeper understanding of their brand's social media performance.

Also, one of Socialinsider's most helpful features for creating top-notch social media reports is its benchmarking analytics solution, which empowers brands with competitive insights .

By analyzing competitors' KPIs,  marketers can identify best-performing strategies and campaigns. Moreover, they can gain content and partnership inspiration, which can enable a competitive advantage.

Last but not least, Socialinsider also supports an Instagram listening module through which brands can take a look at brand-related conversations, get sentiment and emotion insights, and manage brand reputation .

Google Analytics

For brands that have centered their social media strategy around the goal of increasing sales, Google Analytics is a must-have tool for their social media reporting.

Enabling social media traffic tracking, this tool helps marketers understand if their social media content is effective in making consumers visit the brand's website, which increases the purchase possibility.

Take a closer look at your options for reporting tools.

Final thoughts

Covering everything from formats to metrics that matter, we hope this guide on how to create a social media report was useful for you.

When creating your own social media performance reports, remember to adapt the information you've found to what your brand's needs are.

FAQs about social media reporting

1. what are the five steps to create a social media report.

Here are five steps to create any comprehensive social media report:

• set goals and define your KPIs
• collect data from social media anaytics and reporting tools
• analyze and interpret the results
• compile your report, including charts and graphs to present data visually
• outline some actionable insights for the future

2. What should be included in a social media report?

What you include in your social media report depends entirely on your company's or client's goals for social media marketing.

However, most social media reports cover KPIs such as engagement, reach & impressions, audience growth, CTR and so on, as well as charts for easy data visualization, and a few actionable insights at the end.

Content Manager @ Socialinsider

Content & SEO Manager @ Socialinsider with 8 years of experience in marketing. I like to describe myself as a social butterfly with a curious mind, passionate about dancing and psychology.

Build your report with:

You might also like.

LinkedIn Competitor Analysis: Everything You Need to Know

The Ultimate Facebook Competitive Analysis Toolkit

Brand Reputation Management: Strategies for Building Trust With Customers

Improve your social media strategy with Socialinsider!

Use in-depth data to measure your social accounts’ performance, analyze competitors, and gain insights to improve your strategy.

How to Create a Social Media Report in 2024

Enhance your social presence with a detailed social media report showcasing your achievements backed by data. Upgrade your reporting today!

Do you want to track your social media performance?

It can be a daunting task for a social media manager as each platform has its set of metrics and analytics tools, making it challenging to keep track of performance across all platforms and share the results with the stakeholders.

But by using in-depth social media reports, you can simplify the process and ensure regular tracking, analysis, and sharing of your performance.

So, how can you create a social media performance report?

Is there any social media reporting template available?

This article will provide detailed information on a social media report and how to create one for your business.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty aspects.

What Is a Social Media Report?

Social media report is a document that summarizes a business or organization’s social media performance over a particular period.

The purpose of a social media performance report is to share insights into the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, identify areas of improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

You may require multiple reports to suit different goals or audiences.

For example, the social media audit report evaluates the organization’s overall social media presence and performance, whereas the campaign report measures the success of a specific social media campaign.

The format and content of the report may vary depending on the specific goals and objectives of the organization. It includes visualizations, such as graphs, charts, and tables, to make the data more accessible and easily understood.

You can prepare social media reports regularly, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the needs of the business.

Importance of Creating Social Media Reports

Social media reports provide a comprehensive overview of a business’s social media performance. It can help you understand the current trajectory of your marketing strategies and help you optimize accordingly.

Here’s why creating social media reports is important:

1. Performance measurement

It allows you to track key metrics, such as engagement rates, reach, impressions, clicks, and conversions. This data helps you to understand how your social media efforts are performing, identify trends, and make informed decisions to improve your strategy.

2. Demonstrate ROI

Social media reports help show the ROI of your social media efforts .

It can present data on how your social media activity has impacted your business goals, such as website traffic, leads, sales, and customer retention.

3. Get strategy insights

Social media reports provide insights into what is working and isn’t working with your social media strategy. By analyzing the data, you can evaluate your social media tactics, identify areas for improvement, and adjust your approach accordingly.

4. Monitor competition

Using social media reports is not limited to your performance tracking. You can also track your competitors’ social media activity and performance.

By comparing your metrics against your competitors, you can identify areas where you need to improve and develop new strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

5. Analyze social media trends

You can use reports to plan for the future. Social media performance reports can be used to extract insights into social media trends and changes in audience behavior.

Using the data, you can develop new strategies aligned with your business goals and take advantage of new opportunities to engage with your audience.

But to avail these benefits of social media reports, you must know how to create a detailed report that’s easy to understand and analyze.

How to Create a Social Media Report in 6 Steps

Creating a social media report might get complex if you are unaware of the sequential steps. Here are the detailed steps to streamline your process:

Step 1: Define Your Social Media Goals

Before creating a dedicated social media performance report, you must define different objectives and KPIs to make the reporting process.

Goals and objectives provide a benchmark for measuring the success of your social media campaigns. By tracking your progress against your goals, you can determine whether your campaigns are on track or need improvement.

Establish Goals for Social Media Campaigns

Defining clear goals will help you measure the success of your social media campaigns, so you must define the objectives of your social media campaigns.

These could include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving website traffic, boosting sales, etc.

Primarily focus on creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (S.M.A.R.T). SMART goals can provide a clear direction and deadline for your social media efforts.

For example, through Instagram, you can set a SMART goal for your social media campaign to increase website traffic by 25% within the next three months.

The goal defines a specific objective of increasing the website traffic and has a quantifiable metric of a 25% rise. It can be achieved because it’s not too ambitious or unrealistic and is relevant because it aligns with the overall marketing strategy.

Also, it has a specific three-month deadline, making it time-bound. But there’s also another aspect of SMART goals which is choosing a specific social media platform.

Choosing Social Media Platforms

You can choose the social media platforms if you know your target audience and which platforms they are most active on.

For example, if your target audience is primarily young adults, platforms like Instagram and Snapchat may be more effective, whereas if your target audience is professionals, platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter may be more appropriate.

Once you have identified the social media platforms that you will use, you can then determine the KPIs that are most relevant to those platforms.

Identify key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you have established your social media campaign goals, you must identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure progress toward these goals.

Your KPIs can include metrics, such as engagement, reach, impressions, clicks, conversions, and audience demographics.

For example, on Instagram, track metrics like engagement rate, follower growth, and reach, whereas, on LinkedIn, focus on metrics like engagement rate, click-through rate, and lead generation.

Step 2: Search Your metric

Once you have identified your KPIs, you must determine the metrics you must track. It can set up the foundation for creating an accurate and detailed social media report.

Choose Appropriate Metrics for KPIs

You need to choose the most appropriate metrics to measure and track them. For example, if your KPI is engagement, you may measure likes, comments, and shares.

Here are some tips for selecting the most relevant metrics for your organization or client:

• Align metrics with business goals.
• Focus on metrics that can be influenced through your social media efforts. For example, if you can’t control the number of followers you have, then measuring follower growth may not be the most useful metric.
• Use a mix of quantitative (likes and comments) and qualitative metrics (sentiment analysis.)
• Consider metrics specific to each platform.

Identify Sources of Data to Measure and Track Metrics

Next, figure out where you’ll be getting all the information that you need to create a comprehensive report.

Identifying the sources of data will provide insights for your social media report. You can extract data from social media platforms, third-party analytics platforms, website analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and other sources.

Whatever you choose, make sure it provides the insights you need to create a killer social media report!

It can be nerve-wracking to create social media reports for multiple clients. To ease your tracking and reporting process, you can rely on SocialPilot.

Its powerful social media reporting dashboard can help you with tracking all engagement metrics. You can get detailed analytics for specific channels or combine multiple profiles’ analytics on a single page and export striking PDF reports with ease.

Start Your 14-day Trial

Step 3: Create the Template

This step involves creating a template for your social media report. You can choose a pre-existing template or create a custom one tailored to your needs.

Many social media report templates are available, each with benefits and features. Some popular templates include Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, PowerPoint presentations, and online dashboard tools.

But you can avoid the troubles of manually adding the metrics and maintaining the data once you choose SocialPilot’s social media analytics.

Within a few clicks, you can generate a dedicated social media report based on the analytics results on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile.

Step 4: Build the Report

In this step organize the data into a clear and concise format that is easy to understand.

This could include using charts, graphs, and tables to help visualize the data.

You need to track social media metrics based on the platform and your goals. For example, if you want to analyze your Facebook marketing strategy, you must measure your Facebook page’s performance by defining the metrics like the growth of your fans/audience, likes, comments, shares, impressions, etc.

Once the data is available, you can format it into the desired visual graph, making it easier for a non-technical person to understand the reporting results.

If you use SocialPilot’s analytics tool, you can bypass the hassle of creating visually appealing graphics, as the tool already breakdown the most important metrics in the form of eye-pleasing graphs and charts.

Step 5: Analyze and Interpret Data

This step involves interpreting the data to draw insights and identify areas of strength and weakness. Based on your findings, make recommendations that will help you improve your social media strategy.

Interpret Data to Draw Insights

You need to interpret the data to draw insights about your social media performance. Look for trends, patterns, and anomalies in the data to help you understand what works and what doesn’t.

For example, if your audience engages more with videos than images, incorporate more video content into your social media strategy.

Also, if you notice a spike in follower growth after running a specific social media campaign, replicate the same campaign in the future.

Identify Areas of Strength and Weakness

Based on your analysis, identify the areas of strength and weakness in your social media strategy. This will help you make informed decisions about how to improve your performance.

You can use a SWOT analysis to identify areas of strength and weakness in your social media strategy. The framework can identify areas of strength and weakness in your social media strategy and help you leverage the information to make data-driven decisions.

Let’s understand SWOT analysis with an example of a fashion brand with a decent social media presence.

Strengths : The strengths can include a visually appealing Instagram feed, decent social media engagement, and a loyal following of fashion enthusiasts

Weaknesses: You can struggle to generate leads or sales through social media.

Opportunities: To improve its weakness, you can partner with fashion influencers to reach a wider audience or use social media platforms like TikTok to showcase its products and reach a younger demographic.

Threats: If your competitors use social media more effectively, they may attract more customers and gain market share. Also, consistent social media algorithms or policy changes can affect the visibility of your content.

Make Final Recommendations Based on Findings

Based on your insights, make recommendations for how to improve your social media strategy. These recommendations should be actionable and tied to your social media campaign goals.

For example, if your social media engagement rates are declining on Instagram, you can improve your engagement rates by focusing on creating more interactive content that encourages user participation.

Try out different social media campaigns like polls, Q&A sessions, or quizzes or share user-generated content, which can drive better engagement from the audience.

Also, blending your content strategy with new formats like Instagram Reels can deliver excellent results.

Step 6: Report and share

This step involves presenting your report clearly and concisely and sharing it with the relevant stakeholders. You should also prepare for future reports by tracking your progress and making necessary adjustments to your social media strategy.

How to Present the Report

You need to decide how to present your social media report clearly and easily to understand, helping communicate your findings.

Choosing a detailed PDF format with multiple visual elements can make it easier for the stakeholders and your team members to analyze the social media reports.

Best Practices for Reporting and Sharing

There are several best practices you should follow when reporting and sharing your social media report. These include tailoring your report to your audience, highlighting key insights and recommendations, and being transparent about the data and method used.

Also, understand that report sharing is not a one-time thing. Many marketers do it every week, and others do it every month. So, with SocialPilot, we removed the manual task of sharing reports from your workflow with our dedicated Schedule Report feature.

With a click of a button, you can automate weekly or monthly sharing of your in-depth analytics report with teammates and clients via email. Say goodbye to the hiccups of generating social media reports manually monthly.

Preparing for Future Reports

It’s important to prepare for future reports by documenting your process and method. This will help you maintain consistency across different reports and make it easier to track your progress.

You should also identify areas for improvement and set goals for future social media campaigns.

Using the detailed steps, you can create a well-polished social media report to help you improve your strategies and optimize your resources.

Ready, Get Set, Report!

A social media report template can be your north star to guide you through your social media performance analytics, which otherwise would feel unorganized, confusing, and resultless.

You can create an excellent social media report template by performing all the detailed steps in this blog.

However, your task will not be finished once the template is created.

You must face multiple challenges to extract and manage social media data. But with SocialPilot’s powerful social media reporting dashboard, you can avoid the hassle of creating a report template from scratch and create perfectly-crafted social media reports quickly.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• Content performance: Easily understand your top-performing content that engages your audience and leverage it to scale your social media performance.
• Audience insights: Know your audience better and analyze growth patterns to create social engagement strategies using SocialPilot’s integrated social media insight tool.
• Identify your biggest fans: Discover who interacts with your social posts, the most with impactful insights, like most active commenter, sharer, and more.
• Best time to post: Analyze the best time to post by getting insights about the active audience during the week .
• Comprehensive analytics: View analytics of all your social posts irrespective of whether you posted from SocialPIlot.
• Share PDF analytics reports: Schedule your in-depth PDF reports to share automatically via email with colleagues and clients, or download them from the Analytics tab.

Try it yourself!

Kickstart the free trial or schedule a demo call.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key components of a social media report?

The key components of a social media report include:

• An executive summary
• Overview of social media performance
• Analysis of key metrics, insights, and recommendations
• Breakdown of campaigns and events that occurred during the reporting period

What are templates for social media?

Templates for social media are pre-designed documents that provide a structure for social media content, strategy, or reporting. They can be customized to suit a business or organization's needs, saving time and effort when creating social media content or reports. Some popular templates for social media include content calendars, social media strategy templates, and reporting templates.

How often should I create a social media report?

The frequency of social media reports can vary depending on the organization's needs and goals. It can be done weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. The important thing is to ensure that the report is comprehensive and provides valuable insights for future campaigns.

How to create a social media weekly report?

To create a weekly social media report, you can gather data on key metrics such as reach, engagement, and conversion rates using social media analytics tools like SocialPilot. Next, you can organize the data into a report template, including sections for insights and recommendations. You can also include a summary of any campaigns or events during the week and their impact on social media performance.

About the Author

Chandraveer Singh

Related Posts

Manage social media effortlessly.

• Trial Begins Immediately
• No CC Required
• Change Plans Anytime
• Cancel Anytime

Start Your 14-Day Free Trial

Integrations

More on Social Media

• © 2024 SocialPilot Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved.
• Privacy Policy & GDPR
• Terms of Service
• Cookie Settings
• Follow us :

Take Advantage Of Professional Social Media Reports – Examples & Templates

Table of Contents

1) What Is A Social Media Report?

2) Social Media Reporting Importance

3) Best Practices To Create Social Media Reports

4) Social Media Reporting Elements

5) Top Social Media Report Examples

6) Social Media Reporting Challenges

There are billions of social media users across the globe, most of which share their thoughts, feelings, opinions, and recommendations with friends and family. As a brand or business, if you meet your target customers on the platforms on which they’re most engaged, you stand to grow your audience and boost your bottom line exponentially.

By sparking up meaningful conversations and delivering valuable content with your prospects at times that they’re most likely to respond or react to, you will ensure your social success – and in turn, help your company to scale, evolve, and thrive in this cutthroat digital age.

But how do you know where to target your audience? What time is best to connect with them? And which platforms should you focus on the most? Getting your socially-driven affairs in order can seem like an impossible feat, but with social media reporting, you will be able to gain the insights you need to attain the results you deserve. When you add up modern technology and professional reporting software , your reporting processes in the social realm will reap many rewards.

Here, we explore the meaning and value of social reporting plus the value of a social media marketing report , as well as the tools you need to get the job done properly – starting by considering what these reports are and their role in today’s hyper-connected business world. After that, we will present the benefits they have on offer and finish with examples and templates from real business scenarios. Without further ado, let's get started.

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, 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 material 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. Here are the primary reasons you should use digital dashboards for your social media analysis reports:

• Smarter content creation: This is the base for any social media strategy. But publishing material just by intuition is not the smartest way to approach your strategy. With the help of social media reporting metrics, 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 material on each social channel 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 organization 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, and connect with other international markets while keeping expenditures at 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 strategies are successful than with a social media analysis report template. By making sense of your social KPIs, you can prove if your posts were 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, and 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 analytical 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.  

As we just established, tracking and measuring your activity is pivotal to success, and reports are a great tool. If you track your social activity on a consistent basis, you will not only grow your audience but also foster customer loyalty, turning one-time buyers into long-term brand advocates.

Moreover, these kinds of reports, when customized to your specific needs and goals, will help you become more approachable to potential customers as it will allow you to establish the perfect brand voice for each platform while helping you to improve your response rates and levels of social-based customer service.

Seventy-one percent of consumers who have reported a positive social experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. Track and measure your efforts, and you will satisfy your customers, reaping the rewards of growth, loyalty, and prosperity in the process. Need we say more?

Your Chance: Want to test a social media reporting software for free? We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from great social media reports!

Best Practices For Successful Social Media Reports

There is no one, single black-and-white way to create a report. Depending on the specific use case and what kind of metrics you want to track, the reporting process for various social channels will be different. There are some core questions you need to answer before creating a report, and there are some best practices to follow in order to create the best possible one for your social efforts. Here we will name a standard process that should make your practice easier:

1. Define your stakeholders

The first step to start creating the best SM 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 for results in 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 always to include only your KPIs to avoid losing time and resources in analyzing numbers that are not useful. You can include other 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 indicators 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 KPIs that align with the main goal of your strategy. For example, if one campaign was created with the goal of driving sales, then followers or likes will not be a useful parameter to track better leads or conversions. 

3. Provide competitive context 

While your SM report should obviously outline every critical aspect regarding the performance of your strategies across various platforms, it should not only be about you. A best practice to follow for efficient reporting is also to include information about your competitors. Now, when we talk about competitors, we don’t mean you compare yourself to the number 1 business in your industry unless, of course, you are at that level. When looking at competitor analysis, make sure you select businesses that are at the same level as you are. This will help you keep your benchmarks and goals realistic and attainable. From this practice, you can extract insights such as at what rate is your competition’s audience growing, how shared their content is getting, and what works for them the most, among other valuable things. 

4. Concentrate on impactful data

Defining and analyzing the right KPIs is not the only determining factor you should consider when creating your reports. You should always try to look at your information from different perspectives and 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 not to create misleading reports. 

5. Benefit from text analysis  

Text analysis is the process of analyzing text sources such as social media comments, support tickets, customer reviews, and others and deriving meaningful conclusions from them. This is a very useful practice when it comes to social media. Obviously, you can’t go through every single comment or piece of text that your customers leave on your social channels; therefore, text analysis tools have emerged to automate the process and offer businesses valuable insights. By using this technology on your SM platforms, you can understand sentiment about a specific product or content, measure your share of voice, identify key topics that your customers are talking about, and even identify purchase intention, among other things. This provides a wider and even more valuable approach to data than just looking at numbers. 

6. 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 on 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. 

7. Follow design best practices 

Once you’ve gone through all the strategic steps we mentioned previously, it is time to start generating your SM report. To do so efficiently, it is necessary to follow some design best practices to make them as efficient as possible. These best practices include avoiding overcrowing your report with multiple graphs and charts, sticking only to a couple of colors and avoiding colors that are too bright or hard to look at, stay away from 3D effects, among other things. Neglecting the design process can make your reports harder to understand and harm your strategies in the long run.

8. 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). They 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. More on this point below. 

9. Automate your reports 

Moving on with our list of best practices, we have report automation. As mentioned above, automated reporting technologies allow you to schedule a report to be sent to a specific recipient in a selected time frame. But not just that. Rather you are an agency working with multiple clients or a social media team working for an organization, generating reports is tedious and time-consuming. Luckily, automation tools relieve you from this pain by automatically generating and updating them as soon as new information arises. This way, you will not only save countless hours of work but will also be able to react to any issues as soon as they occur. These solutions also include intelligent data alerts that will notify you as soon as a goal is met or an anomaly is detected, so you don’t need to check manually. 

10. Share your reports 

Rather you are an agency working with multiple clients at the same time or just a company that does its social media internally, it is very likely that you’ll need to share your reports with somebody at some point. While this might sound like a straightforward step, it is always important to be careful about the way you are sharing this information. You can go for the traditional route of an automated email or take it a step further and make the sharing process more interactive. For instance, datapine allows you to share them through a password-protected URL that keeps the interactivity of the report and also protects the data from any unauthorized users. You can also set roles when sharing your reports to make sure each recipient can only access the data they are allowed to.

11. 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 reporting. 

12. Integrate predictions in your report 

Apart from tracking the progress of your strategies, you should also use your 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 customers’ demands, sales promotions, and others. Modern businesses are using more and more predictive analytics technologies to get an edge over the competition. 

To continue exploring the value of social media reporting this time in practice, we have selected a list of examples that will show you not just what goes into a report but also the particularities of each. You will be equipped with enough insights to start creating your own reports and use these templates to your advantage.

13. Learn & optimize where needed  

This last best practice is often overlooked, but it is of uppermost importance when it comes to achieving a successful reporting process over time. Once your social media reports are generated, you should meet up with your team and find improvement opportunities in the process. This way, you can optimize your strategies and ensure your analytical efforts are successful.

What Should Be Included In A Social Media Report?

We’ve covered 13 best practices for building efficient social media reports. Now, to complement this information, we will outline some key elements that should not be missed from the process. Of course, the data you add will depend on the type of analysis as well as the audience. Your boss or clients might need a more general approach to understand the success of your strategies, while your teammates might need something more detailed to use as support for their own work. That said, there are a few elements that should be there no matter what, and we list them below. 

• Goals and targets : The first element that can’t be missed on a social media tracking report is your general goals and targets. This represents the journey that you are going to take to reach a final strategic objective. It is what will let you understand where you need to improve and if you are going on the right path. Now, setting targets and goals is not an easy task. They should be attainable and realistic for the organization. If you want to dig deeper into this, take a look at our KPI targets blog post.
• Content metrics: Arguably, one of the most important elements to include in a social media report is content metrics. The way your audience receives your content will be the indicator that they are engaged with your brand. By looking at these types of indicators, you can understand if they prefer video, audio, or image if they enjoy influencers, and much more. You can also compare the interactions with paid content vs. organic one. We list some of these metrics below. 
• Reach : Following on the same line, including your reach, is also a very important element. Essentially, reach refers to the number of unique people who saw your post. A high reach means you are posting relevant content at a time your audience is active. Businesses calculate the reach for a specific post with the following formula: post reach ÷ total followers x 100 = post reach. 
• Impressions : The impressions are the number of times your content is displayed. Unlike the reach that only considers a unique view, the impressions consider every time your post is seen. A person can provide multiple impressions to a post without even interacting with it. This is valuable information to understand the value of your content. If you have 1000 impressions but no interaction, then something might need some optimization. 
• Engagement and interactions : Your engagement rate is another important factor to include, as it will tell you how satisfied and loyal your audience is. The engagement can be broken down into smaller metrics known as interactions. Interactions can be anything from clicks, likes, sharing, or commenting on a post. Naturally, this is critical data as it can help you find improvement opportunities in your own strategies. 
• Achievements: Since you outline your goals and targets, it is only natural also to show when you achieved them. This is essential information as it will serve as an overview to understand the success of your entire SM strategy and at what pace you are meeting your objectives. You can include any type of achievement that works towards your general objectives, rather its a positive comment or a follower increase. This is especially useful for agencies doing client reporting as you need to show progress to your clients on a regular basis. 
• Opportunities: Just like you include your wins, you should also include opportunities that are discovered through analyzing all the data you have in hand. For example, you can see through analyzing your comment section that customers would like to have an Instagram highlight story that answers key questions regarding your products or services. This presents a great opportunity to offer them a more personalized experience and boost engagement. 
• Customer demographics : Another critical element to include is customer demographics. This includes any important information regarding your target audiences, such as the language they speak, age ranges, gender, location, and more. With this knowledge in hand, you can segment your customers and offer targeted campaigns that match their needs and preferences. This is also a good way to select influencers that will be appealing to your audience. 
• Customer reviews : Customers are the backbone of any organization. If they are not happy with the way things are done, it will significantly affect your performance. With that in mind, including customer reviews or feedback in your social media reports is of great value. These reviews can be analyzed with the help of text analytics and extract conclusions about the general sentiment. Here you can pinpoint specific areas in which your customers are not entirely satisfied and exploit the ones in which they are. This is especially true for businesses that sell through their social channels. 

Discover Our Top Social Media Report Examples

By now, it’s clear just how valuable social reports are for modern businesses looking to make a real impact with their marketing efforts. To help put this into perspective, here is a selection of real-life social media reports examples for your viewing pleasure. With these user-friendly online dashboards , you will see how each interface is intuitive, navigable, and simple to customize.

1. Social Media Marketing Report Example 

Before diving into the specific examples of each social media channel, we want to go deeper into the benefits of displaying all your data in one place with this powerful KPI scorecard showcasing relevant metrics on four platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. 

**click to enlarge**

In the example above, we see charts tracking a set of relevant metrics for each platform, such as followers, views/impressions, interactions, and engagement. Every single one of these metrics performs against a target and a comparison with the previous period. At the bottom of each chart, you also have a graph showcasing CTR fluctuations for a 6 months period. By looking at these numbers, you can see if specific strategies that you implemented are working to achieve your goals; for example, we see that Twitter has problems with the number of clicks. Here, you can investigate deeper and see if the content wasn’t interesting for your audience or if maybe it would work better in another type of channel. 

This social media campaign report template can be useful for several scenarios in social media reporting. First, it can serve as a tool to present to clients or managers that want to have access to the live performance of their social media. For this purpose, the simple visuals in red and green can provide insights immediately about positive or negative goals and achievements. Second, as we mentioned before, having an overview of all these platforms’ progress together in one place will save you time that you can invest in deeper analysis to improve your strategies. Finally, this KPI scorecard can also be useful for SMM departments that hold meetings to track the progress of their strategy since the dashboard gives them a quick summary of KPIs to support their discussions.  

Primary KPIs:

• Average Order Value
• Average Time To Conversion
• Engagement Rate

2. Social Media Engagement Report 

**click to enlarge** 

As you’ve probably learned by now, knowing your audience is a key requirement to be successful with your SM efforts. Our template above provides a 360-view of audience-related indicators as well as engagement metrics to understand if your content is successful or not. Plus, the template can be filtered by platform to get a detailed view of each channel. 

Taking a deeper look into this example, we can see that, while new followers are way higher than lost followers, there is still a long way to go to meet the follower target, especially on Instagram. A similar situation is happening with mentions where the target of all platforms is halfway through. That being said, these metrics only scratch the surface. It is necessary to take a deeper look into each of them to understand if these values are truly positive or negative. Filtering the dashboard by a specific platform can be a good way to start. We’ll discuss vanity metrics in detail later in the post. 

Primary KPIs: 

• Average Clicks per Post
• Average Shares per Post
• New vs. Lost Followers

3. Social Media Reports For Facebook

Facebook is the most widespread social channel in the world. With billions of users across the world, tracking and analyzing social activities on this channel is essential. Here we deliver a sample social media report for your Facebook page and another one for Facebook post management.

a) Facebook Page Dashboard

This report template is dedicated to the world’s largest social network – Facebook. With 1.47 billion people that login daily, this network is still on top of search engines, with 78% of American consumers that have discovered retail products to buy just on this network. This is an astonishing potential that, if used wisely, can ensure sustainable company development. For this reason, the reporting practice becomes even more important since it can provide the exact numbers on how your company is developing on this social network.

As Facebook has its own set of rules, practices, and metrics, this invaluable report template offers a real insight into page views, behaviors, interactions, priceless follow demographics, likes, engagements, and a host of other essential information that will help you refine your Facebook marketing strategy.

• Number of Fans
• Follower Demographics
• Page Views by Sources
• Actions on Page

To find out more about this social media report template, explore our Facebook dashboards in greater detail.

b) Facebook Post Dashboard

Our rundown of social media reporting dashboards wouldn't be complete without taking a closer look at the post level of this social network. While monitoring the big picture of the overall Facebook page is essential, analyzing posts will deliver even more value to your social strategies.

Our template begins with a simple overview of the number of impressions and the average values of metrics such as reach per post, engagement rate, and CTR. That way, you can get an overview of how your posts are performing, but you might want to follow up with more details. That's why, in this example, you can see additional Facebook KPIs visualized in a clean and straightforward way: the average amount of impressions per post, post reactions, top 3 posts by CTR, and average engagement per post. These metrics can tell you a number of things: what type of posts work best, what kind of reactions you generate from your audience, and how many people see your posts, among other important elements, to create a comprehensive social data story.

• Reach by Post Type
• Post Engagement Rate
• Click-through-rate (CTR)

c) Facebook Ads Dashboard 

Our third and last Facebook example is tracking relevant details regarding ad development. As of the beginning of 2021, Facebook was recognized as the most popular social media platform for ad marketing, with 93% of SM managers using it to promote their businesses. That said, using this Facebook for advertising is not an easy task. It requires constant monitoring and optimization of campaigns, not to mention being constantly on track with algorithm changes and other developments. 

The template above aims to assist marketers in performing all these tasks in the most efficient way possible. By providing insights into relevant metrics such as ad costs, interactions, and general performance, users can extract relevant conclusions to make their ads targeted and efficient. For instance, you can look at the costs per conversion and per click of the different devices and platforms, such as mobile or desktop, and see which one is performing better. 

• Ad Impressions & Frequency
• CPM & CTR of Facebook Ads
• Cost per Conversion

4. LinkedIn Social Media Report Samples

If you want your company to thrive in online social settings, you need to develop and manage a LinkedIn account. LinkedIn has numerous benefits, and it's considered the number one platform for business-related social communication. To steer your success on this invaluable network, we have prepared 2 social media reporting templates that you can use for your potential online business influence.

a) LinkedIn Company Page Dashboard

LinkedIn is undoubtedly the planet’s premier professional network, and the second of our social media report templates focuses solely on this ever-expanding platform. With more than 500 million members , of about 61 million users are senior-level influencers, the potential in the B2B environment increases each year. That's just the tip of the iceberg on why tracking this social platform is of utmost importance. Let's see how this can be done in our example.

A prime monthly social media report example (although it's entirely possible to track metrics and interactions on a daily or weekly social media report), our LinkedIn reporting dashboard offers comprehensive information on company update frequency. Follower demographics, engagement rates, and more – all geared towards remaining relevant, present, and growing those all-important professional relationships on a consistent basis.

• Followers’ Demographics
• Number of Followers
• Impressions & Reach
• Company Update Stats

To discover more about this particular report example, explore our LinkedIn dashboards & templates in more depth.

b) LinkedIn Individual Profile Dashboard

Not just important for your company's profile but the individual as well, LinkedIn is one of the networks where you can easily find company influencers and connect with numerous peers across the globe. Individual profile users can benefit from such a dashboard since your business profile on LinkedIn can generate valuable results not just for your company but for your individual efforts as well.

This social media metrics report template is created with the help of a dashboard generator , where you can also find numerous other templates and easily start building your own dashboard or report. Metrics based on post and profile views monitored across specified weeks will immediately let you know how your published content performed over the course of time, how well is received, and do you need to adjust your strategies. This is not only crucial for companies, but if you're striving to brand your name and develop your personal presence, you need this dashboard in your life.

Another LinkedIn KPI , the 3 most recent updates, will remind you of what did you recently publish, and if you see a spike, you might want to consider taking a closer look at those posts.

• Viewer Information
• Contact & Network Growth
• Profile Views by Job Title
• Post Views & Engagements

c) LinkedIn KPI Dashboard

So far, we’ve covered examples for the LinkedIn company page and for your individual page. For our third and last social media LinkedIn report, we will cover an example that focuses on key metrics any organization needs in order to understand its progress, such as Impressions, Link Clicks, Engagement, Social Actions, Engagement Rate, Followers Gained, Number of Posts, etc.

This level of insight allows organizations to get a holistic overview of their strategic efforts and spot any improvement opportunities that can be backed by data. This way, they can avoid shooting in the dark and wasting resources on uninformed strategies and content. The template also differentiates interactions between sponsored and organic posts, so you can easily understand how each of them performs separately. 

• Follower’s demographics 
• Social Actions 

5. Twitter Social Media Monthly Report Templates

Twitter is another social platform that companies and individuals can use to their advantage, depending on the type of brand they want to build . The content aspect that this channel has established forced brands across the world to keep their message short and clear. This type of content revolutionized online communication and is still popular today. If used correctly, this is a platform that can benefit the business in no time.

Let's start by explaining in more detail a social media metrics report template focused on Twitter performance.

a) Tweet Performance Dashboard

Twitter remains one of the most popular and relevant social networking platforms on the planet, and the third of our reporting examples drills down into what makes the platform tick – the tweets. There are more than 500 million tweets sent each day, mixed with the fact that Twitter users are 38% more likely to post opinions about brands and products than other social media users, which makes this platform perfect for reaching out to customers. Let's take a look at our template to see what kind of reports we can extract.

This is a social media performance report template that is certain to enhance your Twitter marketing strategy. The dashboard tracks key activities over a 30-day period while offering a balanced mix of KPIs that will help you boost engagement and streamline your promotional strategy on a continual basis. This is a KPI report example that you should take note of, particularly if you’re looking to achieve total Twitter domination in your niche.

• Average Number of Link Clicks
• Average Engagement Rate
• Average Number of Impressions
• Top 5 Tweets by Engagement

To discover more about this template and others like it, browse our Twitter dashboards & templates.

b) Twitter Ads Dashboard

If you want to succeed in your marketing efforts, performing paid advertisements on Twitter is one of our suggestions you might want to look into. The potential of this network is undeniable, and by boosting your online social efforts, you can improve your company's bottom line exponentially. Our Tweet Ads dashboard will show you how.

This dashboard, created with social media reporting software, focuses on the most important metrics for managing successful advertising efforts: the total budget spent, the number of impressions, link clicks, and the average values per day for the past month. Looking at a monthly level, you can gain a better understanding of your overall performance but don't forget to generate the daily view of the funnel, just like on our dashboard. That way, you will have a more detailed overview of which days were more successful so that you can adjust your strategies accordingly.

• CPM of Twitter Ads 
• Result Rate of Twitter Ads
• Cost per Result

c) Twitter KPI Dashboard

Last, in our social media analytics examples for Twitter, we have one that focuses on metrics related to your follower's behaviors and preferences. Success on Twitter is all about understanding the tone of the platform and what works best for your audience. The more you know about them, the more you can implement successful strategies to increase their loyalty and engagement. 

With that in mind, our template provides metrics that assist you on that journey. Which includes your gained and lost followers, the topics of interest by gender, and the most successful hashtags, among other things. This gives you a complete picture of your audience demographics as well as their interests which allows you to make informed decisions for your future strategies. 

• Interests of Followers
• Hashtag Performance

6. Social Media Report Templates For YouTube

YouTube is a social network focused on videos. We have seen numerous cases where videos go viral; hence, this network shouldn't be disregarded that easily. In fact, YouTube leads the way in regard to video platforms in the world but is also the second-largest search engine right after Google. The potential is indisputable. We will start with an example of a monthly social media report for video performance.

a) YouTube Video Performance Dashboard

YouTube is the top video platform in the world, and that's a fact. With more than 1.9 billion logged-in monthly users , you can navigate the platform in a total of 80 different languages and over 91 countries and reach more 18-49 year-olds than on any broadcast or Cable TV network. These astonishing facts put YouTube also as the second largest search engine and the third most visited site after Google and Facebook. That being said, the monitoring and reporting of this network are invaluable for any video marketing strategy.

One of our social media report templates of the video variety, this YouTube dashboard, will help you improve your video-based marketing efforts.

Offering key metrics on viewer engagement as well as retention, this social media analytics report example will allow you to improve the visual content you produce as well as tailor it to the needs, preferences, and interests of your target audience.

Plus, KPIs like total watch time and video views will help you understand what is and isn’t working, allowing you to make essential tweaks to your YouTube strategy over time. A report example that every business should explore, regardless of industry or sector.

• Total Watch Time
• Total Number of Video Views
• Viewer Retention
• Video Engagement

To find out more about this reporting template and others like it, explore our mix of YouTube dashboard examples & templates.

b) YouTube Channel Performance Dashboard

While monitoring your video performance is essential, your channel performance is another important element in your social strategy, and we will now explain why and how you can use these notions to your own advantage.

This social media marketing report template focuses on the analytics part of your channel production. You need to deliver results in order to be successful on YouTube, and producing videos only will not suffice. The data behind the channel will tell you if your audience resonates with your message or if you need further adjustments. An operational dashboard focused on your channel success will answer all questions related to your subscribers and traffic.

c) YouTube KPI Dashboard

Just as we saw with the examples of our other social media platforms, knowing your audience is the recipe for success when it comes to SM marketing. It is a waste of time and resources just to create content because we think it's cool instead of actually generating material that is interesting for your audience. This is especially true for YouTube, where you need to make sure you provide your subscribers with interesting videos that will give them added value. 

With that in mind, our template displays the needed data to help you understand your audience on a deeper level. By providing insights into subscribers' demographics as well as their favorite video type, you can easily generate targeted strategies that will most likely be successful. For instance, here we can see that 42% of this company’s subscribers use mobile devices, which means all videos should be fully optimized for those devices. 

• Subscribers’ Demographics
• Top 5 Videos by Views

d) YouTube Growth And Revenue Dashboard

Our last YouTube report example focuses on a channel that monetizes its content and provides a long–term view of critical indicators, including the CPM and RPM. The value of this template lies in the fact that it can be filtered to view the performance of the entire channel or a specific video. This way, you can understand which type of content has more monetary value and boost it to maximize the returns. 

The report is divided into two sections. The first one contains three charts showing the monthly development of the views and watch time, the RPM, and the CPM and playback CPM. Getting this long-term view can help the business identify high-performing months and replicate that kind of content but also identify improvement opportunities in low-performing months. This information can be complemented with the second section of the template, which provides a summary of the previously portrayed metrics for the top 10 best-performing videos. 

• Revenue Per Mille (RPM)
• Playback-based CPM
• Positive & Negative Comments
• New & Lost Followers

Social Media Reporting Common Challenges & Mistakes To Avoid

So far, we’ve gone through a list of benefits, best practices, and examples of modern social media reporting. While the process might sound straightforward, it doesn’t come without challenges. Many organizations fail in their data-driven efforts because they ignore important details that can bring big negative results in the long run. These details relate to inaccuracies in the information, communication between teams, but also how you handle sensitive customer data. 

To help you avoid falling into any of these pitfalls, we put together 5 of the most common SM reporting mistakes and provide ways in which you can avoid them. 

1. Using vanity metrics

We’ve already talked about the importance of picking the metrics you’ll need to monitor, analyze and optimize your social strategies. That said, picking the right performance indicators is not an easy task, especially when it comes to social media, where many businesses end up tracking a bunch of vanity metrics to measure their success. These are indicators that often offer a positive result but don’t provide any further insights into the true success of your campaigns. Common examples of vanity metrics include follower counts, likes, or shares. While these do provide a level of insight, they don’t really tell you what kind of return you are getting from your efforts. That is not to say you should discard them entirely, but use them as a complement to other more actionable indicators such as CTR, conversion rates, or leads. That way, you’ll get a brother more accurate picture of your performance. 

2. Using the wrong types of charts

This next mistake is more about reporting in general, but it is so important that we couldn’t leave it out of the list. Choosing the wrong chart type to display your data can lead to misinterpretation during the analysis process, which can then lead the businesses to generate inaccurate strategies that will end in a significant waste of resources and time. To prevent this from happening, it is important to think of what you are trying to show. For instance, if you are trying to show relationships between two variables, then a bubble chart or a scatter plot would be your best choice. On the other hand, if you are trying to show a comparison over time, then a line, column, or area chart is your best choice. 

If you are feeling a bit lost with this topic, we put together a lengthy and insightful guide on the different types of graphs and charts with real-world examples of when to use them. 

3. Cherry-picking data

This next mistake is considered one of the most common misleading statistics techniques in the analytical world. Cherry-picking data means you only pick and choose results that favor your analysis goals. While this technique has been purposefully used in many industries, including the media and advertising, it can also happen by mistake. Many times, businesses or teams who are not too familiar with data analysis tend only to showcase positive results to clients or managers. This is critical because it can not only mislead the audience about the bigger picture, but it can also hide valuable trends and patterns that can extremely valuable to the development of your SM strategies. For instance, going back to our vanity metrics point, you can generate a report showing clients that followers increased 20% after the last campaign, hiding that only 1% of that 20% ended up converting. This means the campaign was actually not that successful and hid improvement opportunities that could be uncovered from the data. 

4. Using only historical data

Traditional means of reporting involved the use of historical data, which was displayed in a static document, often in Excel or PowerPoint. This is no longer enough for businesses that want to stand out from the competition. Today, the reporting process has mutated into an interactive, real-time approach that enables marketers and social media managers to make important strategic decisions as soon as something comes up. For instance, you might generate a report showing the real-time performance of a campaign. After a week since the campaign was launched, you look at the report and realize that the numbers are not developing as expected. This provides the opportunity to tweak the campaign before the whole budget is spent. Something that would not be possible if you used only historical data. 

5. Ignoring data privacy and security 

Last but not least, we have a challenge that is becoming increasingly important. We are talking about security and privacy. 5 years have passed since the Cambridge Analytica scandal taught the world about the importance of the protection of sensitive data gathered on social media. Since then, security and privacy have become a top priority for consumers, and ensuring their information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands should be a top priority. To prevent this from happening, you should invest in the right tools and processes to ensure your follower's sensitive data is protected when sharing and generating reports. This involves setting roles and responsibilities for who can access and manipulate sensitive data as well as ensuring secure sharing methods such as password-protected URLs and others. 

Key Takeaways On Social Media Reporting 

While it may be a competitive landscape, social platforms are potentially prosperous, profitable playing fields for brands that know how to use them to their advantage. It's no secret that the huge potential of utilizing these networks, with both organic and paid opportunities, should be one of the top priorities for companies that know how to target their audiences and create performance-based analytical reports . For that reason, a neat reporting practice is an invaluable resource to obtain the benefits of your social networking strategy fully.  Embrace the power of social reporting today, and you’ll reap endless rewards tomorrow – and long into the future.

We hope you enjoyed and learned the benefits and the power of creating these reports. Here we leave you a small summary of the benefits and best practices for your social media analytics efforts. 

Why Is Social Media Reporting Important? 

• Smarter content creation 
• Results-driven scheduling 
• Tailored targeting
• Customized tracking and performance measurement
• Identifying trends and new opportunities
• Delivering added value to audiences 
• Prove the value of your strategy 
• Identify seasonality effects 

13 Best Practices To Create Powerful Social Media Reports: 

• Define your stakeholders
• Choose the right metrics
• Provide competitive context
• Concentrate on impactful data 
• Benefit from text analysis
• Visualize all your data in one place
• Follow design best practices 
• Identify your reporting schedule 
• Automate your reports
• Share your reports
• Pick the right reporting tools
• Integrate predictions in your report 
• Learn & optimize where needed 

For more insights into the virtues of data analytics, you can explore the 250 KPI examples we have carefully prepared.

And if you want to tackle even deeper into social networks and reports, you can try our social media reporting software for a 14-day trial completely free!

• How to write a social media report

How To Write A Social Media Report [Template Included]

Creating a social media report is a lot of work —especially when you have multiple social media marketing campaigns going on.

On top of pulling data from different channels (just the thought of hopping from one social media analytics tool to another makes our head spin!), you also need to identify the most successful ones and show clients they’re getting their money’s worth.

Want to spend less time creating effective reports? You’ve landed on the right corner of the internet.

Today, you’ll learn how to write a social media report (with a free template) that retains clients for good. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

What is a Social Media Report?

• Social media report template

How to Create a Social Media Report?

What should be included in a social media report, wrapping up: how do you analyze social media.

Alrighty-o, let’s begin.

A social media report is a document that shows your social networks’ performance over a period of time. It includes crucial   social media data like engagement, reach, and conversions.

If you work in marketing agencies, you’d know this report also serves as a project deliverable—it tells clients the results and returns on investment (ROI) from your collaboration.

In other words, a social media report plays a massive role in retention ! You’re not only presenting the results of your marketing efforts. What you’re really doing is proving to clients the priceless value you bring to the table.

Based on our experience working with marketing agencies, here are the three qualities that make an effective social media report:

• Attractive: Beautiful visuals attract people’s desire to read content by 80% . So, if you want to boost engagement, start adding colors, graphs, and unique themes to represent your agency.
• Client-friendly: Your social media report shouldn’t show endless rows and columns. Ideally, it should be easy to digest and understand—preferably in a few minutes.
• Shareability: Time is of the essence. It should take a few quick clicks to share your social media report, whether it’s to your boss for their approval or a client for review. Bonus if you can share it in various formats (e.g., PDF, email, URL).

Take this social media report, for instance. It pulls data from multiple social media channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and youtube.

DashThis is a social media reporting tool that gathers data from all your social media channels in one automated report. Try this free social media report template with your own data .

Notice how easy it is to digest the data right away? There’s no overwhelming data insight (looking at you, Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets). Instead, here’s what you see: Insights that show how you’re doing and what needs to be improved. Just the key metrics you need for your social media analytics report.

Now that’s what we call an impressive social media report.

Sign up for your DashThis 15-day FREE trial today. Save up to 10 hours of work a week and create your social media reports in the blink of an eye. No credit card is required.

Creating social media reports doesn’t need to be a mind-numbing process. In this section, we’ll prove to you that it requires only a few minutes.

Let’s imagine you’re creating a social media report for a B2C ecommerce client that hired you for Facebook Insights and Instagram Insights (for the months June-July 2021).

Option 1. Use a Social Media Reporting Template

Cobbling analytics across multiple social media platforms eats up a lot of time. Here’s a time-saving trick we recommend:

• Select your preferred integrations (in this case, Facebook Insights, and Instagram Insights)
• Choose the social media report template (all popular KPIs are directly included in all templates)
• Pick your desired KPIs under Preset Widgets

DashThis’ preset widgets help you save time from manually adding KPIs to your social media report. Pro Tip: If you can’t find the KPIs you want, create them with Custom Widgets.

Drag and drop the KPI widgets as you like. 

You have full control of the layout and look of your social media report.

Option 2. Create a Social Media Report From Scratch 

Prefer to build your social media report using a blank canvas? Here’s how to do it: 

• Choose your preferred integrations (in this case, Facebook Insights, and Instagram Insights);
• Click Blank Periodic Dashboard;
• Select your desired KPIs under Preset Widgets or Custom Widgets.

Pro Tip : If you want to add comments and a header in your report manually, click Static Widgets .

Then drag, drop and tweak your report accordingly. 

Bonus Tip : Want to add an extra oomph to your social media reporting? Check out our white label options to get custom reports to fit your brand. 

You’ll even get a personalized link branded to your business' URL

Here are three final tips to make the most out of DashThis:

1- Save Your Template for Future Use

Customize an existing dashboard or create a new one from scratch, DashThis enables you to save it as a template for future use. You can even clone it and select your preferences accordingly. You'll have a monthly report with all your company page data, social media campaigns metrics, from all your best social media channels, all in one automated report.

2- Automate Your Deliverable Strategy 

DashThis offers three sharing options: 

• Shareable URL link;
• Email (Tip: To automate your report, select your desired time frame under Frequency ).

Choose the most convenient option for your client and share it away. 

3- Leverage the Groups Option

Maybe your client has two different marketing teams, one for email marketing, another for PPC ads. Or maybe your client has multiple types of reports. If that’s the case, create different groups and drag and drop the relevant dashboards.

Copy the URL link and share the entire content in the group with the right members. They can access all the dashboards included. 

Earlier on, we talked about the qualities of an effective social media report. But there’s a lot to unpack on how they actually look like. Here’s a deeper look at what you should include.

1- Important Metrics 

If the layout is the appetizer, then social media analytics is the main dish. 

The KPIs are the most critical part of the report, as it shows whether your social media marketing strategy is working.

Here are ten examples of social media metrics ranging from brand awareness to follower engagement and influencer marketing data:

• Shares or retweets
• Post engagement rate
• Click-through rate
• Number of followers
• New followers
• Top performing posts
• demographics data
• Industry benchmarks

2- Graphs, Charts, and Sections

Images help clients visualize the data points in their social media marketing reports. (Trust us, add them in. Your client will thank you for it.)

Colourful graphs help stakeholders—from marketers to clients—digest and understand an entire social media strategy at a single glance

3- Comments

This feature prevents endless back and forth of messaging.

Here’s what we recommend: Add comments and notes in your dashboard to explain the social media performance to clients (think of them as a social media executive summary).

You can even add your most successful Instagram analytics social posts to reinforce clients of the great work you do.

Select Static Widgets > Comments to add images or an executive summary. And don’t worry, there’s no limit! You have the option to expand the widget to the right size.

Adding notes in the report itself will save you the extra step of recording videos or emailing clients.

A social media report does more than listing data. 

At its core, it tracks and measures important metrics, so you can analyze which posts and campaigns are working. You’ll know how to adjust your strategies accordingly (without ever wondering, “Gosh, I hope this works out.”), allocate the right budget, and double down to optimize your social media performance. For an agency as well as for any social media manager, that makes a whole lot of a difference in your overall performance.

More importantly, it educates clients on the ROI of your digital marketing efforts and proves to them the priceless value you bring to the table.

Grab your free template here and customize it with your data

Curious to explore our all-in-one marketing reporting tool? Sign up for your FREE DashThis 15-day trial today. 

DashThis is more than a social media reporting tool. If you want an easier way to analyze your metrics—SEO, PPC ads, Google Analytics, or whatnot—so you have a clear overview of your target audience’s entire journey, try our tool today.

You only need to create your report once. Choose a template, select your favorite KPIs (instead of manually adding them), and save it for future use. When you use DashThis, you save up to 10 hours of work a week—true story, that’s what a   client told us! 

Whether it’s optimizing the time you spend on social media management in your agency or gathering results from a content strategy in the long or short-term, you can create one report that includes them ALL , with DashThis .

DashThis is the power behind thousands of reporting dashboards created by and delivered for agencies and digital marketers every month.  Try it out for yourself!

Get the perfect social media report in seconds!

How to use client reporting to create recurring business

Don’t miss out!

Follow us on social media to stay tuned!

Automate your reports!

Bring all your marketing data into one automated report.

Get Started Today!

Made in Canada

DashThis is a brand owned by Moment Zero inc

Copyright © 2011-2024

• Social Media Analytics
• Social Media Manager
• Social Media Reports
• Social Media Management
• Social Media Marketing

How to Create a Social Media Report: Your Walk-Through Guide

Written by Anna Sonnenberg

Last modified Oct. 25 2023

Table of Contents

Is social media reporting your least favorite task of the week, month, or quarter? Wish you could compile analytics more efficiently so you can share actionable insights with your team or clients?

Creating reports doesn’t have to be as annoying or time-consuming as you might think. If it’s a current challenge, you’re not alone in the struggle. According to a recent Forbes article , client-facing data quality and also the measurement of PR are two of the 15 biggest challenges that agencies currently face.

With the right social media reporting tool, you can automatically pull analytics, benchmark results, and share takeaways that stakeholders will actually read and understand.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about social media reports—from essential analytics to efficient workflows. That way you can start creating social media reports that people will actually read—and like.

What Is a Social Media Report?

Social media reports collect and organize analytics from social profiles and marketing campaigns. Although some include raw data, most reports focus on visual displays—such as graphs and charts. Many also include marketers’ insights and actionable recommendations.

For most social media marketers, the key to creating a social media report that stakeholders actually want to review is presenting the information in an understandable way. That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter to the organization and interpreting the data to give team members useful takeaways.

Why You Should Create a Social Media Marketing Report

A social media report offers tons of value for organizations of every size and in any industry. Take a look at a few of the most important reasons to create reports for your team.

Track progress toward goals

For most organizations, social media—like all marketing efforts—has its own set of goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). When you prepare social media reports, you can easily see whether you’ve reached your goals or how efficiently you’re progressing toward them.

If you find that you’ve reached your social media marketing goals , you can suggest revised KPIs. That way, you can continue to move your organization forward and get value from your social media marketing efforts.

In contrast, if you find that you’re struggling to reach your goals, you can suggest methods for improving performance or rethinking KPIs. For example, you might recommend investing more in content production or influencer marketing.

Establish performance benchmarks

Working toward specific goals is essential for most social media marketers. But in competitive or fast-paced industries, it’s easy to become overly focused on one-off goals and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Social media reports can help you keep track of both current goals and long-term performance. Many social media report templates feature comparative overviews that show how your social media profiles or campaigns are performing compared to previous time periods.

Those comparative reports allow you to establish benchmarks for profiles and campaigns. They also allow you to keep social media performance moving in the right direction over the course of the year, even when you have short-term goals to achieve.

Discover top-performing content

Creating content that works with (rather than against) each social media platform’s algorithm is essential for success. But if you aren’t paying attention to what’s performing well, you could waste time and resources on content that just doesn’t work.

With a comprehensive social media report, you can easily identify top-performing content based on the most important metrics for your organization. In other words, you can use impressions, engagement, clicks, or other metrics to find your top content.

Using what you’ve learned, your social media team can create more of the content that works—and produce less of what doesn’t deliver results. Then you can continue to make progress toward your goals while feeling confident about how you’ve invested resources.

Find out what and when to publish

Does your audience respond better to videos, photos, link shares, or text posts? In addition to showing you the topics your followers like best, social media reports can reveal the types of content that generate the best results.

If your team can’t decide when to post content, social media reports can give you data-backed answers. Many tools can report on user activity, revealing the times of day when followers tend to engage with your content.

You can use these insights to make data-driven decisions about when to publish content. Then you can create a schedule for your social media content and reliably connect with the maximum number of followers.

Quantify return on investment (ROI)

Whether you manage social media for your employer’s corporate accounts or for agency clients’ profiles, you have to be able to demonstrate the value of your work. There are two key reasons why quantifying return on investment (ROI) is so important.

Your boss and your clients need to know what types of content and campaigns generate the most revenue for the business. With this information in hand, your marketing team can develop campaigns that align with business goals.

Different Types of Social Media Analytics Reports

The social media report category includes a wide range of formats and schedules.

Let’s look at some of the most helpful kinds of reports you can create for stakeholders. Keep in mind that you don’t have to limit yourself to just one. Instead, you can produce them all or combine some as necessary.

These types of social media reports focus on various performance aspects:

• Audience reports focus on follower growth, impressions, and brand mentions
• Content reports center on post engagement and content recommendations
• Community reports quantify engagement and team performance
• Competitor reports compare your profile’s metrics to other brands in your space
• ROI reports reveal the value of your content and campaigns

You can prepare reports at various intervals:

• Campaign reports monitor performance for specific social media initiatives
• Weekly reports track performance from week to week
• Monthly reports summarize performance over the course of a calendar month
• Quarterly reports help marketing teams track longer-term goals
• Annual reports wrap up performance for calendar or fiscal years

10 Key Items to Add to Your Social Media Reports

Whether you’re preparing a report for a social media campaign or for a certain time frame, it’s helpful to include the key components below. If your boss or your clients prefer to focus on particular aspects—like audience or content only—you can omit irrelevant elements.

1. Audience growth

Is your social media audience growing, or have your accounts lost followers overall? Has your account growth been steady compared to the previous week, month, or quarter? Where have your new fans come from—organic content or paid advertising?

An audience growth chart can answer all these questions and help you stay on track toward your goals. When you use Agorapulse to prepare reports, you also have the option to view both total growth and daily variations.

2. Impressions and reach

Does your content have the reach you expected? How do your organic and paid impressions compare? Has your content generated any viral impressions?

By monitoring impressions, you can make sure your content is reaching your audience. Using what you’ve learned, you can determine whether to allocate resources to paid or organic campaigns.

3. Engagement overview

From likes and comments to direct messages (DMs) and shares, engagement analytics can help you ensure that your content is truly connecting with your audience. Agorapulse’s engagement chart automatically breaks down follower interactions by type and day so you can easily see when and how your content resonated.

4. Top-performing content

Which posts are driving the most likes, clicks, or overall engagement? Agorapulse automatically identifies top content based on your preferred metrics. You can also use the content performance chart to sort by reach, engaged users, and other metrics that matter to your stakeholders.

5. Brand awareness

Are you successfully creating buzz around your brand on social media? When you monitor brand awareness, you can track the number of shares and mentions your brand has generated. Using the comparison tool, you can see how brand awareness has changed over time and maintain momentum.

How to Do Brand Monitoring for Your Agency Clients

6. Social listening

Whether you’re running a social media campaign or keeping an eye on industry trends, social listening reports are critical for tracking hashtags. Add campaign, industry, or location hashtags of your choice to the social listening tab in your Agorapulse dashboard and track them in your listening report.

7. Hashtag interactions

How is your audience interacting with the hashtags on your content? With Agorapulse’s hashtag chart, you can quickly assess which hashtags are driving the highest engagement rates so you can make smarter decisions about which to use with future posts.

8. Social Media ROI

With Agorapulse’s ROI tracking tools , you can easily identify which content, campaign, or channel creates the most value for your brand. First, link your website’s Google Analytics account and use Agorapulse’s built-in campaign tracking tools to create UTM parameters.

Then you can go to the ROI tab to monitor all visitors, transactions, and revenue generated by social media content. You can also view these metrics by channel, campaign, landing page, or even team member to gain even more insight into your highest-value efforts.

9. Recommendations

Using Agorapulse’s publishing and user activity reports, you can make informed recommendations to improve social media performance. Find when users are most likely to engage with your published content or DM or mention your brand so you can time your posts and plan your real-time community management more effectively.

10. Insights

Once you’ve reviewed all the components above, it’s time for the final step—your unique insights.

By reviewing your team’s marketing goals and your profiles’ performance, you can share your thoughts and suggest data-driven strategies for creating content, allocating budgets, or launching campaigns.

As a social media manager, you need a way to create social media reports efficiently.

Here are a few options to consider adding to your workflow.

Social media reporting templates

If you’ve ever tried to rely on native analytics from channels like Facebook or Twitter, you’ve probably found that it’s impossible to download graphs and charts. Instead, you’re stuck downloading data in spreadsheets—which you have to organize in a visual format.

An easy way to tackle this issue is to find a social media reporting template that works for your company or clients. Design apps like Canva can help. Search for a template in the app, modify it to work for your brand, and use it to generate a report every week or month.

Keep in mind that this will be incredibly time consuming – particularly if you are managing multiple clients and multiple accounts for each client. You will need to pull the data from each channel, put it into the template or spreadsheet yourself, do any calculations required, create graphics and charts, and still write your insights and recommendations at the end!  There definitely is a much more efficient way to do things – but it requires using a third-party social media tool, rather than the analytics on each platform. But, once you see how much faster the reporting process can be, you won’t ever want to return to using the native analytics, guaranteed.

Social media reporting tools

There are a number of options out there for social media reporting tools, but for the purposes of this article we will show you how Agorapulse reporting works because, well, we think it’s pretty great. (But I will admit we may be a bit biased!)

If we had to pick some other tools that can be useful for social media reporting, we’d have to say that Google Analytics is definitely a must-have because it helps you track the entire buyers journey more accurately. And, by the way, you can integrate your Google Analytics data with the data in Agorapulse with click of a button.

But that’s not the only reason we think Agorapulse is a great social media reporting tool…

Social Media Reporting With Agorapulse

As a complete social media solution, Agorapulse makes the reporting process easy. Take a look at how this social media reports tool can help you streamline your workflow creating reports for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles.

Automatic scheduling

Does your team need frequent social media marketing reports? You can save time by using Agorapulse’s automated reports tool. In your Agorapulse dashboard, go to the social profile settings. Select a profile and go to the Automatic scheduled reports tab. Then click the Schedule new report button.

Give your report a name and choose the frequency. If you opt for a monthly report, it will automatically send on the second of the month. Weekly reports go out on Mondays.

Next, choose a format. PDF and PowerPoint reports are typically best for stakeholders, while CSV reports are better for team members who need to process raw data.

Then add all the recipients for the report. You can add any team members who share your Agorapulse subscription. You can also enter email addresses for external stakeholders like clients and colleagues in other departments.

Finally, configure the settings for the report, so it’s easy for your team to interpret. You can adjust the time zone, date, and time format, and even when your weeks start.

When you’re finished, click the Save button. Your report will automatically send weekly or monthly.

Do you want to review reports or add insights before sharing them with your team? You can always send reports to yourself automatically—and then forward them to your team along with your recommendations.

Publishing labels for campaign insights

Agorapulse automatically tracks all the content you publish on social media. But you have the option to create campaign reports that feature select content only.

You can lay the groundwork for these reports by using your Agorapulse dashboard to add publishing labels. Then you can create a Power Report based on any publishing label to build a custom campaign report. (More about Power Reports down below!)

Team tracking for optimized performance

Looking for a way to incentivize your team or keep everyone on track? With a social media reporting tool, you can monitor performance automatically.

On the community management tab, Agorapulse automatically tracks the number of items each team member has reviewed and calculates their average response time. You can use these metrics to ensure your team is responding efficiently.

On the ROI dashboard, Agorapulse displays the website traffic and revenue each team members’ work has contributed. You can use these metrics to see who’s creating the most value for your company or clients.

Power Reports

Is your boss or client looking for specific data rather than a complete social media report? Agorapulse’s Power Reports add-on lets you create a customized report format that includes only the analytics you need—without overwhelming your team with unnecessary information.

To customize your social media report, open the Reports tab in your Agorapulse dashboard. Click the Create a report button in the upper left corner. Then choose a social media reports template.

Note that for all custom reports, you can create custom titles and covers with company logos—which is especially ideal for agencies. You can also schedule custom reports to distribute automatically, similar to the workflow above.

Aggregated report by profile

When you want to see how certain social profiles have affected your brand’s performance, this report can help. Choose at least two profiles, and then select the data you want to display.

This custom report can show a complete overview of your social media activity as well as audience, content, and community management metrics. When creating this report, you can also choose how to determine top-performing content—based on reach or engagement.

Aggregated report by network

If you’d rather focus on the impact of certain social channels, choose this network-based overview instead. You can add up to 12 social profiles to this report, making it a great option for evaluating the overall effect of multiple profiles across a single channel or brand.

While the previous custom report breaks down analytics by individual profiles, this report shows the total impact of all selected profiles. Using this template, you can assess the total effect of your work—from audience growth and engagement to content and publishing.

Label report

Do you need to report on a social media campaign rather than preparing a complete performance overview? When you go to create a custom report, choose Label report and select the publishing labels to include.

Note that you’ll need to add publishing labels to the content you publish via Agorapulse prior to using this workflow. Then you can easily create reports that focus on certain content sources or marketing initiatives.

Individual report

To access detailed social media metrics for one or more profiles, choose Agorapulse’s Individual report option. This option is similar to Agorapulse’s standard reports, but with a couple of key differences. You can opt to omit certain metrics, and the entire report displays in a single, easy-to-scroll interface.

If you add more than one profile to the report, you can toggle between them using the arrows or the dropdown at the top of the dashboard. Like other custom Agorapulse reports, you can also schedule this one to send like clockwork every week or month.

Aggregated and Individual report

When you want to go completely custom, choose the Aggregated and Individual report . Select up to 12 social profiles and decide which aggregated and individual profile analytics to include in the report. Then use the dropdown menu to toggle between sections.

Like other Agorapulse custom reports, this option allows you to choose any comparison period—allowing you to compare performance across months, quarters, years, or other time frames. You can also use the export and schedule tools to share this report with your team.

Wrapping Up What We Learned About Social Media Reports

Manual reporting can be frustrating and arduous. But with the right social media reporting tool, you can access analytics automatically, customize output as necessary, and even schedule ahead for added efficiency.

When you automate much of your social media reporting process, you can devote more energy to analyzing reports, making informed decisions, and developing smarter strategies that make a measurable impact on your company or clients.

Whether you need a simple report or a complete overview of your brand’s social media performance, Agorapulse can help. Create and schedule standard summaries in seconds or use the Power Reports add-on to customize social media reports for your boss, clients, and other essential stakeholders.

Check out our free DEMO to see how Agorapulse can help you schedule, track, and measure all your social media efforts.

More from the blog

How to Deal With Difficult Clients of Social Media Agencies

How to Write a Brand Messaging Guide (and Why You Should!)

How to Get More Clients for Your Social Media Marketing Agency

Keep up to date with social media marketing!

Our newsletter is packed with the hottest posts and latest news in social media.

What to Include In Your Monthly Social Media Reports

What is a social media report?

Why do social media reports and analytics matter, a slide-by-slide template for your monthly social media report.

• Make social media reporting easy with Plann 

No idea how to track your success on social media? We reveal how to dive into your analytics and create winning monthly social media reports.

You’ve created a brand new social media account and have crafted a killer social media strategy. Great! 

But, how effective is your strategy? Is your social media content driving tangible results? Is your audience growing month-on-month?

The power of social media marketing comes from being able to track the impact of your work in real-time and make improvements when needed. And, a monthly social media report can be the perfect way to track the growth of your social media presence and help you refine your social strategy. 

Essentially, by keeping tabs on your businesses’ social media metrics, you’ll not only be able to figure out what’s working, but also identify what needs to be improved. Clear social media reporting is what will enable you to create a winning social media strategy.

No idea where to start with social media analytics and monthly reporting? Let’s walk you through the process of creating your own social media report using real-world examples.

Advanced analytics help you identify what works, discard what doesn’t and build your brand without the guesswork.

Before we dive into the stats and numbers, let’s start with the basics. 

A social media report is a document that shows and records information about your social media activity. It covers everything from the growth of your audience to the performance of your social media content as well as the results from any paid social media campaigns you’ve been running.

The way a social media report is displayed really depends on who will be reading it. If you’re a social media manager presenting results to a client, you might create a visual presentation. However if your report is an internal document for your content team, a few tables of results might be a better use of your time.

In an ideal world, a social media report would have three elements: results, learnings and recommendations. You may need to create many reports to cater to various audiences or purposes and you can choose your reporting scheduling (whether it’s weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly).

How can you tell if your social media content is resonating with your audience? By digging into your social media analytics and creating regular monthly social media reports .

Ultimately, social media reports allow you to benchmark your results, track performance and adjust your social media strategy. These metrics give you concrete proof of whether or not your current approach is working and how to pivot your social media content to boost your reach, drive meaningful engagement and increase your chance of conversion. 

So, which statistics and data should you focus on when creating your monthly social media reports? The answer will most likely be determined by your unique social media goals and objectives. 

Examples of analytics to include in a social media report

Depending on your social media goals, you’ll have a stack of different metrics you’ll want to track in your social media reports. 

Here are some examples of popular metrics to track and what they mean for your social media presence: 

• Followers (and follower growth) indicate the number of new users that are choosing to connect with your brand on social media. While followers can be a vanity metric, it’s still worth tracking how many new users discover and follow your brand to assess how your audience is growing.

• Clicks indicate that the user is interested in the stuff you’re sharing. Clicks direct visitors to a URL and can help to boost traffic to your website (getting your followers one step closer to making a sale, signing up to your mailing list or submitting an enquiry form).

• Reach indicates how many social media users are served your content. The bigger your reach, the more eyeballs your content is getting (and the higher chance you have of converting users into customers at scale).

• Engagements indicate how many users are taking action on your content. It’s important to focus on high-value engagements (such as comments, saves and shares) that indicate high conversion intent. 

The importance of comparing your results over time

Along with tracking the right metrics, being able to review your progress over time helps you understand if your brand is gaining traction on social media. 

By comparing your latest month’s results to the previous month (or the same time last year) you can contrast and benchmark your analytics across time frames. 

Since month durations can vary, it can be helpful to choose a 28-day timeframe for monthly reporting to ensure consistency throughout the entire year.  

Your social media report should be visually appealing and easy to read.  Rather than simply sharing numbers and tables, it’s important to bring your social media reports to life with insights and strategic storytelling. 

To get you started, below is a simple outline for your analytical report. Feel free to mix and combine these sections to develop a unique social media reporting tool that meets the needs of your business or client. 

Always start with an introduction

Your social media report should start with a summary of the purpose of the report, along with the objectives set for your social media marketing. For example, the report should offer a summary of your social media KPIs, goals and benchmarks for each channel.

This will help the reader understand what they can expect in the report, while also giving them enough context to determine the success or failure of the strategy based on the numbers presented in the report. 

Highlight the most important results 

The next step needs to be an overview of the important results that you want the reader to focus on. This should be tied to your social media KPIs and benchmarks. 

Trying dedicating one slide to the most powerful stats from the previous month, including follower growth, accounts reached, engagements, website clicks and even sales from social media. 

For a comprehensive overview and visually-appealing summary to add to your social media reports, you can use Plann’s built-in analytics tool that provides a stack of data across your social media channels. 

Dive into the numbers

Once you’ve given an overview of the most important social media metrics, it’s time to delve deeper into the other results. 

Try focusing on one channel at a time and really dive into this data across your audience and content. A few helpful metrics to track include:

Number of posts published

Top performing posts of the month

• Number of  new followers

• Number of followers lost 

• Number of likes, comments and shares 

• Number of clicks to the website

• Number of story/post views 

Plus, if you’re running ads on social media platforms, there are some other metrics you should add as well:

• Total ad spends 

• Revenue generated from ads

• Number of leads or conversions 

• Engagement on ad posts

By splitting your reporting by organic vs. paid social media activity, you can gather an accurate snapshot of your social media results. 

Celebrate every win

Numbers may not always accurately represent the outcomes of a campaign. Perhaps you made your initial contact with a significant social media influencer. Perhaps a particularly powerful review was received on social media, which you will be able to utilize in future marketing initiatives. 

Include any and all types of achievements that are related to your objectives in your social media report.

Highlight learnings and provide recommendations

This is when you go beyond merely reporting the statistics and truly analyze what the data implies.

For example, instead of just reporting the total number of interactions, you may want to look at the number of engagements by post or follower. This method may assist you in determining the content types and formats that are most effective with your target audience. 

Try to figure out why you received the outcomes you did. Sure, the stats are fascinating, but the reasoning behind the data is what may help you fine-tune your approach and define relevant social media objectives.

By turning your insights into learnings, you can make strategic recommendations about how to boost your results in the months ahead. 

Make social media reporting easy with Plann 

We get it: creating stunning social media reports can take a stack of time and effort. 

This is why we created an advanced social media report builder that can help you skyrocket your growth. In just a few clicks, your team can score in-depth reports that visualize your success on social media.

Plann’s in-built social media reports include advanced analytics tools that can help you discover the fastest path to success too! Sign up for a free 7-day trial of Plann today and you can manage your entire social media reporting from one effortless dashboard.

How to reverse engineer your way social media success

Author:  Richa Sharma

Richa describes herself as an avid dreamer and a curious soul! She is in love with Digital Breakthroughs, Content Marketing, Startup Strategies and so much more.

Get social media insider social media hints, tips & hacks straight to your inbox.

Recommended For You

Your FREE June 2024 Content Planner

The Biggest Social Media Trends To Watch In 2024

The Ultimate Guide To Mastering TikTok And Reels

How To Prompt AI For Engaging Content: Your Comprehensive Guide

How To Get Discovered with Instagram Stories

Done-For-You Content: Engaging Instagram Captions You Can Start Using Right Now!

Latest Blogs

Content Planner

Grow Your Brand

Social Media Strategy

Your June 2024 Social Media Planner

Fast-track your content creation with done-for-you captions, post ideas and customizable templates so you’ll never be left scratching your head about what to post.

Instagram Tips

A Complete Guide To Instagram Influencer Marketing

Diving head first into the world of Influencer Marketing? Here is everything you need to know before you jump.

Content Creation

Your Ultimate Guide to Creating YouTube Shorts

Ready to unlock the potential of YouTube Shorts? We’re rounding up our favorite ways to use the platform to create dynamic and engaging Shorts.

“So much information packed into a small amount of time” As an artist, I always knew TikTok was an important platform for me to be on to connect with potential clients. I left this course feeling so confident and excited to create and grow! Jenn Evans Artist

Getting started with tiktok.

Send us an email

Creating a Social Media Report to Share With Your Boss [Free Toolkit]

For any social media manager, creating a social media report is an invaluable skill. Reporting is what tells you if your social strategy is tracking toward your goals or if you need to make an adjustment.

Equally important is your ability to package and present your findings to your managers and other key stakeholders in order to secure executive buy-in. An established reporting system empowers you to regularly share social insights with leadership in a way that’s understandable—eventually expanding the influence of social media within your organization.

In this toolkit, you’ll find the templates and resources you need to stand up your own internal social dashboards and create a regular reporting system.

This free toolkit features:

• [Template] Internal Social Media Dashboard
• [Worksheet] Social Media Reporting
• [Document] Monthly & Quarterly Reporting Document
• Bonus: Resources to elevate your social media reporting

Download the toolkit to get a head start on your social media reporting today.

View Template

Recommended for you.

• Leveling Up
• Social Media Analytics

Why you need to share an executive summary of your social media reports with leadership

The social media metrics to track in 2024 (and why)

The journey of a data point: Turning numbers into social media intelligence

How to use LinkedIn hashtag analytics to boost content reach

• Now on slide

Build and grow stronger relationships on social

Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

Facebook Advertising Optimization Tool

How to Create a Social Media Report for 2022 [FREE TEMPLATE]

May 13, 2022 Leave a Comment Althea Storm

Let’s be real: Creating social media reports can be boring, tiresome, strenuous—you get it. But it’s very important.

Because, in social media marketing, you can only understand the results of your efforts if you track and analyze your performance. It’s also the only way you can prove to your boss and team members that your work contributes to the growth of the organization.

Building a social media report can also help you learn what’s working and what’s not, so that can tweak your strategy accordingly.

In this post, we go over how to track all of your most important social media performance metrics , and how to build easy-to-follow, comprehensive reports that will show your team and other stakeholders the value of your strategy .

We’ve even included a free, customizable social media report template you can use to get a head start!

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a document that details the performance of your social media networks over a period of time. It includes relevant performance data like reach, engagement, and conversions.

Your social media analytics report can be anything from a simple spreadsheet to a data-packed slide presentation. The format your report takes depends on your audience and the purpose you want it to serve.

Different audiences might require different reports. For instance, if you’re making the report just for yourself, you can use a simple spreadsheet. But if you work in a marketing agency, you’ll need to create a more in-depth report to show clients the results and ROI from your work.

What should your social media report include?

Your social media report should contain only the data your audience needs to understand your social media performance. That means there shouldn’t be unnecessary details or vanity metrics in your report. Your report should look clean and easy to understand.

We have outlined below some things you should feature in your social media report. But none of this is set in stone.

Feel free to switch up the sections to create the best social media marketing report for your audience and needs.

A brief outline of your social media strategy

Start off your report with an overview of your social media marketing strategy . This will help your audience understand the importance of the other elements you’ll include in the report.

There’s no need to go overboard on this section. Just lay out the overall purpose of your social media marketing efforts and how they align with business goals. For example, if your company uses social media primarily to increase brand awareness or to sell products, include that in your report.

You should also include any changes you’ve made to your strategy since your last report. Include any new channels you’re actively working on and the ones you’ve dropped.

This is where it gets a bit technical. Here, you’ll take the brief overview you wrote in the previous section and break it down into SMART goals.

For reference, SMART means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

This goal-setting framework will help you create goals that you can track easily and report. The number of goals you outline in your report will vary depending on the size of your team, the company you’re working for, and the depth of your social media strategy.

If this is your first social media reporting report, just outline a few goals. Once you’ve established a goal-tracking system, you can include more goals over time.

Your success metrics

Now, you need to think about the metrics you’ll use to validate your goals. If you set SMART goals, then it shouldn’t be hard to find your success metrics.

If your goal is to increase your conversions by 30% in Q2, then you need to report the number of conversions you get.

As you choose your success metrics, be wary of vanity metrics. These are metrics that seem important, but have no intrinsic value to your business. For example, it’s good to have a lot of likes and comments on your Tweets. But if your goal is to generate leads, then likes and comments are not going to cut it.

Success metrics differ for every team, but here are some important metrics you can include in your report:

• Number of leads generated
• Number of conversions
• Total spend (on paid social ads )
• Total return on investment (ROI)
• Total revenue generated
• Social sentiment
• Social share of voice (SoV)

If you’re using social media for customer service , you can also report on metrics like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and resolution time.

If you want more info on this, check out this Hootsuite post on the social media metrics you really need .

Your results per social network

Now, you’ll detail the specific results you get for each social media network. If you want to be more thorough, break down these results by format within a network, such as feed posts, Stories , and Reels .

The data you’ll include in this section depends on the goals and success metrics you outlined above. Below is some of the most important information to include of each social platform:

• Number of posts
• Net followers (gain or loss)
• Top-performing posts
• Engagement rate
• Click-through rate

Whatever metrics you choose, include some precious results that explain why you’re including the metric(s) in your report. If you’re reporting on a paid ad campaign, include a similar campaign you’ve done in the past to compare the results.

If you’re creating a weekly or monthly report, track your present results compared to the results you get a few weeks/months back.

You can also compare your results to the same time the year before to check if there were any seasonal trends.

After presenting your data, you can start your analysis. First, highlight all the things that went well in this reporting period. These are your wins.

Wins go beyond numbers. If you got on the radar of an industry expert you plan to do a podcast with in the future, that’s a win. If you get glowing reviews on social media that you can use in future campaigns, that’s a win too.

So don’t limit your wins to metrics and numbers. Include your relevant successes in your report, no matter the form they take.

If possible, try to determine why you got these wins. The wins themselves are really cool, but the reasons you got them can help you know what marketing methods work for you.

Your opportunities

After outlining your wins, it’s time to look at your marketing results objectively.

Was there anything that went wrong during this reporting period? If yes, do you know why things didn’t go as planned? And how do you plan to get things back on track?

You should also note any opportunities you’ve discovered through social listening , studying the market, and engaging with your followers.

Is there a type of content your audience wants to see more? Are there any issues that can be resolved through explainer videos, FAQs or better documentation?

If there are, include them in your social media report.

Conclude your social media report by summarizing all that you’ve achieved and what you’ve learned during this reporting period.

Note some huge takeaways and how they will help you improve your social media marketing strategy.

How to create a social media report

Determine your audience.

The first step is to determine who you’re creating the social media report for. Is it your boss, VPs, your team, or just yourself?

When you know who your audience is, focus on what’s important to them, rather than making a general report that contains details that don’t matter to them. The more authority your audience has in your organization, the more concise your report should be.

Focus your reporting

Social media is great for many things—increasing awareness, getting engagement, driving conversions, and more.

It’s really easy to get caught up in all these social media marketing results. But you should focus on the KPIs and metrics that matter most to your company and the stakeholders involved.

Don’t include extra details unless you notice something major or unique.

Gather your data

The next step is to gather your social media data. You can get this data from many different sources. We’ll delve into these sources later in this article

Analyze your data

Raw data doesn’t really mean anything until you analyze it.

When you get the numbers, look for patterns, anomalies and trends that can explain what’s working for you and what isn’t.

Present your findings

Now it’s time to arrange all your data and analysis into a document in a clear and concise way. That document is your social media marketing report.

Free social media report template

To make the process easier, the team over at Hootsuite created a free social media report template you can use to craft your report. This template highlights the most important elements of data you should include in a typical social media report.

After downloading the free template, follow the instructions to customize it. If you’d like to build your own social media report template from scratch, you can also do that.

If your focus is on numbers, you can use Excel, Google Sheets or any other spreadsheet tool to create your template. If you plan to include more analysis, you can gather your data in a spreadsheet and present it with Google Docs or Powerpoint slides.

Or… you can use a social media reporting tool like Hootsuite Analytics to craft custom reports. This gives you access to comprehensive charts and graphics that you can export directly to a spreadsheet tool, PowerPoint or PDF.

Social media reporting tools

Here are the main platforms you can find the data to include in your social media report.

Meta Business Suite

You can find your Facebook and Instagram analytics individually on each platform, but Meta Business Suite combines the data for both platforms so you’re killing two birds with one stone.

To get your Facebook insights in Meta Business Suite, visit http://business.facebook.com and click insights in the left menu.

Click Export Data on the top right of any chart to export data for your report. You can export your data of choice in .PNG, .PDF, or .CSV formats.

If you’re looking for more detailed instructions, here’s a Hootsuite article on how to use Meta Business Suite .

Twitter Analytics

To get your Twitter Analytics, go to your Twitter profile and click on the three dots icon in the menu. Then click on Analytics.

There, you’ll find data on the main analytics screen. To get more information, click the options in the menu of your Twitter Analytics screen. Then click Export Data to export the info as a .CSV file.

TikTok Analytics

You need to have a TikTok Business or Creator account to access TikTok Analytics .

Once you’ve switched to these accounts, go to your profile and click on the three dots. Then click on Business Profile (or Creator Profile) and Analytics.

You’ll be able to see how you’re performing on TikTok. You can only export data from TikTok Analytics if you’re using a desktop.

All you have to do is log in on your desktop computer, hover your cursor over your profile image, and click View Analytics. You can get overall metrics for your account, as well as in-depth analytics on each video you’ve posted.

LinkedIn Analytics

To find your LinkedIn Analytics , open your business page and click Analytics in the top menu. Then click on Visitors, Followers, Updates, Competitors or Employee Advocacy.

You’ll be able to see metrics like impressions, page views, and engagement rate.

When you click on the Competitor Analytics page on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to see how your company page compares to up to nine other pages, which is pretty cool.

Click the blue Export button on the top right to export your data as an .XLS or .CSV file (depends on the data you’re exporting).

Hootsuite Analytics

Unlike the other analytics tools on this list, Hootsuite Analytics isn’t native to a single platform only. It offers a comprehensive overview of all your accounts across all major social media platforms.

With Hootsuite Analytics, you can collect data and create social media reports for multiple Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles from one dashboard.

You can also customize the dashboard to track your specified success metrics, including time and team metrics. When you want to build your report, you can customize the information you want to include.

Hootsuite Analytics gives you access to a wide range of charts that will help you visualize your report and make it easy to understand.

You can share social media reports with your marketing team directly within Hootsuite Analytics. Or you can download your report as a spreadsheet file, a PowerPoint, or a PDF that you can share.

To understand how to use the data available on these platforms, check out this Hootsuite blog post on social media analytics .

Use Hootsuite to report all your social media activities and results from a single, intuitive dashboard. Choose which metrics to track, get beautiful visuals, and share reports easily with your team members and stakeholders. Try Hootsuite for free today .

• Pinterest 0

You may also like reading:

• Social Commerce 101: How to Make Money Selling on Social
• 63 Instagram Caption Examples for 2023 (And How to Write Your Own)
• How to Create a Facebook Business Page (The Easy Way)
• 10 Social Media Schedulers for Easy Auto-Posting in 2022

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Work with Us
• Marketing Services
• What’s new
• Facebook Ads Beginners Guide
• Google Ads Beginners guide

From the Blog

• Top Facebook Updates You Can’t Miss (December 2022 Edition)
• 17 Call To Action Examples (+ How to Write the Perfect Social CTA)

• Why Talkwalker

Over a decade in the making, we are thrilled to give you Blue Silk™ GPT, the greatest innovation in natural language processing purpose-built for consumer intelligence...

• Client Help Center
• Customer Stories

How to create a social media report

• What's a social media report?

What should a social media report include?

• Why do you need a social media report?

How to create a social media report in 7 steps

Types of social media reports.

Social media channels are an essential part of digital marketing strategies. Measuring your social media performance and proving campaign results in a social media listening report can be painful. You need to know the metrics that matter, and the KPIs to use. What you should be presenting to your team, your clients, and management.

Even if you’re already doing weekly or monthly reporting, those detailed spreadsheets won’t please the boss. They want to see a high-level overview.

This social media reporting guide will explain why analyzing and reporting social results is crucial. Follow the seven steps to create your social media reports, and learn:

• What you should include
• Which metrics to track
• How to choose a reporting tool
• What to present

We’ve suggested several social media reports to present. Take your pick based on your audience, business goals, and what you want to prove.

Here's an example social media report template - you can download all three simulated Talkwalker social media reporting templates now .

Example dashboard for Coca-Cola, showing the share of product attributes, results over time, reach vs engagement. ‘Ingredients’ has the largest share of mentions, over ‘packaging’ and ‘flavor’. Talkwalker Social Listening

Social media reporting

What do you reply when asked, “What’s the ROI of your recent social media campaign?”

“Incredible… we got 1500 more followers, 45 shares, 22k likes…”

Nice engagement, but how did it help your bottom line?

It can be hard to translate social media metrics into something understood across the board. Not everyone has your insights into the many marketing channels you use. You need to be able to explain all that your team is doing and the goals you’re hitting, to justify your budget. A visual, comprehensive social media report - social media audit - will explain all.

The secret of successful social media reporting is comparison . Compare how your channels performed before vs how they perform now. This Q3 compared with the last Q3. And, how you position your social marketing campaigns against your competitors

Proving the value of social media

Don’t ever, ever assume that senior management understands social media, or what your job involves. It’s up to you to educate them. To prove your team’s value . To prove your value.

What is a social media report?

First up... the definition of a social media report . A social media report uses data, stats, and metrics to prove the value of your social media strategy . Done well, the best social media report will steer you in the right direction for future social media campaigns. You'll also learn what isn't resonating with your followers, and be able to pause or stop campaigns.

Simulated social media report for Coca-Cola, showing Community Impact page. Social community growth by channel, with explanatory notes.  Talkwalker Social Listening

Your report will explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Your targets and the results you’ve achieved. It’ll justify your budget.

• Measure the ROI of social media campaigns so you can prove their value and targets met
• Show your clients how their social accounts are evolving
• Identify successes and failures, to improve, repeat, or delete
• Save time with automated social media reports - including videos, images, and comments to make them easier to understand

First, your report should include an overview of your social media strategy . A summary that'll help readers understand what your social media report will cover.

It will explain your intended goals for your social activities and how they link to your business strategy.

• Do you use your social channels for social commerce?
• Does your company use social media management for customer service?
• Are you using social media to increase brand awareness?

At the end of your report, answer the following questions. This will demonstrate what you’ve learned and how you’ll improve your social media strategy .

• What do the numbers show you about your strategy?
• What did you learn about your audience?
• If results were poor, is it a seasonal issue?

A successful social media strategy fully understands how and why your content performs the way it does. The big wins and the disappointing fails.

Now you need to drill down and provide comprehensive, measurable goals . Follow SMART goals, so you can track and report your results easily and accurately.

The number of goals depends on your social strategy, team size, organization size of your organization, etc

SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely.

As you become more proficient at tracking and analyzing, you can add more goals.

Time to choose the data you'll use to measure and confirm your goals . Remember, SMART goals need measurable metrics.

For instance... you're looking to increase your leads by 30% in Q2. There's your success metric - show how many leads you generated.

While each team will have its own set of metrics depending on their goals, data to include for measuring your social strategy are...

• Conversions
• Return on investment - ROI
• Share of voice
• Customer satisfaction - CSAT
• Net Promoter Score - NPS

Include all the metrics you need to prove your results and demonstrate social media strategy success.

Results per social media network

Now you need to find results for each of your social media channels. 

Owned channel performance - results per channel for social media reporting.  Talkwalker Social Listening

The data you include will depend on your goals and metrics. For instance, for each social channel, you could include...

• Follower growth/loss
• Number of posts for reporting period
• Engagement rate
• Click-through rate
• Top-performing post
• Top mention
• Top follower

You must offer a comparison, i.e., compare Q2 results this year, with Q2 results from last year. If you're reporting on a specific social campaign, try to compare it with a similar one from the past.

When performing weekly or monthly reporting, always compare to the previous weeks and months, to identify trends. 

Wins & fails

Next, analyze. Highlight what was successful, and what didn't work.

Start with the numbers - focus on leads and revenue. Then concentrate on other wins such as,

• Shared user-generated content or positive reviews and comments.
• Content you could use in future website copy or marketing campaigns .
• New influencer contacts that are happy to become brand advocates for your product .

Understand how you got the results, so you can improve your social strategy , and determine future social media goals . Were there parts of your strategy that didn't work? Find out why they failed, and how to turn those into a win.

Include a summary of all your wins, failures, and learning points. Plus, how these results will guide your future social media strategy.

Why do I need a social media report?

Tracking your social media campaigns -  owned and paid - will help you find what’s working and what isn’t. Budgets are tight, so you can’t afford to waste money on things that aren’t working.

Comparing your social media channels identifies which channels your audience favors. And which are bringing the most success with least effort. Identifying what content works and engages helps you replicate successes, and cut failures.

Track and analyze your competitors to compare your market impact, and find new opportunities to expand your community. Seeing the bigger picture helps prove your business decisions are effective.

Talkwalker simulated report - track and analyze your competitors, to compare market impact. Talkwalker Social Listening

Creating an automated report is all in the preparation - who, what, why, how...

1 - Identify your audience

Who are you creating your report for?

• Your marketing team,
• Line manager

You need to choose your audience so you only share what’s relevant to each stakeholder . Don’t force your audience to hunt for the information they need. 

The social media report you create for your team will be entirely different from the one you share with C-level.

Senior management won’t always have the time or inclination to read a heap of pages. Keep it short and simple.

2 - Set your goals

It’s important to focus your social media analytics reporting. What are you hoping to achieve from your social media reports? What are you trying to prove, to justify? 

• Brand awareness

Concentrate on the social media KPIs that matter to your business strategy  and your target audience. While you have to be detailed, don’t bury yourself under data. 

You can break social media reporting into three categories...

• Regular reports - using key metrics to demonstrate progress on social media - your brand alone, or include competitors and industry
• One-off report - following a campaign, event, product launch - metrics and qualitative analysis to gauge success
• Research reports - using social media listening to find actionable insights around a particular topic or trend

3 - SMART questions

Regardless of which report you’re writing, you should identify the questions you want to answer. As with your goals, ensure your questions are SMART...

• Specific - real numbers with real deadlines
• Measurable - how you'll track and analyze results
• Achievable - ask questions that are challenging, but possible
• Relevant - check you have the necessary resources
• Timely - set a timeline, and stick to it

A report following a specific marketing campaign might ask - how much of your target group drove engagement?

A research report might ask - what do people want in their 40s from a clothing brand?

4 - Which metrics to track

You don’t need to report on everything.

The more you include, the greater your reporting task will be. What you choose to measure depends on your needs and which social networks you use. These can include X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. . Try to avoid custom metrics that’ll need manual calculation, unless vital.

Measure metrics that you’ll learn from, and that will inform your decision-making...

• Leads - visitors that have the potential to become customers. You can directly tie leads from social to revenue. Target consumers with gated content, contests, events, demo sign-ups, newsletter subscriptions, etc., to increase registrations. Regular content that resonates with consumers will drive sign-ups . Use Trackable links (UTM code) to track generated or converted leads.
• Conversions - a lead that became a paying customer.
• Reach & impressions - the number of people that see your posts. It’s a metric that demonstrates the value of your content strategy beyond the total number of likes. Reach = total number of people who see your content Impressions = number of times your content is displayed.
• Volume - track conversion size and number of brand mentions
• Engagement - this is about the relevancy of your content. Analyze the quantity and type of engagement your social media channels and content receive. Include clicks, comments, and shares. Recognize which channels are performing well for your brand. Highlight posts doing better than normal. Identify pain points, so you can action for improvement.
• Audience - identify who participates in conversations, the most active users, influencers. Present a breakdown of the audience and demographics to show you’re reaching the right market.
• Content - tracktop-performing posts, and those that failed. Include the number of posts published monthly, to prove the activity of your team.
• Clickthrough with bounce rate - track bounce rate of website visitors coming from social. Compare these to direct website visitors or those that arrived from a search engine or paid ad campaign. If your social media bounce rate is lower than those other sources, you you’re targeting the right people on social . And that traffic is more valuable to the business.
• Bounce rate = % of page visitors who leave your site after only viewing one page. In social media, it would be someone clicking on a social media link, landing on your site/blog post, then leaving without looking at any other type of content.
• Share of voice (SOV) - Mentions show how much consumers are talking about you on social. Find out how your SOV compares with that of your competitors .
• Lessons learned - share social media insights you’ve learned with other teams in your organization. For instance: product feedback, technical issues, praise.
• Executive summary - include a summary of your top achievements during the month. Keep it short - up to 5 bullet points.

You need to track a lot of social media data. When it comes to reporting results,  be shrewd with what you share. Not everything you’re monitoring is relevant to management.

Be consistent - report the same metrics in the same way, each time. Include percentage changes and benchmarks to make it easier for your audience to understand the results.

5 - Choosing the best social media reporting tools

Clarify your priorities and goals before you start looking for the best tool. Ask questions...

• Where does the tool source its social data?
• What’s the quality of data?
• What relationship does it have with the social networks?
• Can it track owned, earned, and paid social ?
• Does it include insights from the networks that you’re reporting on?
• What type of customer support or account management does it provide?
• What features are on its roadmap?
• Does it offer multiple languages?
• Does it have AI to accelerate your speed to insight?

Social media channels are evolving. You need a tool that will keep up with these changes.

A single tool is best, rather than multiple, or a different one for each channel. You’ll save time, money, and stress.

6 - Choose optimal reporting timeframes

Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and campaign-related. It makes sense to report some metrics more often than others. What does management want?

If you’re creating a campaign-related report , set benchmarks before you start. You’ll then be able to track improvements.

You can do a monthly report on published content. Include the number of sessions, page views, new users, goal completions, bounce rate, leads, and downloads.

If you’re targeting keywords, include page rankings for before and after the publication date.

With this information, you’ll see spikes and patterns, to better understand what’s working with your audience. For example, seasonal patterns during holidays, Christmas, Black Friday, etc.

7 - Presenting your social media marketing report

Once you have all the information, you need build your social media report. It's time to work on your presentation. 

Remember, not everyone you're talking to will have your insights. They may not understand all the data you present. Make it an easy read. 

Use graphs, charts, virality maps, Conversation Clusters, word clouds, social posts, and Influencer Networks. Whatever it takes to create social media reports that are easy to understand. Human brains understand images and are more likely to retain the information they’re illustrating. Include a short description of what they’re seeing, along with takeaways and analysis highlights.

Here are our tips for making your social data easier to grasp...

• Break down your data per channel , and present separately. Thereby making performance analysis easier.
• New user growth per channel
• Lead generation per channel
• Engagement stats per channel - comments, likes, shares, mentions 
• Influencer interaction per channel
• Revenue growth - conversions and ROI listed separately - per channel

How you present - the look of the report - depends on your audience, the depth of your reporting, and which tools you're currently using.  

If you can present everything clearly on a single slide... go for it.

For comprehensive results, a consumer intelligence platform can collect data, and automate results into an easy-to-understand report.

Use a mix of data visuals to support and explain your results in your social media report. Talkwalker Social Listening

You should be ready to...

• Understand what happened so you can plan the future - pull out last year’s data to target this year’s critical KPIs
• Get to the point - don’t include anything that doesn’t impact your goals
• Understand the data you’re presenting - don’t list numbers, tell a story
• Be brutally honest - learn from your successes and failures. Never lie about or fluff over what the results represent. Ensure your team is ready to address negative results immediately
• Make it actionable - allow the data to steer your decisions and plan how you’re going to respond

The goal of your social media report is to optimize your social media activities and benefit your bottom line.

Let's take a look at the various reports and periods that you could cover...

Time Periods

Choose those that will give you and management all the data you need.

Daily reporting

Used by the social media team to track daily changes. Can find spikes and troughs to enable fast response. What caused this? What action should you take?

Managing your channels means monitoring - in real time - your brand, product, and competitor posts. Address any issues immediately.

An issue can become a crisis in the blink of an eye!

Questions to ask...

• What are your followers doing - sudden increase/decrease? Are spikes in followers genuine/fake/low quality? Have you tagged anyone or used a hashtag that’s attracting bots?
• How are engagement levels looking for your content - increase/decrease?
• Are there new influencers you can reach out to?
• What’s the performance of the hashtags you’re using - increase in activity of those you’re following?
• What’s your brand sentiment - positive/negative increase?
• How are your competitors performing - increase in followers, sentiment, etc.?

Performance benchmarking shows how your business compares to your competitors and industry.

Punctual campaign reporting

Marketing campaigns - when successful - have a significant impact on company growth. Are you measuring this impact? It’s time you proved the value of your team and your campaigns.

A punctual campaign - a time-bound initiative - has a single/targeted message and drives one business goal. You’ll want to report on the ROI of each punctual campaign. Track audience engagement, and analyze the opportunities that resulted from your campaign. Depending on the structure of your campaign, measure these metrics:

• What impact did the campaign have?
• Were preset goals met?
• How much traffic did the campaign drive?
• How many leads did the campaign bring?
• What was the engagement rate of customers?
• How much revenue did the campaign influence?
• How does this campaign compare to previous?

You need to track paid ads for performance and frequency, while keeping the budget on track. Optimize goals and allocate money based on what’s working and what isn’t.

Each social media platform has built-in tools to measure performance. For easier reporting, a single consumer intelligence platform will prove more efficient.

Metrics to improve future campaigns...

• Which landing pages had the highest conversion rates?
• Which blog posts took off?
• Which emails were opened most?
• Which social messages drove the most engagement?

Monthly reporting

Monthly reporting is for performance comparison over time . Watch for spikes and slumps. Is that spike a trend or a one-off incident? Determine this before tweaking your social media plan on an exception, rather than the norm.

You should include the following...

• This month vs last month
• This month vs the same month, last year
• KPI movement - include acquisition, conversions, engagement, retention KPIs

This is for management, so be ready with the answers to any questions. More data, more questions...

• Focus on crucial metrics - 3-5 max
• Avoid including data you can’t explain
• Use data visualizations to clearly show trends and progress
• Tie the results back to business goals Example: goal = customer retention . Show increase in sessions coming via social media for returning customers

Quarterly strategy review

Your quarterly strategy review will help you maximize the performance of your marketing efforts . The goal is to assess how fit for purpose your strategy is, while learning from the previous quarter. This in turn, will influence planning for the next quarter.  

Your quarterly review should cover...

• Current strategy, focus, and goals - what your social media campaigns will achieve, in line with business goals
• Progress against goals - where is your team concerning targets - ahead or behind?
• Hits and misses - what worked, what didn’t, why? Your review should cover reasons for successes and failures
• Issues and resolution - why weren’t goals met? What improvements should you make? Who is responsible for this? How will you monitor and report the results?
• Insights - what did you and your team learn that will help improve your social media marketing?
• What data will you share across your organization that will improve performance? Example: share customer feedback and insights with the customer service team and sales
• Next steps and actions - plan of action with roles defined, responsibilities, target deadlines

Brand protection reporting

Crisis management.

When a brand faces a potential crisis, a fast assessment and reaction is crucial. Reporting on your online performance is only valuable if you’re honest, and face up to the truth. Establish a PR crisis management plan . It will significantly reduce the chances of damage to your brand reputation. 

During PR crisis management - listen, identify, review, respond.

Share of voice report

Who are people talking about most, you or your competitors? What’s your brand’s share of voice   - SOV - in your industry? A spike in SOV isn’t always a good thing if a crisis caused the increase.

Understand how your brand is positioned in the market with a share of voice report. And uncover new opportunities for growth.

Brand performance reporting

Social network comparison.

Compare results from all your social channels. Each channel is different, and might not be a fit for your brand. Try out some alternative strategies. If it doesn’t improve, concentrate on the channels that work for you.

Brand health report

Simulated brand health report - Talkwalker Social Listening

How effective is your brand in achieving your business goals? Tracking reputation, awareness, engagement, and positioning will give you an overview of your strengths and weaknesses.

Report the stats, and ask questions. An increase in your share of voice sounds great, but is it due to a potential crisis? Gathering all your results and analysis into a single report will give you the complete picture of your brand health.

Choosing a social media reporting tool

Now you understand why accurate reporting is so important.

And an industry-leading social media reporting platform can make it easier than ever. Here are some key factors to consider when choosing a tool.

• Can you choose the format of my social media report?
• Can you use pictures in my reports?
• Can you get all your results in one place?
• Can you receive notifications about changes in your results?
• Are you able to badge your social media dashboard with your company logo
• Is it possible to combine third-party data sources with your internal data?
• Can you filter data for increased accuracy?
• Can you save time and energy with AI support?

The reporting function of Talkwalker Social Listening tools does all this and much more. To learn how it can make reporting a breeze, click below.

You may also like

How Location Insights analyzes competitors’ reviews

SIQ Spotlight: Unveil the Impact of IPL 2024 Sponsors with Talkwalker

Subscribe to our emails..

Social Media Report Template

Why Your Agency Needs a All-in-One Social Media Report Template

Social media is a major source of growth for your client’s business, if managed properly. Agencies that consistently deliver on their promises and increase their clients’ online presence are those that continuously track changes in social media performance and engagement metrics.

With the AgencyAnalytics social media reporting tools, agencies like yours know exactly what’s going on with each of your client’s social accounts at any point in time. This powerful analytics tool also makes it easy to communicate your client’s social media performance in a way that’s easy to understand and interpret, regardless of their level of expertise.

Share your social media reports with your clients to demonstrate the ins and outs of their social media metrics for them while backing up the strategic choices your agency makes with data. Presenting your clients’ marketing metrics in a concise and understandable manner builds transparency and trust, leading to greater client retention and less churn.

With AgencyAnalytics, easily set up real-time social media dashboards to accompany your periodic reports so your marketing team–and clients– keep a finger on the pulse.

Create Professional Social Media Reports in Minutes

8 key sections included in your social media report, 1. cover page.

A Social Media Report is a multifaceted document, and its cover page and sections should set the stage for the in-depth analysis within. The Report Cover and Section Design Customization Feature offers the flexibility to choose a background color or upload custom images that suit your agency's brand. With additional options to adjust title and image widgets, the branding elements can be seamlessly integrated into the entire report.

When you identify a design that captures your agency's essence, save it as a template. This action maintains a cohesive brand presentation and streamlines the report creation process for future projects.

The cover page isn't merely a visual element; it serves as an important introduction to the in-depth metrics and analysis inside. And a well-designed report, from cover to end, enhances your agency's credibility, reinforcing the quality of the insights within. It serves as a direct reflection of your agency's expertise, impacting how clients perceive the value you deliver.

2. Monthly Social Media Report Summary

An important aspect of running any kind of social media or marketing campaign is keeping your clients informed on the progress and results on social networks in a way that’s easy to digest with a monthly report. The Report Summary section gives you the opportunity to inform your clients in plain English exactly what happened over the last month and whether or not you’re on track to meet their business goals.

Also, use the Report Summary to discuss new marketing strategies that you plan to implement in the coming period. Was there anything that just didn’t work this month that you want to change next month? This is a great place to discuss your objectives and key results (OKRs) that will help grow their social media presence.

3. Google Analytics - Social Breakdown

Following the Report Summary, the Google Analytics - Social Breakdown section provides essential marketing metrics that highlight the social media efforts that drive real business results as opposed to vanity metrics like followers and likes.

First, you’ll see the number of web sessions coming from social displayed in a line graph that tracks total traffic over time. To the right you’ll find a bar graph that displays how many sessions are coming from each individual social media account. In addition to total Sessions, the report displays the average number of pages customers visit per session.

This section also differentiates between repeat visits and new sessions so you can see if you’re attracting new customers with your social media marketing strategy. Like the number of web sessions, the Social Breakdown section displays the total number of conversions, or Goal Completions, generated from social media.

Below, the table highlights four crucial metrics that provide deeper insights into user engagement, conversion rates, and overall campaign performance:

These key performance indicators help an agency understand and optimize social media strategies by providing a clear view of user behavior and interaction patterns.

Use these social media analytics to show your client which social media channels are driving results for their business, and which platforms represent an opportunity for growth.

4. Facebook

Next up, the social media analytics report template includes a section dedicated to Facebook, including Facebook Insights and Facebook Posts. This provides insights into the overall performance of your Facebook marketing initiatives, as well as a breakdown of your individual posts.

The Facebook Insights page focuses on your clients’ follower growth and activity on their business pages. To start, you’ll see the total number of Likes on a page, along differentiating between paid and organic Likes. You’ll also see a graph that displays the change in audience growth over the past month, which is a direct reflection of the growth in brand awareness across this powerful social network.

The Insights section also displays audience demographics data of your clients’ followers on Facebook. You’ll be able to see data relating to gender, age and geographic information. This information keeps you informed about your clients’ audiences and whether or not you’re reaching the intended target demographics.

The Facebook Posts section of the social media report template provides your agency with an overview of each of your clients’ individual post performance and engagement. The page displays a full list of the Facebook posts you’ve made, along with the total reach and number of Likes, Shares, Clicks or other reactions followers have left. This section helps you and your clients understand which types of posts are resonating with their target audience at a glance, providing key insights that helps your agency create an informed content strategy in subsequent months.

For example, to understand user engagement, conversion rates, and overall campaign performance, consider the following four key metrics:

Use AgencyAnalytics’ dedicated Facebook report template to get all your clients’ Facebook reports set up and automated in a few clicks.

AgencyAnalytics makes it faster and easier to gather and present insights into your client's TikTok presence. If your clients are on TikTok, simply add metrics like follower growth and engagement (Likes, Comments, Shares, Views) to create a custom report or dashboard that helps gauge audience reception.

If you're leveraging TikTok Ads for a client, provide a dedicated section in your agency's social media report template to analyze these campaigns to showcase relevant KPIs and measure campaign effectiveness.

By analyzing this data, you are better equipped to optimize your client's TikTok marketing strategy and maximize return on investment.

With TikTok, agencies should concentrate on metrics that offer insights into content reach, engagement, and audience growth. For example, the following outlines some critical metrics from TikTok, their importance to social media marketing, and how they can be utilized effectively.

Each metric added to a report template should be essential for showcasing how well content resonates with users and drives tangible growth and engagement.

6. Instagram

The next section is dedicated to Instagram and provides analytics into the overall account as well as individual post performance. To start, you’ll see a section for Instagram Insights, which displays metrics for the overall account including the number of total followers and follow growth over time. Below that you’ll find line graphs displaying the number of Likes, Comments, and Posts over time.

Below the Insights section you’ll find a page dedicated to individual Instagram posts, along with the number of Likes and Comments each post has received throughout the month.

Just as with Facebook, if you’re running ads on Instagram, this part displays all relevant KPIs for a particular campaign. Much like demographics data, you can use this information to re-adjust your marketing strategy as necessary to maximize your clients ROI.

For Instagram marketing efforts, monitoring the right metrics is essential to understand audience interaction and campaign effectiveness. For example, include the key Instagram metrics that align to the client's end goals, such as:

This table pinpoints the metrics that are most useful for agencies handling Instagram marketing campaigns. Each metric provides vital insights into different aspects of content performance and audience behavior, crucial for refining strategies and enhancing overall engagement on the platform.

7. LinkedIn

Particularly if a client is focused in B2B marketing, a social media report template must include analytics for LinkedIn. First, the Insights page presents the total number of followers and whether they’re organic or paid. Tracking the change in followers over time with the bar graph is an easy way to identify if your LinkedIn strategy is resonating with the audience or if it needs improvement.

Just like the other post sections in this social media report, the LinkedIn Posts section displays a list of each post you made during the month, along with the number of Comments and Likes your clients are getting.

For LinkedIn, distinguishing between organic and paid metrics is key to creating a comprehensive understanding of both the organic audience growth and the impact of paid campaigns. For example, here are some key LinkedIn metrics that agencies should focus on within client reports:

Monitor these metrics to develop a clear understanding of how different types of content perform and how audiences are engaging with the brand on LinkedIn.

8. X (Twitter)

This comprehensive social media report also includes a dedicated X (formerly Twitter) section that provides growth insights for each account as a whole, as well as individual post analytics.

Quickly and easily build X reports in just a few minutes by leveraging AgencyAnalytics’ integration with Google Sheets to automatically integrate X data into your client's social media reporting templates.

Showcase the total number of X followers, including a bar graph that displays the change in follower count over the past month. The X Insights section also displays the total number of Likes, Retweets and Tweets for the overall account.

Below that, you’ll find a section for audience demographics, including language, gender and geographic location. If you’re targeting a specific location or demographic, use this section to see if you’re on the right track or if your strategy needs refining.

The X Posts page displays a full list of each Tweet during the past month, including the text and image. This section is especially useful if your agency has a client agreement to provide a certain number of Tweets per month. It also provides an overview of the type of content that resonates with your clients’ target audience and what can be improved next month.

Tracking X metrics to help evaluate how content resonates with users and grows a brand's presence. For example, some of the most commonly report X metrics include:

Each metric offers insights into different facets of X performance, critical when optimizing social media strategies to maximize content impact.

Customize the Social Media Report Template to Meet Client Needs

Go beyond the ordinary and create reports that perfectly align with each client's unique goals. The social media report template is only the foundation–easily tailor it with just a few clicks, using our social media reporting tool .

Seamlessly pull in data from any of the 80+ integrations, including different social platforms, such as, Pinterest , TikTok Ads , Vimeo , YouTube , and more! Whether your client is focused on video performance, niche social engagement, or cross-platform analysis, you deliver the insights they need.

Streamlining Reporting with Customizable Social Media Report Templates

Tailored social media report templates quickly improve the way agencies handle client reporting. The easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor reduces reporting time by up to 80% compared to manual methods like Excel or Google Sheets. Automated data collection makes the reporting process more efficient and reduces the likelihood of human errors.

Discover the All-in-One Reporting Tool Trusted by 6,500+ Marketing Agencies

As your agency continues to grow its clientele, the time it takes to collect, aggregate, and report on each client’s social media KPIs and metrics each month quickly adds up.

Free up your social media teams to concentrate on analyzing data and refining strategies rather than on manual data management.

Creating your own social media report template, based on the unique needs of your clients, saves time by automatically pulling data from each platform, displaying the data in a way that’s easy to digest. And by automating the process of sending periodic reports to clients, your agency scales its operations.

Putting an automated social media reporting system in place streamlines your agency’s entire social media analytics and reporting process. It instantly shows your social media marketing team and your clients everything that’s taking place on each channel in real time.

This not only saves your agency countless hours each month, but demonstrates the value of your agency’s social media services to clients by clearly displaying exactly how much traffic, conversions, and revenue you’re driving to their bottom line from your social media marketing efforts.

Automate Your Social Media Reporting. Focus on What Matters.

Stop wasting valuable hours wrangling spreadsheets and manually compiling social media data. A robust reporting platform automates the entire process, freeing you from tedious tasks and empowering you to focus on what truly drives results.

Imagine having beautifully designed, insightful reports delivered directly to clients with a single click. Instead of scrambling to pull numbers, you'll be analyzing trends, uncovering growth opportunities, and crafting strategic recommendations that propel your clients' (and your agency's) success.

By consolidating all of our tools into dashboards, we have saved so much time and money—it’s truly been invaluable.

Spend More Time on Strategy, Less Time on Client Reporting

Social media reports as unique as your agency, instantly access all your clients’ social media data.

Switching between multiple social media platforms is a pain. Not with AgencyAnalytics! Access all your clients’ social media channels from one streamlined platform: Create reports that paint a complete picture of your social media team's performance by connecting Facebook , Instagram , LinkedIn , Twitter , Snapchat Ads , YouTube , and many more. Managing your client’s social media metrics has never been easier.

Go deeper by adding data from over 80 automatic platform integrations to include analytics and insights from PPC campaigns, social media ads, email marketing, SEO, and so much more.

Create Social Media Reports in Minutes–Not Hours

Speed up social media reporting.

No more screenshots and Excel spreadsheets! All your client’s real-time social media data is right here waiting for you. With an easy-to-use, automated client reporting platform built for marketing agencies, focus your time on creating social media content that moves the needle.

EASY-TO-USE PLATFORM FOR YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CLIENTS

With dozens of report templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop report builder, set up your client reports in no time, with thumbnails of their latest posts and all! That leaves you more time for your social media team to optimize client campaigns, scale your agency, and focus on building relationships with your clients.

White Label Your Social Media Reports

SEAMLESS BRANDING 

Match your agency’s brand to your professional reports with fully white-labeled dashboards and reports. Just upload your agency logo, use your brand’s color palette, and you’re set! A comprehensive set of white labeled tools helps your agency stand above the competition.

SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE AGENCY BRANDS

On the Agency plan and higher, create multiple white label profiles for different client-facing brands, including different logos & color schemes. Even host your marketing dashboards on a custom domain and send reports from your email address for a complete white-labeled experience.

Put Your Social Media Reporting on Autopilot

As social media marketers, you need to spend more time crafting social media posts and executing exceptional social media campaigns and less time creating social media reports.

Use your customizable social media dashboard as a starting point to effortlessly pull in key metrics, then build and schedule automated marketing reports in minutes. The visual-first format turns complex social media metrics into an easy-to-understand presentation your social media clients will appreciate.

On Agency plans and above , pair your report scheduling with the report approval feature for the best of both worlds: streamline your agency’s efficiency while providing clients with a personalized experience. You’ll get notified before your scheduled reports go out to add extra insights to your automated reports and ensure there are no surprises.

The reports we send to clients look a lot cleaner and professional as we’re able to white label them. We always know the data and charts are up-to-date and that each report is visually appealing and straight to the point.

More Templates

Get Started for Free

Check out the Customizable Social Media Report Template

Social Media Analytics Report: Best Practises, Tools & Reporting Templates

An effective marketing strategy includes learning how to construct an easy-to-understand social media analytics report. Having all of your data in one place allows you to see how far you've come and make changes depending on your results.

Apr 18 2024 ● 8 min read

Table of Contents

What is social media analytics, what is a social media report, how to conduct social media analysis, 6 best practises for creating social media reports, 1. determine the relevant metrics, 2. focus on the most important information, 3. blend data for a unified view, 4. use data visualization to create more engaging reports, 5. establish a reporting timetable and automate report delivery, 6. select the appropriate social media reporting tools, 3 best social media report templates, 1. instagram, 2. facebook, what should you expect from a social media analytics reporting tool in 2024.

However, manually preparing a report takes a long time, raising the question of whether this is the ideal way to track your progress.

It has been established to be the most concrete, data-driven manner of demonstrating your accomplishments. So, how do you create a social media report without wasting a lot of time? What types of social media metrics and KPIs should you include? How often should the results be checked? In today's article, you'll discover how to create a social media report and use social media data to your advantage.

Social media analytics refers to the process of pulling data from social media channels and analyzing digital marketing efforts and account performance. You’d usually need a social media analytics tool to gather and create reports for the ideal optimization process.

But if you've ever seen a social media marketing report , you know how frustrating it can be: the data sets might be so large that you don't even want to read it - and for those less-data-savy, may be hard to understand. That isn't to imply that data reports aren't important. You can benefit from a social media report in the following ways:

• Creates a clear picture. Reporting provides a detailed overview of your social media strategy, including completed and ongoing tasks. A report aids in the pursuit of improved results, the formulation of conclusions or strategy revisions, and the enhancement of productivity. It also gives you a better knowledge of the target audience's preferences and demographics. The social media report will enable you to identify any patterns or trends in your audience, as well as the marketing activities they enjoy.
• Shows the work you’ve done. If your manager or client doubts whether you’re doing enough for the company, give them a detailed overview by using a social media dashboard to prove otherwise.
• Keep your team informed. A social media report isn’t just for you and your client; it also serves as a communication tool for the rest of your team. You won't need to make a PowerPoint presentation, create a graph in Excel or do any extra explanation if you share the report with your coworkers.

Keep in mind that your report should be well-organized and attractive to the eye. Otherwise, it'll just be a burden in your teammates' eyes.

A social media report is a document that compiles real-time and historical data points from relevant social networks (Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter). These reports examine the progress of your social media activities and provide key metrics as well as actionable insights.

How often to create these reports?

Of course, it depends on your client's needs and the size of your marketing campaigns. Here's what to expect from each type of report, based on its frequency:

• Weekly reports are created to keep your clients or team up to date on any issues that arise on a weekly basis. Weekly reports are commonly employed in startups and businesses with a flexible social media strategy. Because these businesses are more likely to make changes or switch things up on a weekly basis, a weekly report is beneficial.
• Monthly reports are at the most common frequency level. Because the social media audits contain a huge quantity of information, their results may become rather substantial. Nonetheless, it's an excellent tool for keeping your team informed on the progress of the social media campaigns.

• Quarterly reports help to ensure you’re making progress at every point of your social media strategy, and every avenue is put to the test. Quarterly reports increase your team’s productivity and keep everyone updated on long-term performance.

Extra tip: although report frequency is essential, make sure you’re tracking growth, too. To do it, you can compare the previous report to your current one.

Depending on your aims and resources, each social media report will be different. We've compiled a few questions to ask yourself to help you pick which KPIs to include in your report:

1. Who is my target audience?

2. Is there any specific information relevant in this context?

3. Are you reviewing a particular campaign or ongoing results?

Now, keep your answers in mind throughout the entire process of creating your social media report.

Start with the introduction: lay down your goals, tactics, and metrics . This way, your readers will get a general overview of what this report will be about.

Also, provide a brief performance summary. Include critical details, like the number of new followers or leads generated. In other words, be sure to mention the highlights of your campaign.

When it comes to building a social media insights report or dashboard, there are several key things to consider. Now you’ll find a list of essentials to go through before even drafting a report.

When deciding what metrics you should add to the report, consider your goals and objectives. Here are the most common numbers social media marketers track:

• Number of posts;
• Follower growth metrics ;
• Reach rate;
• Web traffic;
• Likes, comments, shares;
• Page or profile views;
• Clicks on post links;
• Clicks on the link in your bio;
• Video views;
• Story views;
• Top performing posts.

It would help if you considered including data that generates money for your client, such as the number of leads, conversions, the total revenue, or ad spend. Of course, feel free to add any further information if you think it’s relevant to your campaign or strategy.

When it comes to developing social media monitoring reports, establishing and evaluating the relevant KPIs isn't the only element to consider. Always strive to look at your data from different angles, to examine and filter your data for hidden insights that could help you improve your performance.

Combining data from multiple social media sources gives you a holistic view of your marketing efforts, leading to more meaningful insights and better decision-making.

This feature is not limited just to countries. You can aggregate your social media data by campaign, year, audience, age, etc.

However, the capabilities of data transformation don’t stop there. By integrating data from different channels and platforms and performing a cross-channel analysis, you can have a unified view of user interactions across various social media channels, which helps you optimize your marketing strategy.

Finally, data blending allows you to create custom reports and dashboards that meet specific analytical requirements — for example, having data from multiple sources visualized in the same table widget or unifying names of dimensions and metrics from different platforms.

The amount and diversity of data generated by your social media initiatives will be significant if you use multiple platforms. This becomes especially difficult to manage when you're tracking multiple platforms, for multiple clients.

Whatagraph is a great marketing analytics tool , that can aggregate massive amounts of data from all channels and make it simple to understand for all involved.

Data visualization is an important feature of these reports because it simplifies data analytics and saves time.

Some posts become viral right away, while others take some time to reach the ideal number of impressions. However, the most crucial thing is that you and your clients always stay on top of social media performance metrics.

It would be ideal to use Whatagraph to automate reports at regular intervals (as mentioned above) and remove manual reporting.

There are a plethora of SaaS reporting options on the market today. Only a few, however, include a user-friendly panel, data visualization, and automation features.

Whatagraph is a marketing analytics reporting solution that has not only the mentioned features but also white-label, cross-platform reporting, and a pre-made template library.

Here’s how to gather the analytics on different social media platforms:

To gather Instagram performance data for your Instagram analytics report, make sure you are using a business account. Also, you’ll only be able to acquire this information using the application on a mobile device.

( Instagram analytics dashboard created using Whatagraph )

Open your profile and tap the Insights button. Alternatively, you can click the settings icon in the upper-right corner and select Insights. Instagram Insights can be split into three sections: content, activity, and audience. While you’re in the Insights section, gather impressions and engagement rates. When you're here, you can siphon off the data and make your very own Instagram Insights report using a tool or a simple spreadsheet.

To access Facebook Page Insights, first, open your Facebook Page. Then, navigate to the top menu and select Insights. If you can’t find Insights in the menu, click More to bring it up: you’ll be taken straight to your Overview. You’ll be able to access the Overview anytime by clicking it in the left-hand menu. Try using a Facebook Ads Reporting Tool to build more detailed client reports.

( Facebook analytics dashboard created using Whatagraph )

To create a Twitter Analytics report , start by logging in to your Twitter account at analytics.twitter.com. If you’re using the mobile Twitter application, tap the analytics icon visible in your Tweets.

( Twitter analytics dashboard created using Whatagraph )

On desktops, click on an individual tweet to see its data. On mobiles, tap the Tweet to see the Tweet detail page, and then click View Tweet activity: here, you’ll see all the necessary numbers.

These are just the three most common social media platforms. If you’re also using Pinterest, LinkedIn, or other channels, make sure to acquire data from there, too.

Dashboard and reporting tools - like Whatagraph for example - can gather all of these critical social media marketing metrics automatically, for all of your clients and aggregate them in one place!

If you decide to make a Whatagraph account, just connect your social media platforms with Whatagraph, and all of the latest analytics and insights will be included without any additional input. At this point, all you will have to do is drag-and-drop the metrics you wish to include within the report and you're all set.

Now that you’ve collected the necessary information, it’s time to start working on your presentation. Reading a ton of data is already tricky, so here’s your chance to make it easier. Your report should be visually appealing yet still cover relevant information. Here are a few general tips to make the data easier to understand:

• Split data by channels. There’s no need to pack all the data in one place. It will be more beneficial to separate data by channel to make individual channel performance assessment that much easier.
• Include the growth stat per channel. Compiled the statistics for lead generation growth and the following growth separately for different channels.
• Add engagement statistics for each channel. Put the number of different engagements, including comments, likes, mentions separately for different channels.
• Calculate revenue growth for each channel. Make sure you’re not mixing conversions and ROI numbers – separate and arrange these numbers accordingly.

You can present the information in many ways: for instance, a simple slide might do the trick. But, wouldn’t it be great if there was someone (or something) that did all these things for you? Yes, the data gathering, the right metric picking, the visualizing.

Luckily, there is.

Whatagraph is software that builds social media performance reports for you. The tool gathers and visualizes the key performance indicators in one place. You can create the report from scratch or use pre-made templates and widgets. Either way, the tool allows you to compare metrics from different channels, all in a single sheet.

As a matter of fact, we even made a social media report template for you to use! It's highly customizable so you can adapt the template to the individual needs of your firm or your clients. Give it a try.

Published on Feb 03 2020

Dominyka is a copywriter at Whatagraph with a background in product marketing and customer success. Her degree in Mass Communications/Media Studies helps her to use simple words to explain complex ideas. In addition to adding value to our landing pages, you can find her name behind numerous product releases, in-app notifications, and guides in our help center.

Related articles

Agency guides · 7 mins

How to Exceed Client Expectations as Marketing Agency

Agency guides · 10 mins

Agency Client Retention: Common Mistakes & Expert Tips

Data analytics · 7 mins

Data Blending: Clear Insights for Data-Driven Marketing

Blending Data in Looker Studio? Here’s a Faster and More Reliable Alternative

Marketing Data Transformation: How to Organize Unstructured Marketing Data?

Top 15 Data Transformation Tools for Marketers in 2024

Get marketing insights direct to your inbox.

By submitting this form, you agree to our privacy policy

Adweek’s Social Pro Daily section is a timely feed of news, trends and tips for social media marketers. We cover it all—from new feature rollouts and how social media platforms are optimizing for ecommerce, to the news about the latest algorithm changes. We also cover breakout social media campaigns by the industry's heaviest hitters like Amazon, Apple and Android, to social media giants like TikTok and Snapchat. Adweek is your go-to source for a deep dive into innovative social media content, memes and campaigns from influencers and regular Joes who are making waves industrywide.

• Most Recent
• Most Popular

Amplifying Impact Through Strategic Social Media Engagement

By Alexandra Bower

Unleashing the potential of collaborative partnerships with Duolingo and Intuit.

Snapchat: How to Use Easter Lenses

By Brandy Shaul

A variety of augmented reality lenses are available.

Instagram: How to Use the Bloom Chat Theme

This option is also available in the Messenger application.

Messenger: How to Use the Bloom Chat Theme

Users can add colorful flowers to their conversations.

Messenger: How to Change a Conversation’s Quick Reaction

Users can switch the thumbs up emoji to something else.

Reddit: How to Leave a Chat on Mobile

Users can exit conversations they no longer want to participate in.

LinkedIn: How to Send a Post to Multiple Users at the Same Time

Professionals can share the same content with more than one person.

Reddit: How to Mute Notifications for a Chat

Users can silence conversations without leaving them.

Snapchat: How to Use Ramadan Lenses

Users can choose from a variety of augmented reality content.

Discord Nitro: How to Use App Themes on Desktop

Subscribers can choose from 16 colorful options.

TikTok: How to Make Your Account Private

Users can stop others from following them.

Snapchat: How to Use the Tone Tool When Creating Snaps

This feature can improve a post's exposure.

Snapchat: How to Take Snaps Using a Grid

Users can line up their shots.

Instagram: How to Use the Basketball Chat Theme

A new option is available in time for March Madness.

Messenger: How to Use the Basketball Chat Theme

Users can add a sports-themed background to conversations.

...Loading Popular Posts

AF&PA Releases April 2024 Packaging Papers Monthly Report

WASHINGTON – The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) released the April 2024 Packaging Papers Monthly report.

Total packaging papers and specialty packaging shipments in April increased 21% compared to April 2023. They were up 11% when compared to the same 4 months of 2023.

• The operating rate for unbleached packaging papers was 94%, up 15.8 points from April 2023 and up 4.2 points year-to-date.
• Shipments of the biggest subgrade in bleached packaging papers – food wrapping – 25,800 short tons for the month of April, down 0.5% from the same month last year and down 2.3% year-to-date.

The complete report with detailed tables, charts and historical data can be purchased by contacting Kory Bockman at [email protected] or 202-463-4716.

The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) serves to advance U.S. paper and wood products manufacturers through fact-based public policy and marketplace advocacy. The forest products industry is circular by nature. AF&PA member companies make essential products from renewable and recyclable resources, generate renewable bioenergy and are committed to continuous improvement through the industry’s sustainability initiative — Better Practices, Better Planet 2030: Sustainable Products for a Sustainable Future . The forest products industry accounts for approximately 5% of the total U.S. manufacturing GDP, manufactures about $350 billion in products annually and employs about 925,000 people. The industry meets a payroll of about $65 billion annually and is among the top 10 manufacturing sector employers in 43 states. Visit AF&PA online at afandpa.org  or follow us on Twitter @ForestandPaper . 

RELATED NEWS

Af&pa releases april 2024 printing-writing monthly report.

Total printing-writing paper shipments increased 13% in April compared to April 2023. U.S. purchases of total printing-writing papers decreased 1% in March compared to the same month last year. Total printing-writing paper inventory levels decreased 2% when compared to March 2024.

AF&PA Details U.S. Paper Production and Capacity Trends

The 64th Paper Industry Annual Capacity and Fiber Consumption Survey was released by AF&PA. The report provides detailed data on U.S. paper industry capacity and production compiled by the AF&PA statistics team.

AF&PA Releases Q1 2024 Boxboard Quarterly Report

Total Boxboard production in Q1 decreased 2% compared to Q1 2023. The boxboard operating rate was 89.2%, up 1.3 points from the same quarter last year.