Social media connects you to a massive audience and increases visibility and engagement. With billions of users, it’s direct interaction and feedback. With targeted ads and organic efforts, you can raise awareness, build relationships, and drive sales.
If you’re in charge of your brand’s social presence, you’ll want your team, clients or stakeholders to know that your efforts are paying off with a positive return on investment (ROI).
Creating automated and custom social media reports to measure your performance is a no-brainer. These reports or dashboards help you analyze and optimize your social media channels’ performance, engagement, audience growth, and the impact of your content on your business goals.
In this post, we’ll go through the process of social media reporting and what metrics to include in your social media report.
What Is a Social Media Report?
Social media reporting is collecting, analyzing and presenting data of social media channels. A social media report is a document that analyzes your social media activities and performance over a period of time. It’s a summary of selected data and numbers of your page, content, channel and campaigns.
Social media reporting is not just about tracking your KPIs. It’s about making data-driven decisions to identify campaign and budget opportunities, measure ROI, and steer your social media strategy.
Why Social Media Reporting
As a business, you can gain strategic insights into behavior and preferences through social media reporting. Some benefits include:
- Audience Insights and Targeting: Social media reports give you valuable audience insights, demographics, interests, behaviors and preferences. This allows you to create content that resonates and is personalized to target specific segments and drive more engagement and conversions.
- Competitive Analysis: Social media reporting allows you to benchmark against competitors and industry standards. By tracking metrics such as follower growth, engagement rates and share of voice, you can see where you’re ahead or behind competitors.
- Brand Monitoring: Reporting helps you to monitor brand mentions and sentiment across social media. This is important for managing your brand’s online reputation and addressing negative feedback or issues.
- ROI Measurement: Social media reporting is essential for measuring the ROI of social media marketing activities and channels. You can measure your social media efforts, revenue generation and growth by tracking metrics and attributing sales and conversions to specific social media channels or campaigns. This data is key to proving social media marketing to clients or stakeholders.
- Content Optimization: Social media reporting plays a big role in content optimization. By analyzing the performance of different types of content (e.g., images, videos, and text posts) through reports, you can optimize your brand’s content strategy to maximize reach, engagement, and conversion.
Social Media Marketing Objectives
Defining your social media marketing objectives is key to measuring success and refining your strategy. Tie these objectives to your overall business goals and include them in your social media reporting. Some common social media marketing objectives are:
Increase Brand Awareness
Using social media for marketing can increase your brand’s reach and awareness of your products or services.
Generate Leads
Generating leads means finding people who are interested in what you offer and could become customers. Social media can help you collect contact information from potential customers through various means, such as special offers, contests, or sign up forms.
Increase Sales
Social media marketing can increase sales by showcasing your products and services on your social channels and making it easy for visitors to buy.
Educate Your Audience
Social media educates and informs your audience about your products, services or industry. You can share tutorials, how-to videos, articles and other educational content to help your audience understand more about your work.
Build Brand Loyalty
Social media marketing allows you to interact with your audience, respond to their comments and make them feel valued. In the long run, this helps build brand loyalty by creating a strong positive relationship with your audience so they keep you as their go-to brand.
Drive Event Engagement
Social media is a great way to drive engagement if you’re hosting an event. You can promote the event, share updates and create buzz leading up to it.
Social Media KPIs and Metrics to Include in Your Reports
The social media KPIs and metrics you track should tie to your objectives and be customizable depending on who you’re creating the report for. Whether it’s a paid or organic campaign, here are some metrics to include in your reports:
- Engagement: Engagement metrics like shares, comments and likes show how well your content performs.
- Impressions and Reach: Impressions count every time content is displayed, reach measures how many unique users see it.
- Clicks: Total number of clicks on your ad.
- Conversion metrics: Conversion metrics like sales, downloads, sign-ups, conversion rates or other desired actions are key indicators that measure how well your campaigns drive tangible business results.
- Click-through rates (CTRs): CTRs show the percentage of impressions from a click. This measures the effectiveness of your call-to-action (CTA) elements in your social media content and the engagement of your audience.
- Website Traffic: Website traffic is extremely important to measure the success of your social media campaigns. To get a full picture, look at metrics like pages per session, new users, bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave right away), and session duration.
- Cost Per Click (CPC): The average cost per click. This measures the cost-effectiveness of your paid campaign.
- Total Ad Spend: Total spend on your social media ad campaigns during a specific period. Use this to see if your content attracts real users who engage and convert.
Creating a Social Media Report in 7 Steps
If you use multiple social media channels to drive traffic to your website or product, you may have thought about creating a social media report.
We’ve broken this down into seven easy steps to help you create a social media report.
Step 1: Objectives
Before you start looking at your metrics, you need to have an objective. Whatever you want to achieve with your social media, whether it’s brand exposure, engagement, conversions or a mix of these, start with a clear objective.
Having quantifiable targets that align with your overall business objectives, like driving website traffic or generating leads, means your social media activity will contribute to your overall business goal.
This approach gives you a clear path to success and allows you to focus on specific goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
Step 2: Choose Relevant Platforms and Data Sources
Each social media platform is different so you need to identify the platforms that are most relevant to your goals and where your audience is spending their time.
Once you’ve chosen your platform, choosing and aligning your KPIs to your specific goals gives you valuable insights into your social media performance. For example, you might look at likes, shares and comments on Facebook, while on Instagram, you might look at engagement rate, reach and follower growth.
Step 3: Collect Data and KPIs
Once you’ve chosen the platforms that align with your objectives, the next step is to set up tracking to collect data and metrics. Collecting this data to get insights into audience behavior, engagement, and the effectiveness of your activity is essential for a social media report. These KPIs will guide your team and business to success.
Step 4: Analyze and Report
Combining the raw data into a clear picture so you, stakeholders and clients can see your social media activity and impact. Tools like Swydo let you create custom dashboards to visualize data from multiple sources.
Look at the data to see patterns and anomalies. See which content and strategies are working and not working, compare past and current performance, and highlight areas for improvement.
Step 5: Report Structure and Layout
How you present your reporting data is key. A structured report helps stakeholders and clients understand the key insights and make decisions.
Each channel should have a separate section. For example, Facebook insights might cover post reach and engagement, while Instagram might cover story interactions and hashtag performance.
Reporting tools like Swydo have built-in reporting features with pre-designed templates to create a report in minutes.
Step 6: Visuals and Charts
Choosing the right visuals is key. Clear and concise charts and graphs make it easy for clients and stakeholders to understand the data, make decisions and grow.
Select the best charts or graphs to show your social media data.
Read more: Data Visualization Every Marketer Should Know
Step 7: Recommendations
Now that you have the insights from your report, it’s time to make practical recommendations for future activity. These should guide your team in improving their social media performance. Clearly outline the steps based on the report.
- So What?: What do your reports tell you about your audience’s preferences, content performance or overall strategy effectiveness?
- Actions: Present clear and actionable recommendations. These could include new content ideas (e.g., using trending topics or formats) or adjusting posting schedules (e.g., more frequent posting on high-performing days).
- Goal Alignment: Make sure your recommendations align with your marketing goals and objectives.
These will summarize the key findings from your analysis and suggest actions based on your data.
How to Choose the Right Social Media Reporting Tool for You
With so many great reporting tools out there, each with its own features for engagement, you need to find the one that fits your needs.
When choosing the right social media reporting tool, you should consider the following:
Customization Options
When choosing social media reporting tools, look for one that can be customized to your specific needs. Customization should also allow you to export data in different formats, which is handy for presentations and further analysis.
Usability
Not everyone is techy! Make sure the social media reporting software you choose is user-friendly for anyone on your team to use and access the data, regardless of their technical skills. Also, consider desktop and mobile device compatibility when managing your social media presence across all platforms and devices.
Integrations
Make sure the tool is compatible with all the platforms you want to connect. This will allow you to bring all the data together in one place, eliminate manual entry, and have a single view of your social media performance.
Cost and Scalability
Consider how the reporting tool will grow with your business. Choose tools with flexible pricing, no hidden costs and the ability to scale with your reporting needs so you get the most value for your money.
Real-time Reporting
Make sure the tool offers real-time or near real-time reporting to monitor campaign performance, provide timely insights, and make quick adjustments to optimize results.
Automation and Scheduling
Can the tool automate report generation and scheduling? This will streamline your workflow and give you timely updates. Set up automatic processes for scheduled reports to reduce manual effort and consistency.
Data Visualisation
Does the social media reporting software have visualization features like charts, graphs and heatmaps to simplify the data? Visual tools help you see trends and patterns. Look for software with customizable visualization options to tailor the data to your needs.
Using Swydo for Social Media Reporting
Swydo has a simple interface with lots of features. You can create beautiful social media reports with customizable templates and collaborate with team members.
1. Connect Your Social Media Accounts
To get started with Swydo, you need to connect your (or your client’s) social media accounts and data sources so you can create reports and dashboards. Swydo has over 30 platform sources for integration, including Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and more.
2. Tracking Metrics
Set goals and track the metrics that matter for your social media channels. Swydo shows this data in graphs and charts that are easy to read so you can understand the data and make informed decisions to grow.
3. Custom Reports
One of the best features of Swydo is custom report creation. You can build reports or dashboards from scratch to focus on your metrics or customize pre-built social media report templates with your brand for a professional look.
4. Automate and Schedule Reports
Swydo lets you automate your social media reports, save time and have up-to-date information. You can set Swydo to generate and send reports on a schedule that suits your team, clients, or stakeholders.
Next Steps
Social media reporting is key to optimizing your brand’s online presence and marketing results. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and data, you can make informed decisions, increase engagement, and improve ROI.
A structured report gives you insight into audience behavior and content performance and helps with strategic planning and resource allocation. With the right tools and processes, social media reporting can drive big growth and ensure your efforts are aligned with business goals.
Start leveraging these insights today to boost your social media marketing strategies. Give Swydo a try by requesting a demo or signing up for a free 14-day trial.