Social media management is a complex process. If you are in charge of your brand’s social media presence, you have most likely felt the strain before. Perhaps your manager wants to know that your hard work is paying off. Alternatively, other teams may want to ensure that you are on the same page.
Social media reporting is a crucial ability for marketers, similar to an artist honing a certain technique. You must pay attention to the details to tell a meaningful story to your audience and provide concrete next steps for your organization. To paint the big picture, you need a mix of analytics and creativity.
What is the greatest challenge? However, reporting on your social media performance is not just for you; other stakeholders are interested in how social channels are performing and what influence they are having on the organization. So, you must understand how social media reporting works and what information to include to assist clients or stakeholders in understanding the return on their social investment. Read on.
Key Takeaways
- Effective social media reporting requires a combination of analytical precision and storytelling. This approach allows marketers to present data as a meaningful narrative, making insights actionable and relevant for diverse stakeholders.
- Understanding the audience for each report is crucial. Different stakeholders, from the marketing team to executives, have distinct interests, so customizing reports to highlight specific metrics ensures clarity and alignment.
- Establishing a regular reporting frequency—whether daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly—enables consistent monitoring and helps identify both short-term trends and long-term patterns, supporting ongoing optimization and strategy refinement.
What is a Social Media Report?
A social media report is a detailed document that collects and analyzes data from a brand’s social media activities over a given period. Social media reports often contain actionable information on your followers and their level of engagement with your material. They will also identify ways to improve the overall performance of your social media channel.
There are various types of social media reports, such as those that concentrate on your competitors, a particular social network, or a specific campaign. You can also generate a unique social media report based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your firm.
Regardless of the type of social media report you require, the six stages listed here will help you create a successful one. 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.
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.
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? This list of things to include in your social media report is more of a suggestion than a rule.
#1. 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.
#2. Social Media Objectives
A quick review of your social media strategy adds context and reminds readers of what we’re attempting to accomplish here. Does your organization utilize social media primarily for customer service? Social commerce? What about brand awareness? All of the above? Make careful to note any changes in strategy since your last report, including any new channels you’ve added to your social mix.
#3. Goals That Are Customized to Each Period
What did you want to accomplish during this reporting period? Perhaps there will be more followers? Maybe you wanted to enhance traffic to your website. Whatever yours is, make sure everyone reading the report understands exactly what “success” means.
#4. 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.
#5. Performance Analysis
This is where the satisfying stuff happens. To examine your performance, consider how your metrics and KPIs compare to your stated goal. Identify trends, triumphs, and places for improvement.
#6. Competitive Analysis
At this point, you presumably have an idea of how your accounts have grown or evolved over the last few weeks or months, but comparing your performance to that of your colleagues can also reveal some intriguing insights. Think about including a competition study to compare your performance to other brands in the industry.
#7. 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 social media posts accordingly.
#8. 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.
#9. 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.
Social Media Reporting Examples
From small business to enterprise reporting, these examples should help inspire you. For example. If your stakeholders are interested in brand awareness, reach, or thought leadership, this LinkedIn post illustrates how social is amplifying those goals.
You can also showcase when a customer applauds your product on social, like in the X post below:
If your stakeholders want to know if customers like a new feature or update, including visual praises like the one above are a great way to drive that point home.
#1. Competitor Reports
Remember to pay attention to your competitor’s data as well to benchmark your social media performance. Sprout’s competitor reports show several relevant KPIs at the top, along with a graph illustrating audience growth.
#2. Network Report
Sometimes your stakeholders might want to focus on one network. Sprout’s network reports show views, engagements, and other metrics for your social channels. Along with showing metrics, the thumbnails help illustrate the specific post listed in the report. This could help someone visualize why one video outperformed another.
#3. Custom Reports
Sprout’s My Reports allows you to create fully personalized reports. My Reports allows you to add various charts, tables, and visualizations—such as bar and line charts—to a single report, allowing you to compare performance across multiple networks and delve deeper into the metrics that are most important.
You can filter individual charts using the My Reports customization by a range of metrics, tags, and content kinds. Within the same report, you can use filters to get granularity in one graphic and high-level performance statistics in another. This chart-level filtering allows you to slice and dice your data to see various subsets of social data at once.
You can customize reports to specific business units and roles, with the option to create views for key stakeholders from marketing leaders to customer care managers. Plus, My Reports has annotations that make it easy to build executive summaries and rename different components of your report. This lets you change the story you tell with your data to fit different audiences—like your C-suite. It helps them understand social impact at a glance, in a format that resonates.
#4. Campaign Reports
Social media campaign management is challenging, but you can use reporting to guide your team. Reporting can help you determine success points, gather insightful data for future campaigns, and highlight which metrics to hone in on the most. In Sprout, you can use the Tag Report to help track a campaign.
Creating social media marketing dashboards like these that automatically track and update can help you report quickly and consistently.
#5. Crisis Management Report
A crisis media coverage should be based on facts and evidence rather than opinions or guesswork. It should include factual and up-to-date information about the event, its influence on the media landscape, and what steps have been taken to address it. Whoever you’re presenting this report to wants to know the specific numbers, read some of the comments, and skim the bylines.
Then, include a narrative of what transpired, including gaps, errors, and suggestions for future crisis management tactics. Being upfront and bringing everything to light establishes credibility and accountability with your clients and stakeholders.
Social Media Report Template
Here’s a handy template—Not all of these items may be necessary, but it’s useful for putting some structure around your reporting:
Additional supporting information
Media Reporting in the Digital Age: How to Create a Social Media Report
Whether you’re producing your social media report on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, it should be clear and in a format that’s easy to digest for your audience. It should include all the relevant insights into your activity for the timeframe you’re covering, many of which the best social media reporting tools will be able to provide.
#1. Consider Your Company’s Social Media Goals
Create a vision for what you want to achieve. You can think big, but keep your goals simple at first. Your goals should indicate you’re working toward something, whether you want to increase your followers, engagement, or conversions. Also, stick to the principle of setting SMART goals:
- Specific. Say which specific strategies you’re going to employ (user-generated campaigns, influencer marketing, Facebook ads and so on).
- Measurable. Track any social goal with numbers.
- Achievable. Make sure you have the resources (creatives, budget) to achieve your goals.
- Realistic. Don’t promise results that you can’t produce (think: doubling your follower count in a week).
- Time sensitive. Your goals need an endpoint. Give yourself a quarterly or annual timeframe to achieve your goals.
Framing your data this way helps you understand whether you’re reaching your goals and clues you in on opportunities to pivot if you’re not.
#2. Choose Your Reporting Frequency
All social networks allow you to pull data from their native analytics based on specific date ranges. You need to determine the time frame for your reports.
Brands typically produce social reports daily, weekly, monthly and/or quarterly. Social media is ever-changing, so it’s important to use data throughout the year to give various snapshots of your performance. Each reporting cadence provides a different value. Here’s a quick overview of the benefits of the different timeframes:
- Daily. You can monitor brand mentions and timely conversations that require immediate attention.
- Weekly. These reports are great for spotting new and trending topics, along with timely optimizations.
- Monthly. Gain a better understanding of metrics, especially pertaining to your marketing campaigns and content strategy. This cadence is great to present to managers since they track progress towards goals like account growth and conversions.
- Quarterly. You can assess overall social performance to help inform your strategy. Quarterly reports allow you to collect and synthesize a larger sample size of data.
- Annual. This is great for reviewing year-over-year comparisons and informing your overall marketing strategy.
Although short-term reports are helpful, they are skewed by anomalies (think: random high and low engagement days). Quarterly and annual reports convey long-term trends. These reports also give you more time to prepare and dig deeper into your data. This informs your strategy more than surface-level data.
#3. Assess Your Reporting Audience
Before you begin writing the report, consider who will read it. Are you attempting to provide a broader perspective? Perhaps the marketing team prefers a straightforward breakdown devoid of industry jargon, or management who is not socially adept. Perhaps your entire organization is curious about what you are up to.
You can better determine the level of information and which points to emphasize based on your target audience. Marketing departments, for example, are interested in performance statistics particularly to campaigns. Meanwhile, leadership may be fixated with conversions and financial metrics.
No matter who’s going to see your report, they’re going to want to see hard numbers related to your efforts. Pull the data that’s most important to the stakeholders and use those metrics to guide the context of your report.
#4. Make Your Social Media Reporting Visual
When reporting to stakeholders, use visuals regardless of who your audience is. Although reporting is analytical, remember that it is also an art form. Use data visualization to curate your masterpiece and make your reports more engaging.
A visual depiction of your data and talking points is a fantastic starting point. This makes your social media reporting easy to understand at a glance.
Visual reporting is also useful for emphasizing events such as engagement spikes, shout-outs from influencers, and other milestones your reporting audience is most interested in
With Sprout, you can customize your reports beyond the data you get from native analytics. These presentation-ready reports range from platform-specific metrics to your entire social presence.
Social media reporting is more than a numbers game. Providing real-world data examples from your brand’s social media can open the eyes of your stakeholders. Use visuals to guide your audience to that light bulb moment to understand the impact.
#5. Provide Competitive Reports For More Context
Pay attention to your competitor’s social performance. Studying their social media presence can help you guide your campaigns, generate content, and remain current with industry trends.
Seek for competitors with a similar social presence to your brand. For example, if you own a local coffee shop, you would not compare your business to Starbucks. Other tiny and medium-sized coffee businesses are close competitors. As an industry leader, Starbucks might help inspire content. Once you understand your industry peers, apply competitive benchmarks to report on the following:
- Audience growth. Are you and your competitors growing at the same rate? If someone’s outpacing you, it might be worthwhile to do a deep dive on their content strategy.
- Share of voice. Which brands are getting their content shared the most? Which social accounts are getting lots of love via hashtags? Maybe it’s time for you to get a bit louder, so to speak.
- Content performance. Which brands are dominating key social terms in your industry? How often do these top performers post? Consider the type of content that’s doing well too—do they use stories or short-form videos?
Third-party competitive analysis tools can help you answer some of these questions. Sprout has several tools that do some of the legwork for you.
#6. Summarize Your Key Learnings And Next Steps
Reporting is ultimately a review exercise for reflection and action. Consider reporting to be the muse or inspiration behind the finer elements of your overall approach.
To conclude your report, tell your audience what you plan to do next based on what you’ve learned (think SMART goals). This could mean running more advertising or publishing more user-generated content—the possibilities are unlimited, and your data can help you decide where to go.
Finally, remember to be brief while presenting facts. Bullet points are sufficient; if someone requires greater clarification, they can ask.
Best Social Media Reporting Tools
Social media reports are an important component of tracking your brand’s social media progress and developing the next actions to implement your plan and achieve your objectives. However, it can be tough to decide what to include when reporting the month’s outcomes to your supervisor, clients, or other teams.
Your social media reports should include a high-level summary of what worked and what didn’t, as well as whether you’re meeting your objectives. Sounds simple, right? It is possible—with the correct tools (or template). This template is for anyone who manages a brand online, including social media managers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.
Before you get started, here’s a quick overview of what a report is, what to include, and the best tools out there for your social media reporting. You don’t need to do it all alone. Here are some of the best social media reporting tools in the game:
#1. Whatagraph
This is an easy-to-use software for tracking and reporting on your marketing effectiveness across all major social media networks. Whatagraph allows you to replace several slow and complex solutions with a single social media analytics platform.
Unlike many competitors, Whatagraph allows you to track various marketing platforms, including SEO and PPC tools, web analytics, and email marketing tools. This enables Whatagraph users to collect, organize, and present disparate cross-channel data through intuitive visualizations, reports, and dashboard templates.
Data can be organized based on unique reporting needs. Unify metric names, group countries in tiers, or blend social media campaign metrics with data from other channels.
Thanks to professionally built templates, you can easily create any social media analytics dashboard or report customized to your client’s or company’s requirements and with the business KPIs of choice. Instead of using different tools to collect, clean, and analyze data, Whatagraph integrates all your data into one fast and easy-to-use platform.
#2. Metrics Watch
Metrics Watch is a social media data analysis tool that you can use to send reports directly to your team’s or clients’ inboxes. The tool comes with a drag-and-drop builder that lets you easily create custom reports with data from all your marketing channels. This means you can display key metrics from social media alongside Google Analytics insights or performance metrics from your paid ads accounts.
Instead of using PDF documents or building live dashboards, Metrics Watch has a reporting workflow where the clients or stakeholders get all the data in a custom email body with their logo and branding. This way, they can access their latest report from anywhere at any time.
Key features:
- Drag-and-drop visualization builder
- Pre-made report templates
- White-label reports
- Automated report delivery
- Real-time alerts
Pros:
- Easy to set up
- Convenient report sharing in email body
- Automated reporting process
- Good support
#3. Sprout Social
This is a comprehensive social media management solution that enables brands to produce, schedule, manage, and monitor their social media content. Sprout Social allows you to track critical metrics from practically any social network in one place, including Facebook impressions, X link clicks, Instagram follower growth, LinkedIn engagement rate, Pinterest article performance, and more.
This social media analytics system enables you to effortlessly organize and distribute your data through user-friendly presentation reports. If you choose Premium Analytics, you can develop custom reports tailored to your organization’s or client’s specific needs.
Key features:
- Engaging, easy-to-read graphs
- Sentiment analysis
- Competitor reports
- Option to tag content by campaign
- Boolean keyword searches
#4. Keyhole
Keyhole is a real-time social media management tool with above-average social analytics functionalities. This tool offers analytics for Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, aiming to help brands analyze all aspects of their online presence. From influencer tracking to competitor analyses and campaign tracking to hashtag analytics, Keyhole monitors what followers say about your brand, tracks competitor behavior, finds leading social media influencers, spots upcoming trends, and more.
For example, you can use it to identify the best influences using detailed profile analytics, so you can be sure they are a good match for your brand. Keyhole can also help you find any red flags such as fake followers or negative sentiment.
Key features:
- Brand mentions
- Hashtag tracking & analysis
- Social listening
- Competitor analysis
- Influencer marketing
#6. Buffer
Buffer is a versatile analytical tool for social media that comes with several features for analyzing and optimizing social media accounts. Unlike most tools on this list, it doesn’t offer analytics for all social media platforms. It also lacks social listening, paid content tracking, and competitive benchmarking features. However, Buffer has a couple of reporting features that social media managers love. First, it consolidates all your data in one dashboard — perfect for busy teams who need a quick way to get up to date with the latest social media developments.
Buffer can also make recommendations based on content performance. With this tool, there’s no second guessing what the best time to post on LinkedIn is or what content to use on which platform. Buffer does the math and answers these questions instead of you to give you the best chances to grow.
Key features:
- Content planning and scheduling
- Content optimization
- Workflow management
Strategies For Creating Social Media Reports
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.
#1. Determine The Relevant Metrics
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
It would help if you considered including data that generates money for your client, such as the number of leads, conversions, 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.
#2. Focus on the Most Important Information
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.
#3. Blend Data For a Unified View
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.
For example, you can use data to assess performance by region for any of your channels. Let’s imagine you wish to see unified campaign results for the Nordic countries. The Whatagraph Organize function allows you to swiftly organize metrics like reach and impressions from different nations into tiers. This feature isn’t confined to specific countries. You can group your social media data by campaign, year, audience, and age.
However, the capabilities of data transformation do not end there. By integrating data from various channels and platforms and conducting cross-channel research, you may have a consolidated perspective of user interactions across many social media channels, allowing you to 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.
#4. Use Data Visualization to Create More Engaging Reports
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.
#5. Establish a Reporting Timetable And Automate Report Delivery
Some posts become viral immediately away, while others require some time to attain the desired amount of impressions. The most important thing is that you and your clients are continually on top of social media performance indicators. It would be nice to use Whatagraph to automate reports at regular intervals (as previously stated) and eliminate manual reporting.
#6. Choose Proper Social Media Reporting Tools
There are other SaaS reporting choices on the market today, including the ones I described above. Only a few, however, offer a user-friendly panel, data visualization, and automation capabilities.
What is the purpose of media reporting?
The media, through its reporting, can put a spotlight on critical developments that impact negatively and positively on people’s lives, as well as bring to the fore issues that are often ignored and marginalized voices.
What are the positive aspects of media reporting?
Positive media coverage can validate your brand, products, or achievements, establishing you as an authority or industry leader. Brand building and reputation management: Media coverage contributes to brand-building efforts by creating positive associations and shaping public perception.
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