How to Create a Social Media Report in 2021

Even if you are a social media expert with loads of successful campaigns in your CV, if you want to justify your budget to the CEOs, at some point, you will have to explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what results you’ve achieved.

Like in any other project, a simple, smart, easy-to-understand, and valuable social media report is one of the most crucial parts of your social media efforts.

Not only does a social media report prove the value of your social media plan, but it also helps you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy and shows what works and what doesn’t.

But how to create a social media report? What data should it include and how to use brand monitoring tools to get valuable data for your report? If you are still trying to define the right approach, here is a quick guide to point you in the right direction.

Why You Need a Social Media Report?

The first step in creating a top-notch social media report is defining why you need one. Answering this question will make it much easier to determine which data to present and point out.

Maybe you want to share the results of your last social media marketing campaign with other social media managers. Sometimes, you will use the report to give valuable data to your sales or IT department. A social media report is a great way to show the results to your boss or explain the value of social media activities to senior management.

No matter the reason, your report needs to be easy to understand and present the right set of data, such as general sentiment around a brand, level of brand awareness, content with the highest levels of engagement, or ROI of a social media campaign. All this data will show the performance of your social media strategy.

Data You Want to Report

After defining to whom you want to present your social media efforts, the next step is to prepare the right reporting framework.

No matter the data and analytics you want to use, goals of your campaign, whether you are creating a new strategy or reporting monthly results, there are some common social media metrics you can include in your reporting:

Audience Size and Growth

As one of the core social media metrics, audience size and growth data show the size of your reach and how fast it is growing. Put in simple words, this metric explains how big is the social media audience you can reach with your posts and engage with.

Mentions

Discovering what and when customers are writing about your brand is crucial in running successful online reputation management and keeping a top-notch brand image.

Although you might have a little less control over this metric (unless you decide to use one of the social media monitoring tools, which we’ll explain in the next section), it is essential to include social media mentions it in your reporting.

Valuable data about mentions from customers or even competitors can help get a clear image of your brand or business online.

Post Engagement

A typical social media report will also include data about how many times you posted on a specific social media channel in a given time frame, such as week or month.

However, those reading the report will undoubtedly be more interested in metrics showing how your followers and fans reacted to posts and what type of content they liked, commented on, and shared the most. You can also use this data to show your audience engagement rate or how loyal the audience is.

Conversions

If your company or business uses social media to generate subscribers, leads, or new customers, you’ll definitely want to include these metrics into social media report.

Conversion tracking can include downloading a content offer, signing up for a newsletter, or trying a free trial of your service posted on the social media channel.

This metric shows how effective your social media campaigns are and points out what changes you should make to improve the conversion rate.

Clickthrough Rate

Social media channels are a fantastic place to share links to a page on your website. Moreover, you can easily measure what percentage of your audience clicked through to the page and include this data in a report.

A good clickthrough rate proves your social media audience finds your websites interesting and relevant and wants to get more information about the content you share.

Social Media ROI

This metric shows how much value you generate with your social media investments. Most companies usually view ROI as a sum of money, but it can also have a non-monetary value like newsletter signups or comments.

However, sometimes, directly tracing ROI to social media efforts can be tricky. If you want to report on this metric, make sure you know how to measure it and also to set the right expectations and attribution models.

Social Media Monitoring Tools- a Smart Way to Get all the Data You Need

The data in your social media report is based on analytics. Although every social media platform provides some analytics, Facebook Insights, or Instagram Analytics they won’t be enough if you want to get in-depth metrics showing the long-term impact of social media on your brand.

To get that kind of data, you need a social media monitoring tool — a smart way of getting all the data you need.

For example, Mentionlytics’ Social Intelligence Advisor SIA uses Artificial Intelligence to monitor your online reputation and measure social media community engagement 24/7.

With SIA, you don’t have to spend the whole day on social media platforms looking for mentions manually. SIA does it instead of you, and classifies each new comment as positive, negative, or neutral.

That way, managing your online reputation and keeping a top-notch brand image becomes much more manageable.

SIA’s Intelligent algorithms also transform the vast amount of data from social media platforms into valuable insights that will help you learn how to find the right hashtags or influencers, improve your posts, or even get a better understanding of your competition.

This kind of smarter insight and personalized advice will not only help in writing a social media report, but also in becoming more competitive, increasing your market share, and improving your overall social media presence.

Use Social Media Reporting to Make More Informed Decisions

Social media platforms have become the most popular place for companies to spread their content, reach an audience, and differ from the competition. However, being present and posting as much as you can just isn’t enough.

To run a successful branding social media strategy, the one that will build a brand-customer relation and leave a mark on your customer, you need to carry out a complete and thorough monitoring and analyzing process. That is because your brand will grow only if you know your consumers, competition, and all the different markets.

When it comes to positioning on social media and developing branding strategies, a high-quality, in-depth social media report with the right data and analytics is a fantastic tool to make more informed decisions and positive changes that directly affect your business.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/how-to-create-a-social-media-report