The What, Why & How of Social Media Reports & Free Template

14 min readJul 28, 2022

Marketers often have to turn in a social media report to show their work so far.

If you’re wondering about the term or the practices it involves, in this guide, we’re going to cover the following:

What’s a social media report
Why do you need one
How to make sure it’s successful
What data should such a report include

Plus, we’re going to discuss how to create a social media report easily. Moreover, we’re talking about how brand monitoring tools can give you valuable data for your report.

We’ve got lots to cover so let’s get started.

What’s a Social Media Report?

A social media report is a document that aims to inform your digital marketing team about their work’s progress.

In other words, a social media report is a compilation of selected data and numbers. It contains social media analytics, demographics, and graphs to help you evaluate your marketing efforts and content strategy.

To clarify, the shape of this type of document varies, depending on the agency or the brand’s needs. It can be a short-form numerical list that showcases key metrics or a detailed PowerPoint presentation that offers valuable insights.

Last but not least, the type of content of such reports is modified according to the target audience’s focal points. The illustration of data in custom reports can include standard social media KPIs, like impressions or follower growth. However, you don’t have to limit your search to mainstream statistics, like the number of posts, tweets, and new followers.

10 Reasons Why a Social Media Report is Important

Creating a social media report isn’t always the easiest or more fun task for a marketer. While this may be true, it’s important to realize the significance of reporting your social media performance.

There are many different reasons why reporting is the key to a digital marketing manager’s success. Why bother generating content for social media platforms, unless you’re planning on monitoring your progress? After all, knowledge is power. You wouldn’t want to invest time and energy into a project only to realize it’s not working months later.

More specifically, social media reports help you:

See what’s working and what doesn’t on your social strategy
Facilitate engagement and success analysis
Get actionable insights and learn from your previous mistakes
Benchmark your progress according to your own social media goals
Plan your next marketing strategy and set milestones by measuring your performance on a frequent basis
Present your social media strategy by-products to your clients
Share the results of social media marketing campaigns with social media managers
Give valuable data points to your sales or IT department
Show the results of social media marketing campaigns to your boss or manager
Illustrate the value of social media activities to senior management

What does this mean?

As shown above, tracking your performance and creating social media reports isn’t only for your own aid. Obviously, your learning experience as a digital media manager is not fully met, unless you get to social media data.

However, the reports can help you demonstrate your progress to major stakeholders, like the ones mentioned above. For instance, when your boss sees why your work is important you can ask for a bigger budget.

What’s equally important is to learn from wrong decisions and get better. When your content generates less traffic and leads, it’s time to figure out what went wrong. Therefore, you need to look at your data and compare your numbers to your competition, before getting back on track. Creating an achievable goal requires you to put your social listening skills to good use.

When you’re working on a multichannel marketing plan, you can’t get confused by the amount of content you’re creating. Make sure to check your social data separately or have someone check your real-time performance based on your reports.

There aren’t any right and wrong answers. So why is a social media marketing report important for your brand? Answering this question will make it much easier for you to determine which data to present and point out.

4 Elements of a Successful Social Media Report

When your mind’s made up about what KPIs to include in your analytics report, you need to start creating.

In any case, there’s a certain structure that social media reporting tools follow. You can arrange your own report, according to your needs and aesthetics. However, there are 4 elements that make a social media report successful.

So your report needs to check the following boxes in order to be user-friendly and effective.

1. Summary/ Introduction

The main part of your report is obviously your numerical findings. However, numbers become useful when you look at them collectively in an opening or closing summary — it’s your choice.

Summarizing your progress is the bottom line of showcasing your work. In fact, you should demonstrate what you managed to generate but also what you learned while testing different approaches.

Shed light on the big takeaways and your new thoughts on planning your next marketing strategy. Don’t forget to mention what your goals are for your future actions. If your approach was fruitful, you might want to amplify some of your top-performing methods.

In contrast, there are chances your previous work didn’t bring the results you were hoping for. For this purpose, reports will point out exactly what you need to change. After all, a good marketer knows how to quickly shift a failing technique into valuable learning.

Moreover, it’s equally important to introduce your report audience to your work in an opening overview.

That is to say, an introduction of your previous achievements and mistakes — how did you proceed in the following time? Try highlighting the focal points of this report. What did you try this time and what results were you expecting? This type of introduction helps with big-time gaps if you’re working for example with quarterly reports.

Tip: Use bullet points in order to help your readers understand what’s important.

2. Metrics and data tracking

Here’s where the main event takes place.

I’m assuming you have decided on the social media KPIs your boss, client, or marketing team needs to follow. It’s the only way to let them know how their social networks are performing to decide on any future amendments.

On this occasion, make sure you’re familiar with the various KPIs you need to track for different social networks.

Firstly, when you’re talking about Facebook Insights, try demonstrating the following key metrics:

Facebook Page Views
Total Page Actions and Reactions
Page Engagement Rate and Impressions (Organic / Paid)

Secondly, the Instagram Insights section should present data that focus on brand awareness, like:

Follower Growth
Top-performing Posts by Engagement Rate.
Number of Likes and Comments

Thirdly, if you’re tracking Twitter Analytics, don’t forget to include the following KPIs in your report:

Followers Count
Post Engagement
Number of Retweets, Likes, and Comments

Additionally, social media data will support your budget requests and your following content strategy recommendations. Make sure that you have picked the most beneficial order for your data to justify your future marketing efforts.

For example, if your goal is to augment your audience fast, try showing the number of followers first. In contrast, if your social strategy focuses on strengthening its brand community influence, you should move the engagement metrics forward.

3. Data analysis

While data tracking and presenting is the main event of the report, data analysis is the most important part. In other words, it’s the hardest segment of a social media report. However, it’s what sets a successful report from a basic one.

So how will you analyze your data in the best way possible?

First of all, you should start by stating what your goals were for the specific timeframe you’re reviewing. This will benefit both the reader (whether it’s your team, boss, or client) as well as yourself when looking back. Keep it short and informative.

Furthermore, before you come in and talk about them, your metrics are just numbers. Therefore, you need to start explaining what these numbers actually mean. To rephrase it, the most important analysis process is adding context to your data.

For instance, what is the average number of followers for an Instagram account of your field? How does your follower count compare to this?

End your analysis with actionable insights that help the reader understand what’s the best approach for future marketing efforts. Don’t forget to make your text cohesive, simple, and readable.

Lastly, build your data analysis plan, according to who’s reading your report. Major stakeholders, like a CEO, need a short analysis version that focuses on numbers and financials. Whereas, your marketing team needs a goal-oriented analysis text that makes members understand what went right and what didn’t.

Tip: Get your data as well as personalized directions for further analysis from a social media analytics tool, like Mentionlytics.

4. Visuals

Last but not least, it’s important to spend time on visualization. For better or for worse, it’s 2022 and a plain Excel spreadsheet won’t do the job anymore.

Context can be added to your data not only, by explaining what these numbers mean, but also by visualizing them. A visual image in particular helps the readers to digest the numerical part and understand the range of these numbers. In addition, this method turns your report from boring to interesting or even entertaining.

If you’re wondering what visualizing pieces you can add to your reports, we have a few suggestions:

Graphs of your key metrics
Charts of comparison
Screenshots of your top-performing posts
Thumbnails of your top mentioners
Videos of real-time team actions

Keep in mind that these 4 steps are important to follow if you’re not an expert on social media reports.

8 Most Prominent Social Media Metrics to Include in Your Report

It’s important to realize that a social media report nowadays doesn’t stick to one medium.

In a similar fashion, your data analysis shouldn’t stick to one key metric. The only exception would be special reports that track your brand’s performance in specific KPIs, like social media ROI.

Every brand or company needs custom reports that cater to different aspects of a general social media marketing report. It’s your job to gather your data points in order and present to your reading audience the most important metrics. For instance, if your brand is already popular, you may want to focus more on engagement metrics than follower growth.

These are some common social media metrics you can include in your reporting:

Metric #1: Audience size and growth

This one’s important! Audience size and growth data show the size of your reach and how fast it’s growing. To put it differently, this metric explains the width of the social media audience you can reach with your posts.

As a brand, you want to know as much information as possible for your target group. Knowing your audience is the first step toward a successful social media campaign. For example, is your audience more invested in B2B articles on LinkedIn or interesting conversations on Twitter?

After all, audience intelligence is what keeps your social media platforms engaging and running.

Metric #2: Mentions

What do customers write about your brand? Tracking these mentions is crucial in running successful online reputation management and keeping a top-notch brand image. Mention tracking methods, like PR clipping, have revolutionized the depth of modern marketing.

Unless you turn to social media monitoring tools, you’ll probably have a little less control over this metric. Regardless, it’s essential to include social media mentions in your reports. Overall, valuable data about mentions from customers and competitors help you get a clear image of your brand online.

Remember that you might need to adjust your report timeframe according to how much people talk about you. For example, if your company is widely popular, perhaps a monthly report may be jammed with mentions and confuse you.

Metric #3: Engagement

Obviously, you will need to include simple data as well. For example, how many times have you posted on a specific social media channel in a given timeframe. Your timeframe can be a week, a month, or a year.

However, the ones that read the report will undoubtedly be more interested in more complex metrics. For instance, how did your followers and fans react to posts? 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. This metric works great with Instagram analytics.

Metric #4: Conversions

If your company uses social media to generate subscribers, leads, or new customers, you’ll definitely want to include these metrics. For example, it’ll be useful for your content strategy to measure the conversion rate of your Facebook Ads.

Conversion tracking includes various techniques, such as downloading a content offer or signing up for a newsletter. Sometimes, it can even mean trying a free trial of your service posted on the social media channel.

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

Metric #5: 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. Include this interesting data in your report.

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

Metric #6: Social Media ROI

This KPI 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. For example, you can measure the number of newsletter signups or comments. However, sometimes, directly tracing ROI to social media efforts can be tricky.

Make sure you know how to measure this metric correctly. Furthermore, take the time to set the right expectations and attribution models for this segment of your report.

Metric #7: Top Mentioners

The first thing to remember when going over your social media campaigns is the power that each mentioner holds.

This metric shares social data about the online users that talk about you the most. It’s important to know who creates buzz for you and these data points paint a picture of your target audience.

The Top Mentioners report can be seen also as an Influencers Report. Basically, you can filter these mentioners by popularity and social influence. Subsequently, you can contact people with influential social media platforms that have talked about your brand.

Earned media -the coverage of businesses by a third party, including influencers- is the most popular method of advertising today.

Metric #8: Share of Voice

Last but not least, it’s time to compare your results to your competition.

See what’s working and what doesn’t for you but also for similar social media management groups. Basically, a Share of Voice Report paints the picture of the market you belong to. It does so by showcasing how your competitors’ keywords compare to yours in the digital world.

For instance, check the visibility charts of your main market keyword. Let’s say you’re working in fashion and specifically in children’s footwear. Track this keyword and see what part of the Share of Voice pie your brand occupies.

Not only is this KPI helpful for evaluating your work so far but it gives you achievable insights. In other words, when you realize what similar brands are successful and which ones aren’t, you’ll know who’s worth watching.

In conclusion, these are some of the most important KPIs to include in your social media report. However, there is a number of other metrics to include. For example, you could choose to analyze your brand’s Social Reach or your field’s Media Share. In the end, you’re the only one who knows what your company really needs to track, so choose wisely.

If you want to analyze niche metrics and get more accurate results try using a social media tracker tool.

Create a Social Media Report using Mentionlytics

You can get a portion of data points for free using Google Analytics. However, if you’re working professionally on social media reports, you might want to search for expert brand monitoring tools.

Monitoring tools get the job done quickly and easily. For example, Mentionlytics offers users a customizable social media report builder to help you step by step in the process.

Mentionlytics provides users with 4 premade templates of reports to download. You can combine filters and keywords to display the desired data. Furthermore, you’re able to create your own templates from scratch.

Likewise, you can customize every slide, according to your needs (change texts, titles, metrics, and many more).

In addition, if you get the Agency plan, you can request to replace our logo with your own. It’s an easy way to create a personalized report without even trying.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Create a Social Media Report with Mentionlytics

To create a new template click on the “Create New” button on the right side of your screen. You can also go to the reports button and click on the “Create New” option.

Now, it’s time to start building your report by adding slides from the report builder from the “+ Add New Item” option.

There are plenty of options to choose from to add to your new template.

You can customize each slide.

For example, add the first page of your report. Then, from the gear icon in the report builder, edit the desired settings of this particular slide however you want. You can change colors, texts, add a background image/logo, etc.

Every slide has some settings you can fully customize — here’s another example.

In the word cloud slide, you can choose to show only hashtags, pick one or specific channels, or select sentiment display. Additionally, choose if the words will be shown in colorful or neutral colors, if you need 1, 2, or 3 words or mixed. So you can add for example 1 word cloud with only words and another one only with hashtags. You can have 1 word/hashtag cloud per channel too.

You can change the title, description, and subtitle on every slide.

There is also a text slide to write your findings in detail and analyze your goals.

Get your free trial today and check out these features!

Grab Our Free Social Media Report Template

For those of you who want a quick solution to their report-creating problems, don’t worry, we got you covered!

For that reason, we’ve come up with a social media report template that is free for you to use.

In the following file, you’ll find everything you read about above, already organized and broken down for you. Take the time to edit every slide and add your own metrics according to the data points you’ve already tracked.

Download your Social Media Report Template

Experiment with our template and share your social media performance results with your team!

Conclusion

To sum up, the art of creating an easy-to-read, visually appealing report that’s packed with important content is not easy. However, it’s the first step toward a good social media strategy. It’s where you evaluate your previous work and set new achievable social media goals for the next evaluation.

In reality, smart marketers wouldn’t do all this work alone. On the contrary, they would trust a social media analytics tool to help them with the data points and analysis.

Use Mentionlytics to create all your social media reports and get personalized suggestions for your content strategy!

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