How to Create a Social Media Report [Free Template]

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

In fact, social networks are the ones greatest Source of inspiration for consumer purchases, with 37% of consumers find buying inspiration through social channels.

However, if you use social media as a tool for organic awareness and brand awareness, and not just a paid ad channel, it can be difficult to track the success of your efforts.

As every social media manager knows, the successful implementation of a social media strategy depends on countless factors – and all companies prioritize different channels, metrics and success criteria.

For example, is your company paying more than organic, and if so, to what extent?

Is the engagement of the audience or the growth of the audience more important?

Was a booking rate directly linked to sales?

With so many focal points for social media marketers, it is crucial to select, analyze and report on your most important social media key figures with a social media report.

With a social media report, you can clearly convey what factors your social media team is prioritizing, why these factors are important, and how to act against these goals.

In this post, we’ll highlight the importance of a social media report, list the metrics you should include in one, and perform a step-by-step process of creating a social media report yourself.

Click here to find a quick and easy solution to your reporting problems HubSpot’s free social media report template.

Why use a social media report?

A social media report is the best way to identify the key metrics that your social media team tracks daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and / or annually.

Because social media encompasses so much, collecting and reporting data and channels that you consider most important to your business provide a focus lens for your social media marketing team and provide a necessary high-level overview for leadership.

Social media doesn’t just affect marketing. Interested parties ask questions, customers write reviews and thought leaders follow you for company news. Since social media matches almost all aspects of your company, collecting and distributing the status of your social media channels is a step that shows transparency and promotes cross-company orientation.

You can also use a social media report to report on campaign-level analytics. If your social media account serves as a gear in a larger corporate initiative, this report shows how social media has contributed to the success of the project.

Selected resource: Free social media report template

HubSpots free social media report template has ready-made slides that you can use to report on all of your prevailing social media metrics. Download the template today and just add your own metrics to customize a social media report for your business.

Social media metrics to report on

Your company will likely appreciate some metrics over others when it comes to social media reporting. These metrics will likely also vary between your channels – since LinkedIn won’t let you retweet and Twitter won’t let you click a cry-face button.

Read this list of social media metrics options before you begin reporting on the performance of your social media channels so you can determine which ones to include in your report.

1. Target group size and growth

This metric shows how big your reach is and how fast this reach grows. This is usually considered the central metric for social media, as it shows how many target groups you can use with your posts and content.

2. Cadence of contributions

This metric is a pretty self-explanatory example and shows how often you have posted in a given period. This metric is usually compared to other metrics, e.g. B. Engagement rates to determine the right cadence for your audience.

This metric should also be channel-specific, as this makes sense post more on some channels than on others.

3. Post engagement

Post engagement measures how your fans and followers react to your posts with likes, comments and shares. Healthy post engagement indicates that you have a loyal audience – and that your content reaches them.

You can also track the engagement as a percentage of your audience Determine engagement rate.

4. Mentions

One metric over which you have somewhat less control is mentions. You can track mentions of customers, prospects, and even news agencies to measure the perception of your company and your brand online.

5. Click rate

When a post points to a page on your website, you can measure how many people and what percentage of your target audience clicked on the page. A high click rate indicates that you share websites that your audience considers relevant.

6. Conversions & new contacts

Conversions come into play when you use social media to generate leads, subscribers, or even customers. If you want to map contacts to the efforts of your social media team, make sure you use the right follow-up and set reasonable goals, as it rarely happens in some industries that you go straight from social media to customers.

7. ROI

It can be difficult to attribute ROI (return on investment) directly to social media activity. However, if you find that it is worth reporting on this metric, make sure that you have set the right expectations and set attribution models.

8. CPM / CPC

This metric is important to monitor the performance of your social media ads. If you are solely If you report on organic social indicators, you can ignore them.

9. Competition metrics

To provide a benchmark, you should analyze the above metrics for your competitors. Of course, these metrics can vary drastically depending on publicity, budget paid, and company size, but it’s still worth comparing.

How to create a social media report

Step 1: Choose your presentation method

For consistency and clarity, make sure you use a Presentation of social media reports, Spreadsheet or memo template. That way, each time you update your metrics, you simply have to copy your most recent metrics to this template instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

We recommend using a PowerPoint or Google Slide Deck template because you can email it to your team, use it for a face-to-face meeting or presentation, or both.

Do you need a template to get started? Try this.

Step 2: Determine the metrics you are reporting on

As we’ve noted, different companies and different social media teams value different social media metrics.

It is your job to choose the metrics that are most important to your team and organization.

Use the list in the section above to narrow down the key metrics that you think are worth presenting to your entire team. Keep in mind that for each social media platform in your company, you can change which metrics you report on.

If your social media report is campaign-specific, contact those involved in the project to find out if they hope the social media report will show reports on specific metrics.

Pro tip: During your first ongoing presentations on social media reports, ask your colleagues which metrics they want to see or which they need to clarify. If you make these changes sooner rather than later, you can keep your team up to date and get involved.

Step 3: collect your data

Once you know what you are reporting and how to report it, it is time to start collecting data.

When you set up your social media reports for the first time, bookmark your data sources. Create a folder for the analytics page for each social media channel you are analyzing and / or Your social media reporting software for a comprehensive view.

If you’re tracking click-throughs to your website, make sure you’re analyzing from one main location, e.g. B. from your tracking URL builder or your traffic tracking tool such as HubSpot or Google Analytics.

Step 4: add some graphics

A table with numbers on a slide deck is pretty boring.

While a numerical chart is important in order to share as much information as possible in an organized way, using graphics is a better way to convey the growth and success metrics of your social media performance. Try including one or all of the following in your social media reports:

• Linear diagrams to show followers over time.
• Pie charts to show clicks on different pages of your website (e.g. blog pages or case studies).
• Bar graphs to show the number of engagements on each platform.

These examples are more striking than numbers on a slide and further illustrate what your team should leave with. If you are new to data visualization, read our Data visualization guide for marketers.

Step 5: think about your story

An ongoing social media report should always remind people of where you came from and where you want to go. However, make sure that your reports also indicate how your numbers have changed since the last period in which you presented them Why Numbers have changed.

Has the percentage growth in followers decreased in the past month? Perhaps this is because one of your posts from the previous month went viral and led to unprecedented growth that is second to none. Make that clear and add context to the numbers.

In addition, each report should include clear action items on how you want to continuously improve your social media performance. Social media is constantly evolving, so your approach and strategy for it should also be developed.

After you have the knowledge to create, design, and share your social media report, download yours Social media report template and get to work!