The Ultimate Guide to Social Reporting for 2024 (Updated)

You’re using social media more. You share content, blog regularly, and see results. Now, you have a lot of data.

You need a way to organize and keep track of it so you can see how you’re doing and make changes to your approach. This is where social reporting comes in. In this post, we’ll see how social media reporting can improve your social strategy and your overall business. 

After that, we’ll talk about the basic parts of a professional social media report and give you some tips on creating your own.

What Is Social Media Reporting?

In 2021, 91% of small businesses will use social media, up from 86% in 2020. 63% of small business owners say that using social media for marketing is helpful for their operations.

However, social media produces a lot of information every minute, and it’s crucial to understand that information to stay ahead of your competitors on social media.

Social reporting is the process of measuring, organizing, and presenting social media data to gain relevant insights. This could be as simple as a spreadsheet with basic data or as detailed as a report with charts and paragraphs explaining key findings.

On the flip side, you might need a formal report to persuade the leaders in your company to keep going with a campaign.

Why Social Reporting is So Critical

Tracking what people say about your brand on social networks, identifying common trends, and planning how you’ll react are all aspects of social media listening.

Importantly, social media reporting is crucial for the success of your social listening strategy. A quality social media report should provide information about brand mentions, discuss patterns, and explain why those trends might be happening.

This helps in creating response templates for different types of brand mentions and developing strategies for handling potential PR issues on social media, among other things.

Create Better Content

Social media is a great way to share stuff, either directly through posts or by linking to other content. But, keeping track of how well your content is doing on social media is helpful for making it even better.

You can see which topics and kinds of content get the most clicks, shares, comments, and other interactions. Then, you can create more of that kind of content. For instance, if you find out that a certain topic gets lots of clicks and retweets on Twitter, it might be worth spending more time and resources on that topic.

Since social SEO is really important for how well your content shows up in search engines, it’ll also affect your efforts in search engine optimization.

Improve Your Post Scheduling

The way you present your articles and content matters, and it’s not just about their quality. Timing is crucial too for getting the most views. If you’re trying out different times to publish, social reporting can be useful.

For instance, checking social media trends might tell you that posting your content on weekdays at 5:30 p.m. — right when many people are wrapping up work — gets more attention compared to posting at 2:30 p.m.

Learn More About Your Customers

Creating a social report helps you find trends in how your customers react and engage. Studying these articles lets you understand more about your clients. You can learn about their goals, challenges, and how they talk about them.

This helps you adjust your products and marketing to meet their needs and create social media content that resonates with them.

Identify and invest in your top platforms

As Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube are expected to be the most popular social media sites in 2024 (ranked by data on monthly active users), you might be giving them a lot of attention. However, it’s possible that your customers are using different platforms more often, and they might be more open to engaging with your business on those platforms.

Social media reporting can help you figure this out. By looking at the numbers on each platform, you might find that some platforms give you better results than others.

You can also explore new social media networks where you’re not already present and regularly check reports to see if it’s worth investing your time in them.

Justify social media campaigns

Social media efforts can cost a lot, so it’s crucial to show a potential gain – especially if your business partners are unsure. Making a thorough social media report lets you prove to them that your strategy is bringing in new customers and boosting the business.

Also, being honest about any issues or less-than-great results and explaining how you’ll deal with them can build confidence among customers or internal stakeholders.

6 Sections to Include in Your Social Media Report

While a simple social media report might just show numbers on a sheet with a few brief comments, it’s usually not enough to truly inform and impress. If you want to share your social media discoveries with colleagues, clients, or anyone beyond yourself, a more polished and visually attractive report is necessary.

This guide explores the essential aspects of a professional social media report, giving you the basis to showcase your social media know-how and attain tangible results. So, get ready, and let’s examine the parts of an excellent report!

Executive Summary

You aim to create a report that’s easy to read for both quick readers and those who want to go through it thoroughly. That’s where the executive summary comes in. This summary gives a brief overview of the entire research and emphasizes a few important findings. 

State the report’s goal, share a few crucial facts, key insights, the main point, and any planned actions. However, steer clear of delving into too many details; save that for the rest of the report.

Audience Insights

Share basic facts about your target audience. Who supports you? Where are they from, how old are they, and what other details do we know about their interests and behavior? Understanding the readers helps you tailor future posts effectively.

Introduction

The beginning might seem like the executive summary, but it won’t have actionable insights. Instead, it explains why the report exists and shares your main social media goals, along with important remarks. This way, anyone reading the report will know what your data points mean when they get to the later sections.

Performance Snapshot

Share some basic info or key numbers about how well you’re doing on social media here. These should connect with your goals and the info you’re keeping track of, but keep it simple for now.

For example, mention how many new followers you gained, the total times your posts were shared, website visits, and overall conversions. However, save the detailed breakdown for the next part.

Data Deep-Dive

This is where you dive into the numbers. Basically, you want to include all the important facts related to the goals you want to achieve. Also, compare how well things are going by looking at these indicators compared to previous periods of the same length.

Use data from previous months if it’s a monthly report. This will help you see trends more easily. If your report is for a particular campaign, you can also check data from previous campaigns to see how well they did. This will help us improve these initiatives in the future.

Analysis/Discussion

You now need to understand the information. Check for patterns in the data and evaluate how well different channels and efforts are working. For instance, you might see more people clicking on certain posts.

When you look into it more, you find out that these posts were all videos about a specific topic. This suggests that sharing video content on social media related to this theme should be a priority.

You can also use this information to figure out why your performance was better or worse than in past campaigns, helping you decide how to do better next time.

Conclusion

Last but not least, recap the information provided in the report and the useful ideas we’ve gathered from it.

Share a few sentences explaining how you intend to use the report’s discoveries to make our social media strategies better in the future. You can even break it down into a couple of simple tips to help steer our future actions.

How to Create a Solid Social Media Report

A great social media report should give useful information, be interesting, and easy to understand. Here are some tips for making a social report that achieves all these goals.

Know Your Audience

Think about who will read your report, not just your company. If it’s for yourself or a close business partner for regular updates, you can keep it less formal. Feel free to be straightforward about any issues.

However, if you plan to include this report in a proposal for a new business partner, make sure it looks visually appealing. Also, tweak the language to make it more persuasive. Highlight the positives and explain how you’ll address any challenges.

Define Your Social Media KPIs

You shouldn’t put every number in your report as it can take up time and confuse your readers. Some numbers aren’t really that important anyway. Instead, find and focus on your top few most important KPIs.

It’s good to have a lot of information, but make sure it gives you useful insights – you can do this by looking closely at the most important indicators.

The following indicators represent your audience’s presence on social media:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Engagement rate
• Top performing posts
• Number of posts
• Page views
• Retweets and tweets
• Twitter impressions for your hashtags
• Click-through rate
• New followers
• Brand mentions
• Overall follower growth
• Demographics of your audience

Pick a Time Frame and Reporting Schedule

Make sure to mention the time you’re looking at because it decides how long your report will be. Running reports every day won’t give you many useful ideas; it might just help you check how your marketing is going.

A good mix is having one report every week and one every month. Weekly reports show you any quick changes from what you’ve posted and tried. A monthly report helps you see bigger trends in your campaigns or overall performance on social media, giving you deeper insights.

Collect Data

Get data for the time you’re reporting on from all the platforms your brand uses. While most social media platforms have their own numbers, you can also use other tools for a deeper look. If it works for your team, you can get even more detailed and separate things by type, like Stories, posts, or Reels.

Give some past results for context, no matter which numbers you picked. After all, data doesn’t mean much on its own. When you’re talking about a campaign, try to find a similar one from before to see how your results compare. Compare your results to the past few weeks or months if you’re doing a report every week or month.

Find a Good Social Analytics and Reporting Tool

Without a strong reporting tool, it’s hard to manage all the data from your social media. Choose a solution that can easily work with all your channels and has strong analytics capabilities, like Buffer Analytics, Hootsuite, or others.

Also, make sure you can add as many people as you need to see your custom social reports. It’s a good idea to invest in a platform that lets you schedule posts to your social media sites.

This can help you simplify your social media tasks and save money on other tools. However, make sure you know exactly what features you need so you don’t pay for things you won’t use.

Get The Formatting Right

Making sure your report looks good is really important. It helps people read the whole thing and understand what it’s talking about. This means finding a good balance between words, empty spaces, and pictures like graphs and charts.

Pictures can make the report easier to read by breaking it up. Each part should have a clear heading, and you can use bold font and nice colors to highlight important topics. These tricks can help readers understand the basics quickly and make it easy to skim through and get the main points of the top ideas.

Create a Campaign Evaluation

Most likely, at some point, you’ll run a particular campaign (whether it’s natural or paid) aiming to achieve a specific result. If you’ve invested money or time in a well-thought-out campaign, it’s time to evaluate its success.

Did your advertising effort flop on Facebook but do well on Pinterest? Did you perfectly reach your intended audience with Instagram Stories ads? Identify the factors that led to the campaign’s success and areas for improvement in future campaigns.

Final Thoughts

You need to understand why keeping track of social media activities matters and how you can make social media data more engaging for your clients.

Always keep in mind that understanding, facts, and thoughtful decisions guide the way to success on social media as you start your brand’s digital journey.

Embrace social media reporting as your brand’s compass, aiding you in forming strong connections, boosting brand visibility, and attaining remarkable growth.