All those likes, shares, and comments you get on social media mean something — but what? That’s where social media reporting comes in. Without a formal report, brands are at a loss as to how they’re performing on social media and whether they’re meeting short-term and long-term business objectives.
Granted, creating these reports might not be the most glamorous part of your job. But as a social media manager, it’s one of the most important tasks you’ll do. It’s your opportunity to prove your efforts on social media are working and demonstrate real value to your organization. Sounds a little more exciting now, right?
Before you start celebrating your social wins, let’s dive into how to create a social media report that will wow your stakeholders.
Table of Contents
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What Is Social Media Reporting?
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What to Include in a Social Media Report
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Where to Find Data for Your Social Media Reporting
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How to Create a Social Media Report
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How Often to Create Social Media Reports
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Simplify Social Media Reporting with Our Free Template
What is Social Media Reporting?
We define social media reporting as the process of turning your social media analytics into formal reports. These reports tell the story of your performance on social channels, for better or worse.
Social media reports can be as simple or complex as you need. They might be brief before-and-after snapshots related to a campaign, a list of metrics and KPIs in a spreadsheet, or a series of charts and graphs that illustrate your growth.
What’s more, you can create comprehensive social media reports or separate your reporting by channel. Depending on who will benefit from your reporting, you may even create separate reports for different audiences.
What to Include in a Social Media Report
The easy answer is to include the data your audience needs to understand your social media performance.
The more honest answer is, it depends.
The purpose of social media reporting is to understand how your social media efforts are currently performing. But you don’t have to stop there — use that data to inform your next actions to improve your current position and generate even better results.
To help with this process, we’ve included a free social media report template that you can download below.
Or you can create your own. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll focus on a monthly social media report template, which should include the following:
An Overview of Your Social Media Strategy
Start your report by providing some context about your social media strategy. Talk about your approach, any recent campaigns, or snapshots from your last report. This gives your audience some background information and shows why the data you’re about to share is important.
General Goals
Use this section to talk about your goals for using social media. These goals might tie to specific campaigns, or they might be more general, such as growing brand awareness or improving customer sentiment.
It’s helpful to set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) so you can easily track your progress. This section of your social media report can talk about goals you set in the last report as well as new goals you’d like to achieve.
Metrics and KPIs to Monitor
Social media reports should include specific data about your performance. Typically, social media marketers use a range of metrics and KPIs to gauge their progress. These metrics may vary by channel (such as TikTok and IGTV views, Instagram likes, Twitter retweets, LinkedIn shares), by campaign, and by goal.
Ideally, you will choose metrics that tie directly to your SMART goals. Some common metrics to include in your reports are:
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Engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.)
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Social media share of voice
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Audience growth
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Number of leads generated
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Number of conversions
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Total ad spend
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Return on investment (ROI)
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Overall sentiment
If you’re using social media for customer service tasks, you might also include relevant KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or resolution time in your report.
You can glean some of these insights from built-in social media analytics. Platforms like Linkfluence can also collect social media data on your behalf as well as data like consumer sentiment and share of voice. Linkfluence provides these insights in a single place and can compile these findings into easy-to-read reports.
A Breakdown of Performance By Channel
If you’re on multiple social media networks (many brands are), you’ll want to include insights about each one. You can create individual sections in a comprehensive report, or create separate reports for each channel.
These sections should dial deeper into the metrics per channel. Linking back to your goals, you can show how you’re reaching those objectives on each social media network. And if a channel has more than one feature you’re using (such as Instagram Reels vs. Instagram Stories), you can include specific metrics on those.
The data you include in these sections depends on the social media channel and the metrics available for those channels that relate to your goal. Offering before-and-after snapshots or comparing data from the last report can provide more context in these sections.
Another best practice is to include historical data so your audience can easily spot trends and patterns. For example, if you are reporting on social media performance every month, you might include data from the past several months or year-over-year to demonstrate growth and success. This provides the reader with even more context and can shine a light on what’s working and what might need improving.
Most importantly, only focus on what matters. You don’t need to measure and report on every detail, especially when you’re on multiple social media networks. The data can get overwhelming if you try to include everything, and it will all end up meaning nothing to the reader.
Benchmark Data
It’s not always necessary, but it can be helpful to include benchmark data from your competitors or industry. This data can put your own social media performance into perspective for your audience. See how your competitors’ performance compares to yours, industry averages for engagement or conversions, and average ad campaign spend, for example.
You can use Linkfluence to collect benchmark data without extensive research. With always-on monitoring, Linkfluence provides real-time insights into all the digital content and conversations happening at any given time.
A List of Wins
Data alone isn’t always enough to make your audience see its value. A great social media report will pick out specific insights to share with the audience and explain why those data points are important.
Start by sharing a list of wins you’ve achieved during the reporting period. Talk about the progress you’ve made on specific KPIs, the things you did well, and what you plan to continue doing to generate more of the same results.
In this section, you can rely on a combination of data and “off-page” information. For example, you might have met a key influencer in your niche who helped with a campaign. Or you might have had one piece of content go viral that sparked a lot of success. This is a great place to talk about why the data looks the way it does or why you got the results you did.
The wins might not always come in the form of data and numbers, so speak up about all the good things that have happened that the data might be leaving out.
A List of Potential Opportunities
Similar to your list of wins, your report should include details about any shortcomings, mistakes, or other things you plan to do differently. This might be a one-off campaign gone wrong, a drop in followers or subscribers due to a change in consumer sentiment, or a missed deadline on a multi-channel campaign, for example.
This section also gives you an opportunity to talk about things you might try in the future. It might be a new social media tool you discovered, a new influencer you want to connect with, or even a new content format or social network you’re interested in trying.
Use this section to get your readers excited about the next social media reporting phase. They’ll have something to look forward to and will be eager to see growth and success based on the opportunities you shared.
Social Media Report Summary
Social media reporting covers a lot of information, so use the end of the report to summarize your findings. Give a brief overview of what worked well and what you plan to do in the next period to improve your results.
This also gives you an action plan to follow as you gear up for new initiatives.
Where to Find Data for Your Social Media Reporting
Analytics on each of your social media platforms is a great place to start when collecting data for social media reporting. You can gain platform-specific insights about your performance and include them in your reports.
You can also rely on all-in-one platforms like Linkfluence. These platforms monitor your social media performance on your behalf and work across multiple channels in real time. This gives you up-to-date insights about your performance at any given time without having to create a report.
It also simplifies the reporting process by having all the data you need in one place. You can add the data to pre-built reports to save even more time.
How to Create a Social Media Report
Using a social media report template is arguably the easiest way to create a social media report. You can take advantage of drag-and-drop tools like Canva to create your own presentation-ready reports. However, these templates can be a bit one-size-fits-all and may not capture all the information you want.
Another option is to use a pre-built social media report template, like the one we created below. Most of the work is done for you; all you’ll need to do is plug in your data and customize it to your liking.
Once you have a template, you can reuse it again and again for your social media reporting. Use the following steps to fill in the blanks and create a helpful report you’ll be proud of.
Decide Who the Report is For
Before you develop your report, it’s best to understand who you’re creating the report for — a VP, a whole marketing team, just your boss, or even just yourself, for example. Knowing your audience allows you to collect the data and share insights that will matter to the reader.
Collect Your Data
Go through each of your social media channels and pick out the data to include in your report. You may require multiple sources, such as each platform’s analytics as well as third-party tools like Linkfluence.
Stay focused on the metrics and KPIs that tie into your goals. This will keep your report neat and organized so readers can get the most use from it.
Analyze Your Findings
As you’re gathering data, make sure you review and analyze your findings and pick out important insights. Look for wins, patterns, opportunities, or anything else you can illustrate for your audience. Then, make sure you share the report with key stakeholders.
How Often to Create Social Media Reports
Your social media reporting frequency will depend on your organization and priorities. Some social media managers conduct weekly or monthly recaps, while others might report on social media metrics less frequently.
There are different levels of value for different reporting frequencies:
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Daily. Ideal for monitoring brand mentions and capturing online reviews and conversations that require your attention.
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Weekly. Best for identifying trends or patterns that will inform your content creation and campaigns.
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Monthly. Ideal for tracking campaign performance and how it relates to your content marketing strategy.
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Quarterly. Provides a larger sample of data to guide your strategy.
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Annually. Great for gaining year-over-year comparisons of social media performance.
There is no right or wrong here. Talk to your stakeholders (e.g., VPs, marketing teams) to see how often they want to be updated on social media metrics. You might also run different reports at different intervals to focus on the data that’s most important during those times.
Simplify Social Media Reporting with Our Free Template
When creating your first report, it’s helpful to look at a social media report sample to see how to organize your information. Check out our free social media report template and let it inspire your own!