How To Create a Social Media Report in 6 Steps

Social media marketing can help you reach new customers, develop a more loyal customer base, and generate sales—but only if it’s working. So how do you know if your social media marketing strategy is accomplishing what it needs to? 

That’s where a social media report comes in handy. Better yet, this write-up can help you leverage opportunities in the future by improving your social media strategy as a whole. 

By following a few simple steps to regularly pull and analyze these reports, you can better understand how your brand is performing on social media and what you can do to make the most of each platform.

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a document that provides an overview of your brand’s performance on crucial social media platforms. It features key metrics for success over a set period of time (such as quarterly reports) and includes an analysis of that data, revealing clear takeaways and valuable insights.

Social media reports don’t just document performance. They also measure that performance against established key performance indicators (KPIs), clearly showing what’s working in your social media strategy and what isn’t. Comprehensive social reports should include social media metrics like reach, impressions, engagement, follower growth, sales, conversions, and top-performing social media campaigns. 

Through the key takeaways of a social media report, you’re hoping to understand how you can adjust your social strategy to further support your overall marketing strategy. That might mean learning about changes in your target audience or finding ways to more effectively direct social media ad spend, for example.

How to create a social media report

1. Determine purpose and time frame
2. Identify KPIs
3. Gather data
4. Analyze performance and distill insights
5. Summarize
6. Format appropriately

While comprehensively assessing your business’s social media performance may sound intimidating, creating social media reports is fairly straightforward. Use these steps as a guide to get started: 

1. Determine purpose and time frame

Different brands may have different reasons for creating a social media report. Established companies tend to prioritize tracking conversions and sales driven by social media marketing. Smaller companies track metrics that show whether they’re establishing a greater social media presence (like follower growth). Other brands interested in customer retention may focus on developing engaging online relationships with their followers.

To define the purpose of your social media report, reflect on what you’re hoping to accomplish with your social media strategy overall. Determine the time frame that your social media report will cover. This will also inform its purpose and your desired reporting frequency moving forward. If you’re after quarterly reports on performance, your time frame parameters will be the quarter you’re reporting on. If you’re compiling annual reports to show year-over-year growth, the scope of the social media analytics you need to pull will broaden.

2. Identify KPIs

Next, pinpoint which KPIs align with the purpose of your social media report. These are the key social media metrics that demonstrate progress toward broader goals. For example, if you’re hoping to build brand loyalty, engagement metrics such as comments, shares, likes, and direct messages will be important.

Impressions, reach, and follower growth can reveal if your content is appealing to new audiences. Demographic information will underscore who your audience is on each platform and if those audiences are changing at all. Clicks through to your website or social-attributed revenue are crucial for tracking progress toward sales.

Outlining which social media networks you’ll be reporting on will shape the KPIs you need to pull, since platform-specific metrics come into play. Some key metrics are trackable on all social media channels, like comments and followers. Others only apply to certain social media platforms, such as page likes on Facebook or completion rates on Instagram and TikTok videos. 

3. Gather data

Almost every major social platform will provide a dashboard that pulls some social media metrics into an easy-to-read central location. This is a good place to start collecting information for your social media report, but the reporting capabilities of these native analytics are often limited. 

A social media management platform like Sprout Social or Hootsuite can grant access to more comprehensive and granular social media performance metrics. You can save or export that data for future comparisons. Google Analytics can help you determine how much of your website traffic came from social media platforms.

4. Analyze performance and distill insights

Data alone doesn’t tell the whole story of your business’s social media success or failure, nor does it encapsulate all that you’ve learned about an audience. Review your performance over the defined time period to identify trends, track social media campaigns that have performed particularly well, and monitor changes in your audience demographics. To dig deeper, conduct a competitor analysis to see how your social content stacks up against competing brands.

Distill actionable insights that inform what you should continue, change, or stop doing to grow your business. For example, if your social media report reveals that behind-the-scenes video clips have notably higher engagement rates than static product images, you can start increasing the number of such videos you’re posting.

5. Summarize

The goal of a social media report is both to spot any key insights yourself and share updates on your social media performance with the rest of your team. Write an executive summary that communicates:

• An overview of performance on selected social platforms during the defined time period you’re analyzing

• Any trends that can be spotted in performance data, such as higher numbers of comments on a particular content type

• Analysis of how your brand’s social performance compares against any social media goals you’ve set and your broader business objectives

• Actionable insights and informed recommendations for how and where you should direct your social media efforts moving forward

6. Format appropriately

To underscore important trends and takeaways in your report, it’s helpful to show performance data through visual tools like charts and graphs. You can accomplish this easily with most third-party social reporting tools. For more custom reports, you can use Excel or Google Sheets to create simple bar, line, and pie charts. 

These visuals should be used to highlight some of the insights you’ve distilled, like changes in audience behavior, performance trends for specific social media content types or social networks, and any noteworthy progress toward social media objectives.

The format you choose for your social media report may vary depending on how you’re delivering it to others. If you’re preparing a document for C-suite executives who need to be able to read a summary quickly, then sticking to a single page in a document format may be best. However, if you’re sharing a social media report in a team meeting, a digital slideshow can make it easier to display concise, visual snippets of information. And if you’re creating the report to simply document performance for yourself, opt for the format that feels most accessible and easy for you to track.