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A good social media report is everything. It helps you track your brand’s growth, shape the content strategy, and communicate your success to the team. With the help of social media analytics tools, you can lay out all your efforts in one concise document, enabling informed decision-making and a strategic approach.
However, understanding the state of your social media involves so many nuances, from ROI analysis to detailed breakdowns of every post. What do you include in a report to your clients or higher-ups to inform but not overwhelm them?
This article is your ultimate guide to building a perfect social media report that helps your team improve your strategy and see the big picture. Read on!
A social media report is a document that compiles social media data to assess the performance of individual social media posts, marketing campaigns, or a general social marketing strategy. It includes essential metrics on audience engagement, content effectiveness, and the overall impact of social media activities.
These reports enable data-driven strategizing and help teams communicate their efforts to stakeholders.
Most viewed and most engaging post reports in Planable
Include data that will give you and your client a clear picture of your social media efforts. Your goals define which social media metrics you want to put in the spotlight, but generally, here’s what you should include:
Ease the gathering of this data and more with Planable’s Analytics. This neat social media analytics tool provides intuitive insights into core social media metrics across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Consistency in social media reports is important — it enables you to compare results throughout time. Use this guide to learn how to build an informative and exemplary social media report in seven steps.
Set SMART goals to guide your reporting and derive key performance indicators. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. These goals help you evaluate and analyze your performance rather than just log it.
For example, “Increase Instagram followers by 15% within the next quarter” is a SMART goal you can easily track and break down into tasks, while a vague goal like “Get more followers” gives little to no certainty.
Besides goals, dive into your target audience’s behaviors, preferences, and online activity patterns. This data can help you shape the social media strategy and determine which metrics are most important and illustrative to track.
Metrics are many, but which ones are the ones?
Focus on data that aligns with your defined goals: if you aim to increase brand awareness, concentrate on reach and impressions, and if you target engagement, focus on likes, comments, shares, and engagement rate.
Content analytics dashboard in Planable
Sourcing data from each social media platform manually will take forever, though. Social media analytics tools like Planable can help you speed it up. Planable gathers the necessary metrics across various social media platforms into a single dashboard. Neat!
Metrics are just numbers until you give them context. Dive into the data using techniques such as segmentation and cohort analysis.
For instance, by segmenting users by demographic factors like age or location, you can discover which groups are most engaged with your content.
Tracking how these groups’ behaviors evolve over time helps identify trends and patterns that can refine your social media strategy — such as optimizing your posting times.
Analytics for an Instagram post in Planable
Planable’s detailed social media reports crunch those numbers for you. These reports not only help observe changes but also enable you and your clients to derive actionable insights from the data.
Transform complex data sets into easy-to-understand visuals using graphs, charts, and heatmaps.
Sometimes, stakeholders lack the time to delve deep into the details of a brand’s social media activities. These visualizations help them quickly grasp the impact of your social media efforts without getting in too deep.
Follower growth tracking in Planable
Planable creates visually appealing reports that highlight key performance trends and comparisons across different campaigns or periods. This makes it easier to track progress and tweak the strategy accordingly.
This can be a good call for quarterly reports, as data about your competitors and previous campaigns helps you benchmark your performance and find opportunities to polish your approach to the next big thing in your social media strategy.
Examine your competitors’ strategies and past campaigns to highlight what’s working. Assess engagement rates, content pillars, and campaign outcomes. Planable can provide historical data back up to 12 months to help you perform a social media audit on your content.
Formulate actionable strategies for upcoming activities based on the findings of the social media marketing report. Whether it’s new content pillars to cover, experimental formats, or new social media channels, back them up with data.
Of course, you’ll have to get all stakeholders on board regarding future steps. Planable’s collaboration tools smooth out strategy sessions, allowing team members to contribute ideas and align plans.
Conclude with a concise executive summary that highlights actionable insights and clear recommendations. Support your solutions with data and examples. This final step is especially important for agencies and outsourced specialists who run social media audits for their clients.
Planable provides a handy social media reporting template that includes all core metrics. Track your account’s reach and impressions, monitor follower growth, and study the best-performing posts for sustainable success.
Your social media report can be monthly, quarterly, or annual. Each period provides specific insights into performance trends and helps you adjust your strategy over time. Some metrics, like follower growth and engagement, are suitable for monthly reports, while ROI is better seen in the longer run, like a quarter or annual report.
Besides the reporting period, you can also differentiate your reports based on the goal and core tracked metrics:
Planable is a collaborative platform that helps you leverage the collective creativity of your social media team. You can create and collaborate on any written content and schedule and manage posts for all major social platforms.
Analytics view in Planable for IG posts
On top of this, Planable’s built-in analytics tools help you analyze your performance on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. Use them to:
Evaluate your results with account-level data like follower growth, number of posts published, and total engagements and profile visits.
Planable’s report includes posts with the most engagement and the most views. No need to crunch the data manually — the platform does it for you.
Planable offers detailed info on engagement, likes, impressions, shares, and more for each piece of content you publish, even if you publish it natively.
Clear, understandable, and packed with action tips, Planable’s reports are ready to be sent or shared via a link in just a few clicks, leaving no stakeholder unaware.
Hootsuite is a versatile platform that allows businesses to manage their social media presence efficiently from one central dashboard.
Its main features include:
Sprout Social stands out with its sophisticated analytics capabilities (and relatively high price), making it a good choice for big agencies and businesses focused on data-driven strategies.
Its main features include:
To take your social media reporting to the next level, follow these best practices:
The essential monthly social media report should include:
Social media reporting is crucial to your success on social media. Reports help you comprehend and communicate the metrics to your higher-ups and clients to forge a better strategy and make data-driven decisions.
Looking for a way to ease this process for your marketing team? Try Planable to create, analyze, and share stellar social media reports. Grab 50 free posts to give it a try today.
Content marketer with a background in journalism; digital nomad, and tech geek. In love with blogs, storytelling, strategies, and old-school Instagram. If it can be written, I probably wrote it.
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