How to Create a Top-Notch Social Media Report in 2024 (Free Templates Included)

The world of social media might seem like a Van-Gogh-swirl of data, photos, videos and memes with a black hole at its end, absorbing users’ energy and attention.

When you’re in charge of your brand’s social media accounts and learn to develop a social media report, the struggle is real. And the picture becomes even more blurry.

Luckily for you and all digital marketers out there who are desperately looking for help, today we're going to learn together how to develop social media analytics reports and how to use reports templates to make our job easier.

1. What is a social media report?

A social media report is a presentation that includes social media data and insights gathered with the purpose of evaluating a brand's performance on social media.

Through social media analytics reports, marketers can glance at their strategies' effectiveness in achieving their social media goals, becoming a key factor in a marketing plan optimization process.

2. How to create a social media report

To benefit the most from their analysis time, when creating a social media performance report, digital marketers are recommended to follow a logical and structured framework in order to discover valuable insights.

So, moving forward, we'll describe the steps you'll need to cover to create a top-notch social media analytics report.

Choose the KPIs that are relevant to you

The very purpose of a social media report is to offer an overview of how successful your brand's content strategy was in getting more attention toward the business.

Depending on your social media goals - be it primarily to increase brand awareness, engagement, or sales - different metrics will land in your social media report.

Defining the KPIs you'll integrate into your performance analysis is probably the most important step of social media reporting, given that you'll draw some optimization strategies based on that further in the process.

Gather the data

Bringing together the data from all your analytics sources will allow you to get a broader picture of your brand's social media performance, providing a deeper understanding of how different tactics and mediums have worked.

To create an in-depth social media report while equally saving time on your analysis, you can leverage a data solution tool, such as Socialinsider, that helps you access your social media KPIs in just a matter of seconds while also providing visually appealing performance statistics.

Measure performance on a set time frame

After choosing the metrics you'll focus on for your social media reporting and having put together all the data you need, it's time to start analyzing the numbers to see if your expectations have been met and if your strategies were effective in getting the results you were after.

For specific campaign evaluation, it's recommended that you run your analysis over its specific duration.

Moreover, if we're talking about a recurring campaign, making a comparison between current and past data may come in handy for you to evaluate if, in the future, it's worth leveraging it any longer.

Get cross-platform insights

To get an in-depth understanding of how your brand is performing on social media and which channels are the most effective and deserve more investment in terms of attention and budget, we recommend integrating multi-platform data into your social media reports.

For example, a report for social media could include data covering a variety of channels and metrics, such as Facebook engagement, Instagram reach and YouTube volume of posts.

By using Socialinsider's Brands feature you can run a comparative analysis between you channel's performance in terms of followers, engagement, impressions and much more.

Here are the steps I've followed for this process:

1. I added the brand's profiles within Socialinsider by adding the corresponding URLs.
2. Then I went to the Home section and created the brand e.l.f Cosmetics, while selecting which brand channels I want to include in my analysis.
3. In the end, I clicked on the brand created, displayed in the left-sided section of the menu, and scrolled down through the data.

Dive into audience demographics

Understanding your audience is key to your social media strategy's success. So, when you're creating your social media performance report, diving into audience data alongside other KPIs can offer you precious insights into the effectiveness of your social media content in attracting your buyer personas.

Here's what I mean: if your follower base is formed of your target audience (as revealed by the data), then looking into what post types are the most appealing will offer you some optimization directions. However, if you discover the opposite case, then that's a clear indicator of your need to revisit your strategy on a bigger scale.

Provide competitive data

Keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing on social media is only natural. And this is some valuable data you can include in your social media report.

This way, you will know how much you grow in relation to your past self, but you will also register your progress compared to your competition.

By using Socialinsider, you just have to go to Benchmarks and you will see how you stand in your market against your competition. Here is how to do it.

I create a project in which I included the Instagram profiles for Rare Beauty and e.l.f Cosmetics. By clicking Benchmarks, I can see their performance for the selected time frame.

Here you can select what metrics and insights to compare between your brand and your competitor.

By scrolling down, you will see social media metrics likes fan count, engagement, top 3 posts for each of the two brands, average engagement, average posts per day, distribution of engagement, distribution of posts and many more.

While this is a social media analytics report sample, Socialinsider offers a wider range of metrics you can look at once signing up for a free trial!

Include actionable insights

Once you have collected all the relevant metrics for your analysis and made correlations between the numbers, you have one final step you need to check for a top-notch social media report. That is coming up with improvement ideas based on what the data told you.

By looking at what you achieved in the time frame you’ve selected to look at examining what tactics proved to work and which didn't, you are now prepared for better predictions in the future.

Put them into practice, and you'll be on your way to great social media success.

3. What to include in a social media report

We have established by now that social media analytics reporting is done with the purpose of evaluating a strategy's results and identifying optimization opportunities.

And because there are multiple social media marketing areas that can influence a strategy's performance when creating your social reports, it's best to look at the data from multiple angles.  

Here are the main layers that a social media analysis report should cover.

• Performance overview

First things first, when creating a social media report, you need to take into account that your clients (or superiors) will want to quickly understand if the current strategy is generating the results expected or not.

For this, it's recommended to start your social media insights report with an overview that includes the main KPIs.

At this point, it would useful to also take into consideration some fresh benchmarks for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or any other platform you're currently focusing on.

• Social media objectives and status

Be it to increase brand awareness, generate engagement, or drive sales, your social media marketing efforts are surely centered around a specific goal within a certain timeframe.

To get an idea of how close you are to achieving the objective you've set, in your social media strategy report, you should track the progress and KPIs related to that specific goal.

For example, if you aim to increase brand awareness, you should monitor reach and impression evolutions over a specific period. On the other hand, if you want to generate more engagement or sales, you should look at the growth percentage that will tell you how far from your target you are.

That is why setting SMART objectives from the beginning is very important, as it will allow you to track development over time.

• Content and campaign insights

Content insights, such as the best-performing posts, are important to include in a social report, as they will reveal trends and best practices for KPIs improvement.

For example, if the data reveals that a certain post format is the most effective, that info should be used for future content creation.

Moreover, if you've had some specific campaigns, such as a product launch, you might want to analyze that specific data separately from the general content and get campaign-specific insights.

Track campaign-specific data!

Analyze your social campaigns with Socialinsider!

• Specific channel data

Understanding which social platforms are best-performing is crucial for strategy and budget optimization. That is why specific channel data is mandatory in a social media summary report, as it will allow results comparison and insights gathering.

4. Metrics to cover in your social media reports

When doing social media reporting, you need to make sure you choose the most relevant metrics for your performance evaluation, meaning those KPIs based on which you can decide if your social media strategy was effective or not in achieving the goals you've set.

Here is a list of the key metrics you should monitor:

• Followers or fans growth

This social media metric helps you assess how many followers you gain or lose in the timeframe you've chosen for your performance analysis.

Significant increases or decreases in your following can be correlated to certain social media campaigns you've run, which serves as a great insight into what type of initiatives work best when it comes to increasing your brand awareness.

• Engagement and engagement rates

Engagement is a game-changing metric that you should always guard, like a princess in a tower. A high engagement rate can be correlated with a higher reach and a broader community.

If your content drives users to interact with it, then you’re winning at social media.

There are two main ways of looking at engagement:

• The overall engagement shows how much people have liked, commented and, depending on the platform, shared the entirety of your content.
• The engagement rate per post shows how people interact, on average, with one of your posts

• Reach and impressions

While reach represents the total number of unique users who see your content, impressions shows the total number of times your content is displayed in users' feeds, including repetitions.

Organic reach and impressions are crucial metrics to track, as they can reveal which posts are the best options for boosting later on.  

• Top performing posts

Given that every social platform's algorithm rewards content diversity, mixing different post types is imperative for a successful strategy.

Naturally, some content formats are known to be trendier in a certain time period, like Reels on Instagram, for example, but ultimately, you need to adjust your posts' planning based on what works best for you.

Looking at your top-performing content is a great optimization tactic, as it will give you insights into what type of messages and formats your audience seems to appreciate the most.

By doing a post's performance analysis, you'll be able to gain a deeper understanding of the following:

• how long the captions were
• what were the main topics of interest
• what hashtags you’ve used
• how did your audience interact with your posts - by linking, commenting, or sharing it more?

• Traffic and leads

Certainly, one of your social media marketing objectives is to increase the traffic to your website, to widen your chances of getting purchases.

To monitor this KPI, Google Analytics is the best tool you can leverage to understand how your social content performs in terms of generating traffic.

When checking for leads, you have to pay attention to the actions users make after clicking a link from your social media posts.

• Click-through-rate (CTR)

Whether you've been running an ad campaign or you just want to check how many people click on the links you include in your posts, CTR, or Click-Through Rate can help you measure that.

CTR helps marketers understand how attractive their content is and how well it resonates with their target audience.

• Sentiment analysis

Social media sentiment is a metric that follows a customer’s perception of a brand, service or product.

Based on that customer’s opinion about a specific product or the brand itself, you can build your entire marketing and social media strategy around it.

You can leverage customers’ comments and posts about your brand to develop better products and services.

It is really important to find out what users say about your brand “behind your back”, when they don’t tag you.

This will help you get some honest opinions that you can use further when designing your content.

5. Types of social media reports

Depending on the purpose of the report (be it to evaluate a specific campaign or a quarter's strategy results), there are multiple types of social media reports.

While most digital marketers leverage quarterly social media reporting, some may need to check the data more often - to optimize on the go so that they could keep their competitive advantage - running monthly or even weekly social media reports.

Lastly, with yearly reports offering an overview of a brand's performance across an entire year, this type of social media report is also very important, highlighting what campaigns should be kept and improved over the next year and which shouldn't. It also offers great insights into how the budget should be allocated.

6. Download free social media report templates

When you're in a rush because the clock is ticking until you have to turn in your performance presentation, a social media report template can surely save the day.

Obviously, depending on your client's preferences or even your own company style, when looking for a social media analytics report template, you may be searching for a specific format, such as PDF, PowerPoint, or Excel.

In the end, it’s probably all a matter of what is more important to you: data flexibility or design.

So, to help you cut the search short, we've put together a couple of social media report templates at your disposal, which are listed below.

7. Best tools for reporting on social media

To develop the most accurate social media performance reports, you should take advantage of the wide pool of tools that could help.

Here is our list of the most powerful social media reporting tools you should try:

Native analytics

Every social platform's native analytics offers powerful data that can help marketers shape better strategies.

In TikTok's case, for example, by leveraging the platform's analytics, you can get in-depth TikTok metrics and insight, such as profile views, demographic data, and more detailed KPIs that will unlock more effective campaigns.

Socialinsider

Socialinsider is an easy-to-use social media analytics and benchmarking tool that enables quick yet thorough social media reporting.

Besides the metrics offered by any social platform's native analytics, this tool also provides a series of extensive KPIs, helping marketers get more in-depth data and gain a deeper understanding of their brand's social media performance.

Also, one of Socialinsider's most helpful features for creating top-notch social media reports is its benchmarking analytics solution, which empowers brands with competitive insights.

By analyzing competitors' KPIs,  marketers can identify best-performing strategies and campaigns. Moreover, they can gain content and partnership inspiration, which can enable a competitive advantage.

Last but not least, Socialinsider also supports an Instagram listening module through which brands can take a look at brand-related conversations, get sentiment and emotion insights, and manage brand reputation.

Google Analytics

For brands that have centered their social media strategy around the goal of increasing sales, Google Analytics is a must-have tool for their social media reporting.

Enabling social media traffic tracking, this tool helps marketers understand if their social media content is effective in making consumers visit the brand's website, which increases the purchase possibility.

Final thoughts

Covering everything from formats to metrics that matter, we hope this guide on how to create a social media report was useful for you.

When creating your own social media performance reports, remember to adapt the information you've found to what your brand's needs are.

FAQs about social media reporting

1. What are the five steps to create a social media report?

Here are five steps to create any comprehensive social media report:

• set goals and define your KPIs
• collect data from social media anaytics and reporting tools
• analyze and interpret the results
• compile your report, including charts and graphs to present data visually
• outline some actionable insights for the future

2. What should be included in a social media report?

What you include in your social media report depends entirely on your company's or client's goals for social media marketing.

However, most social media reports cover KPIs such as engagement, reach & impressions, audience growth, CTR and so on, as well as charts for easy data visualization, and a few actionable insights at the end.

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