Complete Social Media Reporting Guide + Free Template

If you want to add social media reporting to your marketing checklist but don’t know where to begin, you’re not alone. Many marketers realize the benefits of tracking and analyzing the vast amount of data available but don’t know what to measure and how to use that information effectively. 

In this complete guide, we break down the essentials of social media reporting, from identifying the right metrics to understanding how to interpret them. Plus, we offer a free social media report template to help you turn your social media insights into actionable strategies that boost your online presence and engagement. 

Whether you’re a new business owner, a marketing professional, or just starting with social media, this guide has everything you need to know. Let’s begin!

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What Is a Social Media Report?

A social media report is a document marketers use to collect, organize, and analyze data from various social media channels to evaluate the performance of their current marketing strategy. 

You can customize these reports to include the social media metrics that matter most to your goals. For instance, let’s say your goal is to increase brand awareness. The metrics that you’ll need to track include post reach, impressions, and number of shares.

This way, you can understand what’s working and what’s not and make data-driven decisions to enhance engagement and increase your return on investment (ROI) in social media marketing.

What Are the Main Types of Social Media Reports?

As we mentioned earlier, you can adapt your reports to suit your unique business profile and requirements.

Here are the main types of social media reports:

• Performance reports
• Organic and paid campaign-specific reports
• Competitive analytics reports
• Social media listening reports
• Influencer reports
• Audience demographics and insights reports
• Platform-specific reports

A. Social Media Performance Reports

A social media performance report helps you evaluate your social media activity over a chosen time frame. It tracks key stats to see if your strategy is working towards your goals. It helps you understand what content your audience likes, find areas to improve, and improve your strategy.

Here are the key metrics to include in social media performance reports:

• Engagement rate (the number of likes, comments, shares, and overall interaction with your content)
• Reach (how many people came across your posts)
• Impressions (how often your posts appear in someone’s feed)
• Follower growth over time (how many followers you gain during a certain timeframe)
• Click-through rates or CTR (how often people click on the links in your posts)
• Conversion rates (how often clicks lead to actions like sales or sign-ups)

B. Organic and Paid Campaign-Specific Social Media Reports

Organic and paid social media reports often use the same metrics like reach, engagement, clicks, and conversions.

However, organic reports focus on how your content performs naturally without spending money, while paid reports analyze the effectiveness of your ads and their return on investment.

Here are the key metrics to include in organic and paid campaign-specific social media reports:

• Engagement rate by type (organic vs. paid)
• Reach and impressions by type
• Click-through rate (CTR) by type
• Conversion rate by type
• Cost per click (CPC) and cost per acquisition (CPA) for paid marketing campaigns

C. Competitive Social Media Analytics Reports 

Competitive analytics reports provide a reliable overview of how you stack up against other businesses, find out what they’re good at, and discover areas where you can do better than them.

Here are the key metrics to include in competitive social media analytics reports:

• Share of voice (mentions compared to competitors)
• Engagement metrics compared to competitors
• Follower growth comparison
• Posting frequency and content type comparison

D. Social Media Listening Reports 

Social media listening reports offer insights into what’s being said about your brand across social platforms to help you improve public perception, spot emerging trends, and improve crisis management.

Here are the essential metrics to include in social media listening reports:

• Volume of brand mentions
• Sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral)
• Trending topics and hashtags
• Influencer mentions and their impact

E. Social Media Influencer Reports 

Influencer reports help you monitor and assess the influence that partnered creators have on your brand’s visibility, as well as the level of engagement and buzz they generate for your products or services.

Here are the relevant metrics to include in social media influencer reports:

• Engagement rate on influencer posts
• Reach and impressions of influencer content
• Conversion rates from influencer endorsements
• Audience growth due to influencer collaborations

F. Audience Demographics and Insights Social Media Reports

Social media audience reports provide detailed information about the people engaging with your content, including data on age, gender, location, and interests.

Audience insights help you understand who your audience is, how they interact with your content, and what they prefer, enabling you to tailor your content to better meet their needs.

Here are the key metrics to include in audience demographics and insights social media reports:

• Age, gender, and location distribution
• Interests and behaviors
• Device usage
• Time of day/week audience is most active

G. Platform-Specific Social Media Reports

Since every social network differs, platform-specific reports focus on one channel at a time. This way, you can see how your strategy performs on each platform independently so that you can tailor your approach according to a specific audience’s unique needs and preferences. 

Here are the key metrics to include in platform-specific social media reports:

• Platform-specific engagement (e.g., Saves on Instagram, Retweets on Twitter)
• Demographic details per platform
• Unique interactions per platform (e.g., Story interactions on Facebook)
• Platform-specific reach and impressions

What to Include in a Social Media Report

Creating a social media report sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really about pulling together all the pieces that show how well your social media efforts are doing. 

Here’s what to include in a social media report:

1. Overview of goals and objectives: Defining achievable and measurable goals guides you through developing a cohesive, actionable social media report.
2. Key performance indicators (KPIs): These are the metrics you watch to see if you’re hitting your goals. They could be anything from reach and impressions to follower growth or how often people mention your brand online.
3. Audience demographics and insights: Knowing your audience’s age, location, and interests can help you create content that sparks their interest and engagement.
4. Comparison with previous periods: Look at how your current performance compares to your previous one to see whether you’re on the right path.
5. Competitor performance: Pay attention to how you compare with similar brands or companies to see whether their strategies might work for you.
6. ROI of paid campaigns on social media platforms: Evaluate how well your paid ads perform to see if they’re worth what you’re spending on them.
7. Social listening insights: Learning what people say about your brand can show you what your customers like best, what products or services you should improve, identify trends, and whether you need to invest in rebranding.
8. Recommendations for overall social media strategy: Based on all the data, what next steps should you take? Depending on the case, you may need to adjust your posting times, tweak your ad spend, experiment with new content types, and more.
9. Visuals and graphs: These make data easier to understand and are useful for communicating with team members who aren’t as deep into the specifics as you.
10. Executive summary: Wrap up with a summary that highlights the key findings and recommendations to get your entire team on the same page quickly and effectively.

How to Create a Social Media Report from Scratch

Creating a social media report from scratch can feel overwhelming, but it’s a straightforward process that helps marketers see how well their social media strategy is working.

Here is how to create a social media report:

1. Consider your social media goals
2. Identify key performance indicators
3. Select your reporting frequency
4. Assess your reporting audience
5. Create visual social media reports
6. Benchmark against competitors for context
7. Draft recommendations and next steps
8. Implement changes to your social media strategy

1. Consider Your Social Media Goals

When beginning to develop a social media report, do so with the end goal in mind. What do you want to achieve through your social channels?

Common social media goals include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Driving more traffic to your website
• Generating sales
• Improving customer service
• Boosting customer engagement etc.

Once you lay this groundwork, align your social media goals with your broader marketing or business objectives.

Afterward, it’s time to get specific. Instead of just wanting “more engagement,” define how much more. Do you want to increase comments by 50%? Double the number of shares? Setting specific targets helps you measure success more accurately later on.

Then, decide on what actionable steps it takes to achieve your goals, and set deadlines to ensure you stick to the plan.

2. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

First things first, your KPIs need to directly reflect your social media goals. For instance, if your goal is to improve brand awareness (making more people familiar with your brand), good KPIs include reach, impressions, and follower count.

These metrics show how many unique users see your posts, how often your content is displayed, and how many people subscribe to your updates.

On the other hand, if you’re focused on engagement (how actively people interact with your content), look at likes, comments, shares, and engagement rates. These KPIs reveal how much your audience interacts with your posts.

Additionally, when selecting KPIs, you must be able to tell the difference between the following categories:

• Vanity metrics (like follower count) are easy to track and feel good to report, but they don’t always show business value. 
• Value-based metrics (like click-through rates and conversions) tell you what actions people are taking because of your posts. 

For the best results, you need a balanced approach that includes both.

PRO TIP: Choosing KPIs is not just about tracking data for the sake of data. Ideally, you should be able to turn each KPI into actionable insights. Ask yourself: “If I measure this, can I make a decision based on it?” If the answer is no, you probably need to reevaluate that KPI altogether.

3. Select Your Reporting Frequency

Then, it’s time to select a reporting frequency. This will enable you to keep a steady pulse on your strategies and ensure that you’re making timely adjustments to optimize your performance. 

Here’s how often you should report on your social media performance:

• Daily social media reports are great if you’re running time-sensitive campaigns that require you to manage customer interactions quickly and capitalize on immediate trends or issues.
• Weekly social media reports can track progress toward short-term goals. Use these reports to strike a healthy balance between being reactive and not getting swamped by too much data.
• Monthly social media reports give you a good mix of short-term changes and long-term trends in social media performance.
• Quarterly social media reports look at performance across seasons, showing the impact of longer-term strategies and helping to plan for the next steps.
• Annual social media reports are essential for reflecting on a year’s achievements, evaluating overall performance against annual goals, setting benchmarks for future campaigns, and informing strategic decisions at an executive level.

PRO TIP:  You don’t need to stick to one reporting frequency. Many brands benefit from a mix, like detailed weekly reports combined with a broad annual summary.

4. Assess your Target Audience

Before looking at social media metrics, you need to know the audience behind them. Start by collecting basic demographic data like age, gender, location, and language. 

Next, dive into how your audience behaves on social media. Look at which posts they interact with the most, when they’re active, and what content types (videos, blogs, images) and categories (informational, educational, or entertainment) they prefer. 

If you notice groups with different interests, consider dividing them into smaller audience segments. To identify exactly what your audience is passionate about, combine social media data with insights from Google Analytics about your customers’ interests.

For example, you might have a group that loves news and another that engages more with lifestyle content. Dividing them into two separate categories helps you personalize your approach to meet the specific needs and interests of each group.