Maybe you’re needing to report your social media ROI to the boss; maybe you’re needing to present the work your social media team to a potential investor. There are honestly dozens of reasons you might need to report on your social media marketing performance.
And hundreds of ways to give those reports badly. So, what do you do to avoid failure? To condense information and tell a comprehensive story of your social media performance? We’ve got some excellent tips and tricks which should help you not just present your reports, but stay organized, condense information, and walk away with a better sense of your social media successes.
Know Your Key Metrics
What is your report supposed to be about? Improvements over time? ROI? Shifting audiences? A new social media platform? For every kind of report, there are different key metrics which you should pull up as your key takeaway points. Often, these are called KPIs, or, ‘Key Performance Indicators’. So, your campaign objectives should define your KPIs should be the backbone of your reports.
Some of the most significant KPIs you should look out for include things like reach, engagement, clicks, conversions, and traffic from social media sources.
Collecting Your Data
If you’re like most people, you probably have several different sources for your social media marketing data. There are plenty of data tools out there which can provide better social media reporting and analytics! But wherever you can, consolidate. Having one tool will make it easier to track improvements, changes, and what’s working.
When collecting your data, you should ideally segment all of your activity out by time, whether that’s days, weeks, or months, so that it’s easier to make benchmarks and comparisons. You should also designate the differences between organic and paid campaigns, denote the reaches of all your different audiences, and collect the number of engagements (comments, shares, clicks, and etc.).
Create Funnel Reports
One of the best things you can do with any social media report is to demonstrate the funnel activity which occurs thanks to your social media activity! Though this is more advanced, almost any report reader will appreciate the depth of information.
Funnel reports show how many individuals come from social media onto a target brand’s website, and will demonstrate what happens after that. What percentage of social media users visit? What do they do? How many pages do they read? What percentage of those visitors becomes subscribers, compared to the total social reach? Funnel reports describe the actions of followers holistically, from first encounter to (ideally) where they drop out of the cycle or become engaged.
Creating Graphs
If you’re lucky, the reporting and analytics tools you’re using should create reporting graphs for you! But on the off chance they don’t, don’t hesitate to paste the graphs and tables directly from social media reporting pages into your report. Give the viewer access to all the hard data!
For important fields, you can easily export information in CSV format to create graphs in Excel displaying high-value summary information. Compare money invested to money returned, engagement to number of posts made, and so forth.
The Bottom Line
When you’re preparing a report on your social media marketing, you should always try to be aware of what the receiver of the report is looking for! ROI? Improvements to conversions or visitors? Always gear the angle of your reports towards the data the viewer most wants to see, and create a visual story with the information they need to walk away with an informed decision.
Breaking your report down into daily or weekly graphs of information following your KPIs will make your report more digestible and easy to follow.