When presenting social media analytics it is important to do it in a way that best showcases the information. There are a variety of tools that can display your social media analytics in different fashions. Each tool has their own strengths and weaknesses, but which one is the best? That depends on what type of information you need to share and how you want to share it.
Best Way to Present Social Media Analytics
The best way to report social media analytics is to use a dashboard. A dashboard is a tool that displays all of your social media analytics at once, so it’s easy to see which posts are performing well and which ones aren’t. Plus, you can get metrics like reach and engagement with one click!
Dashboards are great because they’re easy to use and quick to set up. You just have to connect the tool with your social media accounts, and voila! All your data will be collected in one place. Plus, you can get an idea of how your content is doing without having to go through each post individually—and that means less time on your part!
In order to report on your social media analytics, you should first identify which metrics you want to track. There are many different ways to measure social media engagement; some of the most common are clicks, visits, followers, retweets, shares, likes, responses and impressions.
Once you’ve chosen what metrics you want to track, it’s time to figure out how often you’re going to report on them. If you’re new to social media analytics and don’t have a lot of experience using it yet, it’s best to start with monthly reports so that you can get a feel for the data. Once you’ve been tracking for several months and have gathered enough data points, then consider switching over to weekly or even daily reports.
The last step is deciding what kind of report format will work best for your needs—will it be text-only? Will there be charts or graphs included? What type of graphics would make sense in this context?
You’ve probably heard that social media is a great way to reach your target audience and build brand awareness, but what you may not know is how exactly you can use social media analytics to measure the success of your efforts.
Luckily, there are some easy ways to get started with measuring your social media analytics.
1) Measure engagement: Engagement refers to the number of likes, comments, and shares a post receives. It’s an important metric because it accounts for how much people are responding to your content—and how much they care about what you have to say. To measure engagement on Facebook, look at the total number of likes and shares on posts; also check out how many times each post was liked or shared by individual users.
2) Measure reach: Reach refers to how many people see your content in their feeds or timelines—it’s basically just another way of saying impressions or audience size (the number of people who saw the post). To measure reach on Facebook, look at the total number of impressions for each post; also check out how many unique users saw each post and compare those numbers against previous posts so you can see if there
ways to make reporting social media analytics less of a hassle:
1. Use an automated tool. There are lots of tools out there that will pull in your data and make it easier to see trends and track performance over time.
2. Create a template. Whether you use an automated tool or not, creating a template will help you keep track of what data is important for your business and which metrics matter most for measuring success with your audience. You’ll also have a place for tracking how often people are engaging with your posts and which posts are most effective (both in terms of driving traffic and increasing engagement).
3. Make sure the data is accurate! Don’t rely on third-party tools for everything—you want direct access to the raw data so that you can understand what’s happening behind the scenes of each interaction with your brand’s social media channels.
Why Social Media Reporting is Important
If you aren’t monitoring your performance, it is meaningless to develop content for social media marketing efforts.
Imagine working on your client’s LinkedIn Page for the past three months when none of the postings brought in visitors or qualified prospects. Unbeknownst to you, the infrequent YouTube videos you produced were actually drawing your finest clients.
This all-too-real scenario paints a vital reminder: Always invest time to analyze results for your social media strategy.
So, you’ll know what’s working (or not) and tweak your marketing efforts accordingly.
Social Media Analytics Reporting
What is a Social Media Report?
A social media report allows you to extract value from data based on various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on) and metrics (follows, likes, reach, growth, awareness, post-performance, engagements, and so on) over various time frames. Social media marketing reporting is based on a carefully curated collection of data and statistics that is tailored to your company’s social marketing activities and goals. You will make better, faster, and more informed decisions while maximizing your ROI with each initiative or interaction if you use social media management reporting software to track, measure, and refine your socially-driven efforts.
Why Is Social Media Reporting Important?
Platforms, plans, campaigns, and strategic initiatives underpin social platform marketing. It will pay dividends to be able to make intelligent decisions that will streamline your efforts.
That being said, social media reporting will expose you to a wealth of information that will assist you in generating leads, cultivating long-term customer relationships, creating shareable content, and increasing your brand awareness.
Shooting in the dark and hoping for the best is no longer acceptable in the digital age. You must use data to your advantage, and do so effectively, by selecting the appropriate digital marketing KPIs to aid in your overall social strategy. Whether it’s a Facebook social media report or a social media analysis report for another platform,
Smarter content creation
The foundation of any social media strategy is content creation. However, publishing material based solely on intuition is not the best way to approach your strategy. You can identify relevant information such as your top-performing posts, whether your target likes videos or images, posts or stories, and a variety of other insights using social media reporting. This will enable you to create and promote more valuable and engaging content on each social channel based on real-world data.
Results-driven scheduling
A monthly social media report can provide invaluable insights into the best times of day, week, or month to interact or share content with your audience, as well as which topics are likely to pique prospects’ interest. Understanding this information will allow you to strategically schedule posts and deliver campaigns, resulting in maximum results from all of your social marketing efforts. This should be accomplished by selecting accurate social media KPIs, which we will discuss in greater detail later.
Tailored targeting
Social media reporting provides you with a level of insight that allows you to delve deeply into platform-specific data and, ultimately, plan strategic efforts and activities tailored to each platform rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to your promotional efforts. This targeting can be significantly expanded with the assistance of an online data analysis tool.
Customized tracking and performance measurement
Tracking your efforts and setting goals is essential for ongoing growth and success, and these types of reports provide a wealth of insights that will assist you in overcoming specific roadblocks, overcoming challenges, and discovering new information that will assist you in driving the organization forward.
Identifying trends and new opportunities
Customers expect brands to participate in conversations on social media. With the help of social media reporting, you can conduct research that you might not find in other channels, such as what topics your customers are discussing, and connect with other international markets while keeping costs to a minimum. Discovering new consumer behavior and identifying new areas of potential selling points can and will expand a brand’s reach.
Delivering added value to audiences:
Another undeniable advantage of tracking your social platform’s activities is that you will have a better chance of leveraging trending hashtags, viral movements, and trends, and discovering new ways to inspire, entertain, and deliver value to your audience.
Prove the value of your strategy:
Whether you are working for a client or your own brand, there is no better way to determine the success of your social media strategy than with a social media report. By analyzing your social metrics, you can determine whether your posts were successful, whether your budget was spent wisely, and, most importantly, whether the investment in your strategy was worthwhile.
Identify seasonality effects
The final benefit discusses seasonality, which is defined in marketing as fluctuations that occur during specific seasons or days of the year. Easter, Christmas, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are just a few examples. These events are crucial for businesses because they represent opportunities to increase sales and gain new customers. To achieve their seasonality goals, brands must conduct detailed analyses and plan quality campaigns with content that is relevant to their target audience. Social media reports are an invaluable resource for this purpose. You can use data from previous years to understand what types of holidays your customers interact with the most, which strategies worked and which didn’t, and plan accordingly.
As previously stated, tracking and measuring your activity is critical to success, and reports are an excellent tool for doing so. If you consistently track your social activity, you will not only grow your audience but also foster customer loyalty, converting one-time buyers into long-term brand advocates.
Furthermore, when customized to your specific needs and goals, these types of reports will help you become more approachable to potential customers by allowing you to establish the perfect brand voice for each platform while also improving your response rates and levels of social-based customer service.
71% of customers who have had a positive social experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. Keep track of and measure your efforts, and you will satisfy your customers while reaping the benefits of growth, loyalty, and prosperity. Should we go on?
Best Practices For Successful Social Media Reports
There is no single, black-and-white method for creating a report. The reporting process for various social channels will differ depending on the specific use case and the metrics you want to track. There are some fundamental questions you must answer before creating a report, as well as some best practices to follow in order to produce the best report possible for your social efforts. Here is an example of a standard procedure that should make your practice easier:
Define your stakeholders
To begin creating the best social media reports, answer the simple question: to whom am I addressing my report? Because social media is such a versatile tool, you may need to account for results in different departments based on different goals. To put your data into context for each stakeholder, whether it’s from sales, marketing, or an external client, you can create a report that only includes the metrics that are relevant to that stakeholder. To avoid wasting time and resources analyzing numbers that aren’t useful, try to always include only your KPIs. Other metrics can be added as needed if you notice a hidden opportunity or if
Choose the right metrics
The metrics you choose should be tailored to the social platform. Despite the fact that they are all social, each has its own set of rules and best practices. You can better understand what kind of operational metrics you want to track with the help of a KPI tool, whether you need to focus on strategic and high-level KPIs or a combination of both. Aside from considering different parameters for each platform, you should also consider selecting metrics that align with your strategy’s main goal. For example, if a campaign was created with the goal of increasing sales, followers or likes will not be a useful parameter to track, as will better leads or conversions.
Provide competitive context
While your SM report should obviously outline every critical aspect of your strategies’ performance across various platforms, it should not be all about you. Include information about your competitors as a best practice for efficient social media reporting. When we talk about competitors, we don’t mean comparing yourself to the number one business in your industry, unless you’re already there. When conducting a competitor analysis, choose businesses that are on the same level as you. This will assist you in maintaining realistic and attainable benchmarks and goals. This practice can provide insights such as how fast your competition’s audience is growing and how widely their content is shared.
Concentrate on impactful data
Defining and analyzing the appropriate KPIs is not the only deciding factor to consider when creating social media reports. Always try to look at your data from different angles, and explore and filter it to uncover hidden insights that could improve your performance. For example, if you filter your data by country and discover that 70% of your traffic is coming from a single country, you can develop targeted strategies for that country or increase your budget allocation to it. It is critical to remember that you must exercise caution when filtering your data in order to avoid producing misleading reports.
Benefit from text analysis
Text analysis is the process of deriving meaningful conclusions from text sources such as social media comments, support tickets, customer reviews, and others. When it comes to social media, this is a very useful practice. Because you can’t read every single comment or piece of text that your customers leave on your social channels, text analysis tools have emerged to automate the process and provide businesses with valuable insights. Using this technology on your SM platforms, you can, among other things, understand sentiment about a specific product or content, measure your share of voice, identify key topics that your customers are discussing, and even identify purchase intent. This provides a wider, and even more valuable, approach to data than just looking at numbers.
Visualize all your data in one place
If you use multiple social media platforms in your strategy, you will need to extract data from a variety of sources, making the reporting process tedious and time-consuming. Modern business intelligence tools, such as datapine, provide data connectors that allow you to visualize all of your relevant metrics in one place, allowing you to compare how strategies performed across platforms and extract meaningful insights for improvement. Furthermore, the tool will automatically update your data from your social media reports, allowing you to spend your time analyzing your data rather than extracting it. Soon in the article, we will provide an example of how combining all of your social media data into one automated report can be beneficial.
Identify your reporting schedule
While social media posts can quickly go viral, it is also important to keep an overall perspective. It’s a good idea to schedule regular reports and connect to your social accounts on a daily basis (don’t forget about community management, which can be a separate topic). Reports can be sent on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, depending on your social schedule. You can schedule reports at specific time intervals using automated reporting techniques, eliminating the need to manually update the information each time. More on this point is provided below.
Automate your reports
Report automation is next on our list of best practices. As previously stated, automated reporting technologies enable you to schedule a report to be delivered to a specific recipient within a specified time frame. But not only that. Whether you are an agency with multiple clients or a social media team working for an organization, creating reports is time-consuming and tedious. Fortunately, automation tools alleviate this pain by automatically generating reports and updating them as new information becomes available. This way, you will not only save countless hours of work, but you will also be able to respond to any problems as they arise. These solutions also include intelligent data alerts that will notify you as soon as something changes.
Pick the right social media reporting tools
There are numerous data reporting tools on the market that can assist you in presenting your data, but only a few offer features that make your work extremely simple and straightforward. Choosing the right software is especially important if you need to combine multiple social networks. A tool that allows you to access real-time data, automate reports, and simplify sharing processes may be preferable to a traditional spreadsheet. datapine is a business intelligence reporting tool that allows you to create powerful, interactive reports for advanced data analysis. Its user-friendly interface makes it simple for anyone in your organization to use. You can see all of your data thanks to its automated reporting feature and data connectors.
Integrate predictions in your report
In addition to tracking the progress of your strategies, you should use your social media reports to forecast future outcomes in your data. Unlike many other BI solutions on the market, datapine includes a user-friendly predictive analytics feature that allows you to extract advanced insights from your data by recognizing trends and patterns that traditional reporting techniques cannot. Predictions can help you understand things like customer demands, sales promotions, and so on. To gain a competitive advantage, modern businesses are increasingly relying on predictive analytics technologies.
To continue exploring the value of social media reporting in practice, we’ve chosen 9 examples that will show you not only what goes into a monthly social media report, but also the differences between them. You will have gained enough knowledge to begin creating your own reports and utilizing these templates.
What Should Be Included In A Social Media Report?
We’ve covered 10 best practices for building efficient social media reports. Now, to complement this information, we will outline some key elements that should not be missed from your SM reports. Of course, the data you add will depend on the type of analysis as well as the audience. Your boss or clients might need a more general approach to understand the success of your strategies, while your teammates might need something more detailed to use as support for their own work. That said, there are a few elements that should be there no matter what, and we list them below.
- Goals and targets: The first thing to mention in a social media report is your overall goals and targets. This represents the path you will take to achieve your ultimate strategic goal. It is what will show you where you need to improve and if you are on the right track. Setting targets and goals is no easy task these days. They should be realistic and attainable for the organization. If you want to learn more about KPI targets, check out our blog post.
- Content metrics: Content metrics are arguably one of the most important elements to include in a social media report. The manner in which your audience receives your content will indicate whether or not they are engaged with your brand. By looking at these metrics, you can learn whether they prefer video, audio, or image, whether they like influencers, and much more. You can also compare interactions with paid and organic content. Some of these metrics are listed below.
- Reach: Along the same lines as content, expanding your reach is also a crucial component. In essence, reach refers to the quantity of distinct viewers of your post. A high reach indicates that you are publishing pertinent content when your audience is online. Businesses use the formula post reach = total followers x 100 to determine the reach for a particular post.
- Impressions: The number of times your content is displayed is known as the impressions. The impressions take into account every time your post was viewed, unlike reach which only takes into account a single view. A person can comment on a post multiple times without even engaging with it. Understanding the worth of your content can be done with the help of this information. If you receive 1000 impressions but receive no responses, something may need to be optimized.
- Engagement and interactions: Another crucial element to consider is your audience engagement rate, which will let you know how happy and devoted they are. The engagement can be divided into more manageable metrics called interactions. A post may receive interactions in the form of clicks, likes, shares, or comments. Naturally, this information is important because it can show you where your own strategies need improvement.
- Achievements:It is only natural to indicate when you accomplished your goals and objectives given that you have outlined them. This information is crucial because it will give you an overview of how well your entire SM strategy is working and how quickly you are accomplishing your goals. Any success that advances your overall goals, whether it be a favorable comment or an increase in followers, can be included. This is especially helpful for client reporting agencies since you need to regularly update your clients on your progress.
- Opportunities: Your SM reports should include opportunities that are found by analyzing all the data you have available, just like you include your wins. For instance, you can learn from studying your comment section that customers want an Instagram highlight story that responds to important inquiries about your goods or services. This offers a fantastic chance to provide them with a more customized experience and increase engagement.
- Customer demographics: Customer demographics must be included as a crucial component. This includes any pertinent details about your target demographics, such as the languages they use, their ages, genders, locations, and more. With this information in hand, you can segment your customer base and provide tailored campaigns that correspond to their preferences and needs. This is a useful method for choosing influencers who will appeal to your target audience.
- Customer reviews: Customers are the foundation of any business. It will greatly impact your performance if they are unhappy with how things are being done. In light of this, it is highly beneficial to include customer testimonials or feedback in your social media reports. Text analytics can be used to analyze these reviews and draw conclusions about the overall tone. Here, you can identify the precise areas where your customers aren’t happy and capitalize on the ones where they are. This is especially valid for companies that conduct business online.
Conclusion
So, what’s the best way to present social media analytics in a way that everyone will understand? As it turns out, there’s no one-size-fits all answer to that particular question. No doubt, every organization is different. Each one has its own unique needs and wants, which means that every social media dashboard will be slightly different as well. The solution? Start by first deciding exactly how you want your dashboard to look. Then, from there, try a few different options until you find something that works for you. In the end, the best dashboard for you is likely the one that is easiest for those who regularly use it to glean what they need to know.