Reporting on social media analytics is a crucial part of understanding what your audience wants, but it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. In this post, we’re going to walk you through the process of reporting on social media analytics and how it can help your organization grow.
Best Way to Report 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.
What Should be Included in a Social Media Report
All Your KPIs From All Your Platforms
Ah, the social media report’s primary stars.
The essential information that clients will learn from the social media KPIs is how their social networks have fared and what they should do next.
In other words, when you continue with the approach, these social media data will support your recommendations (more about this in the next section).
Page views, total actions on page, total responses on page, page engagement rate, page impressions, page organic impressions, and page paid impressions should be your main KPIs if you’re using Facebook Insights.
The following essential metrics and KPIs should be monitored on Instagram Insights: follower growth, profile views, engagement review, likes, comments, and top-performing posts by engagement rate. These metrics and KPIs are focused on brand awareness.
Business-to-business clients that want a LinkedIn page that is optimized should track their followers, impressions, clicks on the page, post actions over time, post likes, comment count, shares, and social interactions.
For Twitter Analytics, you should focus on the number of followers, the engagement rate of those followers, interactions over time, post engagement, likes, and retweets.
You may establish a KPI with DashThis to track the Twitter impressions of your hashtags. Yes, it’s simple to monitor the brand-specific hashtags influencers use in their postings.
Executive Summary
Set your marketing reporting on the right foot— display an executive summary at the top of your social media report:
- Click Static Widgets
- Select Comments
- Enter your executive summary
Comments and Notes
Effective reports include more information than the typical social media statistics. Social media marketers who are knowledgeable and data-driven will make suggestions for enhancements.
Locate your desired KPIs and complete the following steps:
- Click Add Note
- Enter your recommendations
- Click Save
Use this opportunity to prove to your client that they’ll get massive ROI from working with you.
You don’t just want to be a typical agency they hire. You want them to think of you as a partner and asset.
You can also leverage the Notes section for proofing. Send a draft of your report to the marketing team or other stakeholders.
Types of Social Media Reports
Operational Reports
Operational reports are for the doers; they include audience growth rates, impressions, and click-throughs. Because they offer pertinent information to those who really carry out social media and marketing initiatives, they are an important resource. Consider the marketers who oversee campaigns on a daily basis. To make judgments and adjustments at the rate at which their customers do, they require real-time information. They must immediately learn if one issue is generating more attention than another. Operational data can be bundled to keep executives updated on a campaign’s status in addition to guiding tactics and strategy. The reports can explain why a social media campaign succeeded (or failed) in reaching its objectives.
Insight Reports
Insight reports are primarily used to delve further into the data being produced at the operational level. Depending on the extent of the analysis, front-line employees use the data to support either their ongoing strategies or their long-term objectives. The reports should be quite straightforward so that staff members can use them to deliver information to higher levels of the organization. Marketing directors and social media strategists frequently produce insight reports. Their views on why people behave the way they do and what should be done at the operational level to be most effective are based on facts and studies, which they wish to either support or refute.
Informative Reports
A company’s leaders can plot the finest possible strategic route with the help of informative reports. Informative reports concentrate more on the broad key performance indicators (KPIs) that executives value, such as ROI statistics and the pace at which social media is creating sales prospects, as opposed to insight reports, which more closely examine specific, granular themes.
C-Suite members will want to know how increasing social engagement figures relate to the company’s overall strategy if they do. They seek a top-down understanding of how their choices are impacting actual results, and chief marketing officers or vice presidents of marketing are typically responsible for giving them this data.
The most informative reports are those that are simple to understand and consume given the restricted attention span of the majority of executives. There are still skeptics, despite the fact that leaders from all sectors are beginning to understand the value of social media reporting; it is essential to keep the reports brief and to the point if you want to win over this group.
It’s also crucial to have a collection of more in-depth statistics on hand in case a manager asks you about a certain facet of your social efforts.
Importance of Social Media Analytics
They help you understand your audience
Taking steps to understand your audience using social data can help you in so many ways. For example, analyzing your past posts can help you find your unique best time to share.
Timing is an important part of social media marketing. If you post when your fans are online and at their highest level of alertness your posts will drive more engagement, traffic and sales.
Therefore, you should dissect your social data and find your unique best time to post on social media.
Some social networks let you do this easily through their built-in analytics.
On Facebook, you can find it by going to the ‘Post’ section in your insights.
You’ll then see two graphs at the top of the screen.
They will show you the days and times at which most of the page’s fans are online.
If you post content at these times, reach will be high.
They show you what your best social networks are
Not all social networks will work perfectly for you. Just because Facebook has over 2 billion users and Instagram has over 800 million users doesn’t mean they will drive the best results.
There might be smaller networks like Pinterest or Flickr that can help execute your strategy better.
The only way to confirm which social networks work best is through experimentation and using your analytics to measure how much engagement, traffic and sales you are getting.
This data can be utilized to focus more on social networks that are working for you and eliminating ones that aren’t.
You can also use the data to prioritize the amount of time you spend managing each social network. More time can be spent on the top performing networks and lesser on ones that bring in smaller results.
To figure out which social networks are driving the highest engagement, you should use a social media dashboard tool like Cyfe. It connects to several social networks and you can place data from all of them in one single dashboard to compare performance.
Here’s a screenshot of one of my dashboards containing data from different social networks.
Cyfe also has a feature known as mashups which can be used to mash data from different social networks to create one graph that compares performance.
Social data can help you create better content
When you track your social networks, you will understand what content drives the best results.
On networks like Facebook and Twitter you will be able to see whether images, links or videos do better. While on visual-centric networks like Pinterest and Instagram you can check what type of images perform best.
To figure out what content is performing best you can use your social media page’s analytics. Some social networks like Facebook have built-in analytics that shows what types of media perform best. You can view it in the ‘Posts’ section of your analytics on Facebook.
As you can see in the screenshot below, links are performing best on this page.
You can also use analytics to check how your blog performs. You can see which content is shared more, the number of visits each social network sends, how much time they spent and how many of those people converted to subscriptions and sales.
To check your content’s performance on social media, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo.
And to check the amount of traffic a social network is driving you can use Google Analytics. This tool will also display other metrics like the amount of time these people spent on your site, the number of pages they visited, the bounce rate, etc.
Help you Understand competitors
Your competitors are also creating content and running social media strategies. This will result in their own unique data.
If you analyze this data, you will be able to figure out what is working and what isn’t. It will help you avoid the mistakes they are making and only focus on techniques that bring results.
To figure out which social networks are working best for your competitors you can use Similar Web.
Just add the URL to any website and it will show you the percentage of the traffic your site receives from social media and the social networks driving it.
Then you can spy on your competitors’ top performing social media and content using Cyfe and Buzzsumo.
For example, on Cyfe you can create an Instagram widget and choose to track a competitors account instead of your own. You just add their username and select the metric.
Here I chose top posts by ‘Likes’ and I am able to view them.
I can click on each post and it will take me to the post on Instagram so that I can take a closer look.
Social metrics can help you create a better strategy
You will not create the best strategy in your first attempt. You are bound to make several mistakes and use tactics that don’t work.
But if you study your social media analytics regularly you will be able to figure out what these mistakes are. Hence, when you optimize your strategy you can eliminate them and fortify it.
To figure out these mistakes using any good social media analytics tool will do. But along with it you should use social media listening to check the impact your strategy is having on people.
Using social listening you can view in real-time what people are saying about your business online. This can help you modify your strategy to better connect with current and potential customers.
For executing social media listening you can use a tool like Sentione. Just sign up for an account and add in keywords like your product name, company name and other relevant keywords and the software will track all the mentions and list them out. It will also display the data in the form of graphs.
You can use this data to modify your strategy and create better content in the future.
Social media analytics shows you how a social media campaign is performing
Once you launch a social media campaign you should regularly track it. You can check if it is panning out the way you intended it to.
If things aren’t going according to plan you can make changes to your campaign and rectify it. And if results are very damaging you can nip it in the bud.
For this, you can use a tool like Sentione as it conducts a sentiment analysis of campaigns to show whether it is having a positive, negative or neutral effect.
Conclusion
There’s absolutely no reason to be scared of social media analytics. If anything, we should embrace it as an opportunity to learn more about how our social media marketing initiatives are performing. This will allow us to make better decisions and track our progress. So don’t let analytics intimidate you—instead, use them to your advantage.