How to Create a Social Media Analytics Report (And Why You Should)
Creating your own social media analytic reports is useful in the later steps of implementing a social media strategy when it’s time to review the payoff for your hard work. You can create simple reports over shorter periods to keep on top of how things are going and bigger reports when you want to see the effectiveness of long-term efforts.
Also, getting into the habit of documenting your analytics can cut down on time spent obsessing over how your latest post is performing. Instead of panicking over the results you see in the first minutes or hours of posting, you can remind yourself you don’t need to look until reporting day.
Why should you document your analytics?
Organize your data for future reference
The most basic thing a report accomplishes is putting your data in a simple, easy-access format. Instead of trying to analyze while you poke through your dashboard, you have all the info you need visible on one page. Plus Future You will be grateful to have all this ready when you need to see how things performed in the past. If you post seasonal or holiday-related content, reports make it fast and convenient to see what you did last time. You might find things that worked well and are worth repeating. Or you might find reasons why a post didn’t do well the first time but reposting it with a few minor tweaks 3 months later garnered twice the engagement.
Have your analytics on hand when meeting with a consultant, coach, collaborator, or client
At times, you might want to share your brand’s social media metrics with others. You might be working with a consultant or a coach to improve your content strategy. Maybe you’re pitching an idea to a collaborator you want to create content with. In some businesses, your clients might need to know. For writers, many agents and publishers want to know how your established author platform is performing. They want more detailed information besides how many followers you have.
Track progress over time
Previously, you set goals for your content strategy. None will be achieved overnight. Making reports keeps you aware of what milestones you meet along the way. That’s essential for staying motivated. Social media marketing can get emotionally draining when you can’t see what progress—if any—your work is making. Maybe you won’t see much when comparing weekly analytics, but the improvement will be more obvious in month-over-month comparisons.
Focus on your KPIs
You’ve probably already heard that you should focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) and avoid vanity metrics. Consistently tracking your analytics with a good template helps keep your focus where it should be. It helps you practice looking at the data that really matters according to your goals and blocking out the noise.
How often should you document your analytics?
There’s no perfect answer to how often you should document your analytics. If you post to a platform three times a week or more, you might benefit from recording your data for the previous week at the end of each week. Every other week might suit you better.
At the very least, a monthly report is a good idea. No matter how often you post, you should have enough content data to form a meaningful analysis.
What information belongs in social media analytic reports?
The data points you want to include might vary a little depending on which platforms you use and what type of content you focus on. For example, people who create a lot of video content for Instagram or YouTube will probably want to record the data for how long people typically watch your content. But if video content is something you only create sparingly—and you don’t make it a goal to encourage people to watch your videos for a certain amount of time—that information won’t be as useful to you.
In general, your reports will mostly keep track of extremely basic information for each platform:
How many posts you published
How many impressions (people reached) made by those new posts
The number of followers you have
The overall engagement rate for your new posts
You can also add in the increase/decrease since the last report for impressions and followers. This is a good place to make note of any factors that could have influenced the change. For example, if the platform announced a crackdown on spam/bot accounts during your reporting period, your follower count might have decreased. Since that had nothing to do with your content strategy, you know that “loss” isn’t a reflection of your efforts.
You can also highlight your best-performing posts. What makes it the best is up to you:
Most views
Highest engagement rate
Most shares
New followers
How to organize a social media analytics report?
Here are two similar examples of how I organized social media reports for one business. As you can see, they are both incredibly simple. This business had a total of 12 social media accounts across its different brands. Every Friday, I created a weekly report containing the analytics for each one. It’s also worth noting their two primary social media goals:
Continuously gain new followers/grow their audience
Meet or exceed industry average engagement rates consistently
As such, I created this format around the data that measured progress toward those goals. When coming up with your own reporting format, look at your goals to figure out what data you should keep track of.
Earlier versions of this reporting format had top posts written out as bullet points. However, I soon switched to inserting screenshots and found that better for multiple reasons. First, these reports weren’t just for me. I sent them to the whole staff so everyone could see how the business was doing. It made sense to show them what the top posts on each platform were rather than briefly describe what the best posts had been about.
Second, I was the one creating all these social media posts. I wanted to show off my work, including the photos I took for Instagram and the captions I wrote that directed people to click on a link. Third, screenshots made it easier for me when I looked back through older reports. I often had to make multiple posts across each platform for big events. The risk of accidentally repeating myself and making it look like lazy copy and pasted content was HUGE.
Bonus tip: rephrasing captions on previous top-performing posts to use on new posts is a great way to improve your caption-writing skills. With enough practice, you can create killer captions that drive engagement while your brain is on auto-pilot.
