Digital marketing has been taking the world by storm for the past few years. Social media is a great tool to accelerate your business and personal outreach. If you’re an avid user, creating a social media analytic report is the best way to track your data and analyze your progress. If you want an easy way to display your yearly accomplishments, an analytic report increases credibility and helps you pinpoint growth moving forward. Let’s break down the advantages and processes of tracking your data.
What is a social media report?
A social media analytic report can look different depending on your goals. It’s important to consider your audience and intentions to better assess what system works best for you. It can be as simple as numbers in a spreadsheet, or a more in-depth breakdown analysis. Whether it’s for business or personal use, you might even choose to make a few reports.
How to create the report?
I’m going to break down the process step by step to assure you make a stellar report. The key is to focus on what’s important for your goals and audience. Social media in itself is a numbers game, and there are strategies that help you excel and grow your engagement. You want to make sure your report is organized, clear, and effective.
1. Think about your audience.
Is this for a client, boss, marketing team, or personal business? All of these affect the importance of what’s included in the report. Make sure you’re intentional with this step to help you move forward with direction.
2. Focus on your goals and what’s most relevant.
You want to understand your social media KPI or key performance indicator. Stick to the data that is important so your report is helpful moving forward. Don’t get caught up in all the analytics unless they’re directly correlated to your goals, growth, or successes.
3. Start your social media report with an introduction.
This is a great way to open up your report with a bang. Highlight the goals, strategies, and metrics that support your growth.
4. After the introduction, document your social media performance.
Whether this is yearly, or end-of-quarter roundups, it’s great to start with the high-level data. This includes engagement, followers, and overall traffic. It’s a good idea to include this at the top of your report for easy comparison and growth strategies moving forward.
5. Break down relevant data to help you track trends and successes.
Many people overlook the importance of data tracking, especially when it comes to tedious social media analytics. The truth is this is the easiest way to track and strategically plan your growth. This is the point where you want to target numbers from various aspects of your social media (I will include some example topics below). You don’t need to overthink the formatting of this, but more so find something that works for you. It should be easy to read and understand.
Here are some things to consider for analytics:
● Likes
● Posts
● Followers (Gains and/or losses)
● Post Outreach
● Shares
● Page Visits/Clicks
● Story views
● Video views
● Top performing posts
● Number of leads (if you are selling products/services)
● Total revenue
● Amount spend on ads (if applicable)
These are only some general suggestions, but make sure to cater these analytics to your goals. The whole point of an analytics report is to help you or your business. Don’t overflow it with information that’s unnecessary.
6. Create space to highlight all your successes.
At the end of the day, these reports should celebrate your growth. They also provide you with a hub for all you have accomplished and changes to make moving forward.
7. Analyze your data.
This is where you turn numbers into resources. Analyzing your data helps you pick up on previous patterns, correlations, and trends. Maybe you noticed your engagement increased the same time you started posting more. These are all important things to consider. Start to analyze and pan out your results to use as a helpful reference.
8. Use your platform’s tools.
Most social media platforms offer resources that give you all the analytics you need. Here’s what to look for.
● Instagram insights
● Twitter analytics
● Linkedin analytics
● Facebook insights
● Tiktok analytics
● Hootsuite analytics (allows you to gather all of the above in one place)
Overall, building an effective social media analytic report can be the secret to your success. Once you start understanding the impact of your actions, you can create strategies that work. It can feel like a lofty task at first, but once you get into it it’s pretty straightforward. The biggest bonus, it’s rewarding!
Use these simple steps to write up your end-of-the-year report, and check out my blog for more helpful tips!
