Social media is among the strongest advertising and marketing channels I’ve utilized in my profession. In reality, in recent times, it’s repeatedly been amongst these with the highest ROI for many companies.
However showcasing that to decision-makers isn’t all the time straightforward. An important social media report may help.
Social media reporting is your group’s time to judge the way it’s doing with the medium actually, talk that to your organization at massive — and possibly even brag a bit of bit.
So, how do you place collectively one which does all of this successfully? Learn on for step-by-step directions on methods to create a social media report and a few nice social media report templates that can assist you get going even quicker.
Desk of Contents
What’s a social media report?
A social media report is a abstract of how a enterprise’ social media platforms and efforts on them are performing. I’m not speaking in regards to the analytics dashboards used to watch and observe social media efficiency in actual time right here.
Social media reviews can embrace uncooked metric knowledge (followers, profitable clickthrough charges, likes, publish shares, purchases, and so on.) however focus extra on delivering the massive image. Assume better traits, insights, and progress towards targets.
Varieties of social media reviews
A social media report can take any form you want, however, in my expertise, it’s not unusual to create smaller, area of interest reviews to give attention to vital areas.
Platform-specific
How’s Instagram doing on your model? How about YouTube? Each social media platform has its distinctive tradition and nuances, and these reviews assist you to tailor your evaluation and discussions to them extra exactly.
Marketing campaign-specific
Did you launch a brand new product? Perhaps publish a content material supply to generate leads? You can too use a social media report to debate campaign-level analytics.
In case your social media account is serving as a cog in a bigger firm initiative, this report helps you see and evaluate simply how a lot every platform contributed to the venture’s success. (HubSpot Campaigns have all the time been useful on this for me.)
Paid media versus earned media reviews may fall into this class.
Metric/Objective-specific
Was your group targeted on boosting web site site visitors? How about boosting gross sales? Objective-specific reviews, like campaign-specific, allow you to analyze and focus on how every platform helped you’re employed towards a selected accomplishment.
Why use a social media report?
Social media does not simply have an effect on advertising and marketing. Prospects ask questions, clients write evaluations, and others could observe you for thought management, training, or firm information. It touches practically each side of your group and buyer expertise.
So, gathering and distributing the state of your social media channels through a social media report exhibits transparency, encourages cross-company alignment, and helps everybody work in direction of their targets.
A social media report can be arguably probably the most concise and clear solution to replace your group or stakeholders on these issues — every day, weekly, month-to-month, quarterly, and/or annual.
HubSpot’s free social media report template has pre-made slides so that you can report on your whole predominant social media metrics.
Obtain the template right now and easily plug in your metrics to customise your group’s social media report.
What ought to your social media report embrace?
The effective particulars can differ, however each nice social media report tends to incorporate 4 components. Have in mind, that what you name these doesn’t actually matter, however you wish to ensure you accomplish every of their functions in your last product.
Report Overview
Consider this because the executive summary of your social media report.
It’s the place you doc an important themes and findings of your bigger doc or presentation to set expectations of what’s to return. It’s additionally useful to busy executives who could not have time to learn or sit by way of a complete presentation.
Objectives & Initiatives
What are you attempting to perform with social media? Recapping these in your social media report offers the remainder of the knowledge context and course. Realizing your targets tells the viewers what info they need to be in search of.
Metrics Evaluation
You don’t want to incorporate all of the info and figures, however you do wish to embrace some overarching metrics associated to your targets. For instance, if you’re attempting to generate extra leads, you’ll wish to embrace your common conversion price.
However the primary focus right here needs to be evaluation. Speak about what traits you see.
Learn: Social Media Analytics: The Ultimate Guide
Key Takeaways & Suggestions
What story do your metrics inform? What conclusions are you able to draw about your technique from them? What do they are saying about your targets? And most significantly, what do you do subsequent?
Your social media report ought to seize insights in your technique, marketing campaign, viewers, content material, and any ideas for transferring ahead.
What social media metrics do you have to embrace?
Bear in mind, not each social media platform performs the identical. In reality, our analysis exhibits that utilization doesn’t essentially equate to ROI.
Due to this, your metrics, traits, and targets for each platform could differ, together with what goes into your social media report.
Some metrics are additionally simply going to be completely different because of the nature of the platforms — I imply LinkedIn doesn‘t allow you to retweet, and X doesn’t allow you to click on a cry-face button.
Each group’s social media report could look completely different, however let’s check out among the commonest metrics to incorporate that can assist you determine what is sensible for you.
1. Viewers Dimension and Development (Followers)
This metric tells you ways massive your attain is and the way rapidly it’s rising. It’s sometimes seen because the core social media metric, exhibiting how massive an viewers you’ll be able to leverage together with your posts and content material.
2. Publish Frequency
That is fairly self-explanatory, however this metric represents what number of occasions you posted in a given time interval. It’s often in contrast alongside different metrics — equivalent to engagement charges — that can assist you decide the appropriate cadence on your viewers.
This metric must also be channel-specific as a result of it is sensible to post more frequently on some channels than others.
3. Publish Engagement
Publish engagement measures how your followers and followers are reacting to your posts with likes, feedback, and shares. A healthy post engagement suggests you have got a loyal viewers — and that your content material is reaching them.
You can too observe engagement as a share of your viewers to find out engagement price.
4. Mentions
One metric you have got much less management over is mentions. You may observe mentions from clients, prospects, and even information retailers to gauge the notion of your enterprise and model on-line.
5. Clickthrough Fee
When a publish hyperlinks to a web page in your web site, you’ll be able to measure how many individuals and what number of your viewers clicked by way of to the web page.
A powerful clickthrough price exhibits you are sharing web site pages that your viewers finds related.
6. Conversions & New Contacts
Conversions come into play for those who‘re utilizing social media to generate leads, subscribers, and even clients.
If you wish to attribute contacts to your social media group’s efforts, ensure you‘re utilizing correct monitoring and setting affordable targets, because it’s uncommon in some industries to go straight from social media to turning into a buyer.
7. Return on Funding (ROI)
Immediately tracing ROI to social media efforts could be tough. Nonetheless, for those who decide it is price reporting on this metric, guarantee you have got established correct expectations and attribution fashions.
Learn: How to Measure Social Media Marketing ROI [With Expert Advice]
8. Value per mile (CPM) / Value per click on (CPC)
This metric is crucial for monitoring the efficiency of your social media advertisements. Just like ROI, it helps you consider how you know the way a lot you’re spending in relation to what you’re getting. You may ignore this for those who’re solely reporting on natural social metrics.
9. Competitor Metrics
To offer a benchmark, contemplate analyzing the aforementioned metrics on your opponents.
Clearly, these metrics can differ drastically based mostly on publicity, paid finances, and the scale of the corporate, but it surely’s nonetheless worthwhile to make the comparability.
Notice: You may track all of these social media analytics in HubSpot. Fortunate you.
How one can Create a Social Media Report
Step 1: Establish your social media metrics.
As we‘ve established, completely different corporations and completely different social media groups worth completely different social media metrics. It’s your job to decide on the metrics that matter most to your group and your group.
Conserving in thoughts the record from above, the particular social media platforms you employ, and your targets, slim down the metrics you could current to your group.
As an example, for those who’re targeted on constructing model consciousness, you’ll wish to spotlight follower numbers and views. In case your objective is web site site visitors, you’ll wish to have a look at clicks.
Professional tip: Once I’m not sure of what to incorporate or my report feels a bit of incomplete, I ask my friends which metrics they’d prefer to see or which of them they want clarification on. Making these adjustments sooner moderately than later helps preserve your group knowledgeable and engaged.
Step 2: Collect your knowledge.
As soon as you understand what you‘re reporting on, it is time to begin gathering knowledge.
When establishing your social media reviews, create bookmarks on your knowledge sources. Make a folder for the analytics web page for every social media channel you’re analyzing and/or your social media reporting software for an all-encompassing view.
For those who‘re monitoring click-throughs to your web site, ensure you’re analyzing from a single grasp location, equivalent to your monitoring URL builder or your site visitors monitoring device like HubSpot or Google Analytics.
Step 3. Select your report format
Take into consideration who your viewers is and the way they finest client info.
Maybe that’s a social media report presentation, spreadsheet, or memo template. Maybe it’s a mixture of some codecs, together with a video walk-through.
Professional tip: No matter you select, keep it up.
A constant format brings familiarity, making evaluating and understanding future updates simpler. Plus, if you keep your format, you’ll be able to simply copy over your most recent metrics moderately than reinventing the wheel each time.
Optionally available: Select your social media report template
For those who’re simply getting began, we recommend utilizing a social media report template to make your life simpler. As an example, a PowerPoint or Google Slide Deck template could be shared together with your group through electronic mail, used for in-person conferences/shows, or each.
Want a social media report template to get began? We’ll share a couple of choices later, however you can’t go wrong with ours.
Step 4: Analyze efficiency
With your whole knowledge in place, it’s time to investigate.
What metrics went up or down? What posts did effectively or not so effectively? What does this say about your efficiency? How in regards to the progress towards your targets?
Use this time to actually dig in and see what your metrics are telling you.
Professional tip: AI has helped me so much on this space. Take a look at our free information, “How to Use AI for Data Analysis”
Step 5: Summarize highlights and add context
Subsequent, summarize the important thing findings and highlights out of your evaluation. Don’t simply suppose quantitatively right here; suppose qualitatively.
Perhaps a significant movie star commented on content material for the primary time, otherwise you noticed a file variety of shares. Make certain to seize these in your report as effectively.
Additionally, add context to assist your viewers higher perceive the story you’re telling. What do I imply by this?
A social media report ought to all the time remind individuals the place you got here from and the place you intend to go. Which means addressing how your numbers have modified because the final time period you introduced, along with why they modified.
Speak about how this compares to your opponents and the way you’re monitoring towards your targets. Even when individuals’s eyes glaze over if you discuss numbers, these highlights can win them again and get your message throughout.
Step 6: Add Visuals
A chart of numbers on a slide deck is, effectively, fairly boring.
Whereas a numerical chart is essential for sharing as a lot information as potential in an organized manner, utilizing visuals is a greater solution to convey the expansion and success metrics of your social media efficiency.
Attempt incorporating one or the entire following into your social media reviews:
- Linear graphs to point out followers over time.
- Pie charts to point out clicks to completely different pages of your web site (weblog pages vs. case research, for instance).
- Bar graphs to point out the variety of engagements on every platform.
- Typography highlighting key traits or findings
- Screenshots of prime or low-performing posts
These examples are extra eye-catching than chilly numbers on a slid, and so they additional illustrate what you need your group to stroll away with. Plus, you’ll be able to simply make them on Canva.
If knowledge visualization is new to you, take a look at our Guide on Data Visualization for Marketers.
Step 7: Make Suggestions
Every report ought to comprise clear motion objects about how you intend to repeatedly enhance your social media efficiency. Social media is continually evolving, so your method and technique for it ought to, too.
Social Media Report Templates
Creating your personal social media report from scratch could be labor-intensive. Utilizing a template to remain organized may help lighten the load. Listed below are 4 of my favourite choices.
1. HubSpot
Okay, possibly I’m biased, however I’m a giant fan of our free social media report template right here at HubSpot.
What I like: It offers you one thing easy and neat to current, and you may customise it to suit the targets, platforms, and frequency you really need. I additionally love that the template begins with an outline of all of your owned social media channels on the primary web page.
With this, you’ll be able to see your viewers for every channel, what number of posts you made, how they carried out (engagement), and what this appears like as a share of your whole viewers at a look.
Then, on the next slides, you’ll be able to discover every particular platform, its targets related to it, and even its prime posts.
General, this social media report template is the right mix of highlights and particulars. Plus, it’s accessible as a Phrase Doc, PowerPoint, Google Doc, or Google Slides deck, making it accessible to a large viewers.
2. Later
For those who’re in search of one thing a bit extra designed, Later has a free social media report template so that you can strive as effectively. However there are a couple of caveats.
This template solely is available in one format — an editable Google Slides deck — and is organized as a month-to-month report. The design additionally may very well be too playful for some, nonetheless, you’ll be able to edit it to match your private cadence and model.
To get began, you merely need to make a replica and plug in your info, however that stated — you do have to have a Gmail account to make the most of it.
What I like: Whereas prioritizing Instagram (Later is an Instagram device, in spite of everything), it does embrace charts for all social media platforms. You can also simply clone and edit fields to make the deck work for different platforms.
I’m additionally a fan of the important thing learnings slide. It makes it straightforward to get the entire most essential info in a single place.
3. Hootsuite
Subsequent, we have now a social media report template from Hootsuite.
Like Later’s, this template comes with an editable Google Slides deck that you could copy to make use of. It additionally has a well-organized and visually pleasing design that you would be able to edit to match your model colours.
I’d say this design is extra common and adaptable than Later’s.
What I like: I really like how this template consists of directions on methods to fill it out proper within the doc. It makes it straightforward to finish slide by slide and it’s cadence agnostic.
It additionally has devoted slides for all main social media platforms already, highlighting key info like clicks, likes, and prime posts in addition to platform-specific metrics like retweets.
4. The CMO Membership
Final up is the social media report template from The CMO Club. And, as you may guess with a chief government viewers, this one is all in regards to the knowledge. In contrast to our different choices, this template comes as an editable Google Sheet.
What I like: Whereas much less suited to a presentation, this social media report template will get extraordinarily granular about your technique’s numbers and metrics.
It has separate tabs for essential info your resolution makers will wish to see like:
- Goal and Benchmarks
- Viewers Insights
- Metrics and KPIs
- Platform Evaluation
- Platform Evaluation
- Content material Evaluation
However it nonetheless ends with suggestions and key takeaways.
Professional tip: for those who’d prefer to get extra artistic and visible together with your social media report than what these templates supply, Adobe and Canva have a bunch of free designs you’ll be able to experiment with.
Social Media Report Examples
Now, most social media reviews are confidential (for apparent causes), however I used to be capable of finding a small handful of examples to provide you an thought of what a completed product could appear like.
1. High Performing Posts
Along with creating an excellent template, Later affords an especially useful social media report instance on its weblog utilizing it.
Right here, you’ll see an instance of a top-performing publish slide. Not solely does it present the precise posts and what it completed, but it surely additionally affords perception into why the group believes it did effectively.
2. Profile Visitors
Keyhole did a superb job gathering several types of reporting that Coca-Cola might embrace in its social media reviews in this blog. This instance appears at Coca-Cola’s total profile site visitors over a set period of time (on this case, a yr).
I like one of these reporting as a result of it lets you consider the ebb and movement of viewers habits and if there’s a pattern over time.
3. Follower Development
Subsequent, we see a report of Coca-cola’s follower development over a selected time period.
For a model or group targeted on model consciousness seeing a chart like this (particularly one which exhibits steady enchancment) actually helps spotlight the effectiveness of the work they’re doing on social media.
4. Publish Kind
This instance from Coca-cola analyzes Coke’s several types of content material — each how ceaselessly the corporate shares sure varieties after which which varieties carry out the perfect.
Seeing the charts side-by-side lets you see in case your publish technique aligns with the posts which are hottest. The colour coding additionally makes it simpler to see which elements of the 2 charts go collectively.
5. Social Visitors
One other big firm, Walmart, carefully watches its social media site visitors. Take this report picture from 2023:
This report appears at several types of social media site visitors based mostly on platform. You may clearly see that YouTube is their prime social media performer, with Reddit and Fb solely attaining half of YouTube’s engagement.
I like one of these report as a result of it places into perspective what your share of site visitors is for any given platform. If I’m going to spend money on paid social media, I’ll spend money on the platform that’s performing the perfect organically to get extra bang for my buck.
You may see how every kind of report follows an identical curve, providing you with perception into which months you grew probably the most and which platforms carried out the perfect.
(Social Media) Reporting for Responsibility in 2025
Social media reviews are important for understanding your efficiency, aligning your group, and demonstrating the worth of your efforts to stakeholders.
By thoughtfully organizing metrics, analyzing traits, and offering actionable insights utilizing the social media templates and guides I shared right here, your social media report can function a robust device to refine your technique and obtain your targets.