You may feel great about your social media campaign and think its success is assured. But unless you analyze the numbers for insights, you would never really know how your content is performing. To really know that your campaign is doing well, you would need numbers which prove that your content is converting prospects into leads. We are talking about social media reports, which hold a mirror to your brand.
It’s not hard, because social intelligence tools generally enable you to create your own social media reports. However, you would need to know some basics to steer through the functions of such a tool. Here is your manual to creating impactful social media reports.
What is a Social Media Report?
A social media report is a consolidated statistical sheet which helps you understand your performance on various social media sites using analytical data and stats. Use your social intelligence tool to set performance goals for different sites. The tool then works to gather the necessary intelligence to gauge your performance and presents the inferences to you as a report.
Learning about the “total likes” or “total retweets” garnered by the campaign is like wading into the shallow end of the pool. To dive deep, one needs an analysis of the increased/decreased percentage of audience engagement, followed by a clear identification and review of the root cause of such an increase or decrease.
Why do you Need to Create a Social Media Report?
If your company is investing in social media marketing, your top management would want to know the ROI derived. As a manager, it falls upon you to educate your stakeholders about it. There is no better way to do it than by presenting the facts and figures in a visual form.
Also, a social media report helps you pinpoint the key points in the company’s performance, throwing light on what’s working well and what’s not. This vital information enables you to improve the company’s processes. Let’s say your company’s social media monitoring report shows up your customers’ negative sentiment towards your customer service department. You may delve deeper into the report to understand that the slow processes of your IT department are in turn slowing down your customer service department. Instead of simply demanding a superior performance from your IT department, you could actually demonstrate to them how their negligence is affecting the business. Reports with numbers make it easier for your employees to understand the situation.
Most reports consolidate data to present a benchmark – and offer a comparative study between your brand and others in your space. This means that you have a competitor intelligence in the form of a report, as it also offers a live comparison with your competitors.
How to Create a Social Media Report?
We are assuming that if you have read this far, you really want to know how to get started:
Stakeholders
A social media report impacts the overall business and all the stakeholders. Your clients and investors want to know how well you are doing on your digital strategy. Your senior management wants to get key business insights for their operational strategy and decision making. Also, as stated earlier, the report helps you identify any glitches that might be plaguing your organization and its performance at the departmental levels. When sharing the report, identifying your key stakeholders is key. Your social media report could be the answer to all their questions and worries.
Set Goals
Creating a social media report can become cumbersome if you are not clear about your goals. Having a defined set of goals is vital – the metrics you want to measure, the time needed to publish a report and your primary aim in gaining business intelligence from the report. You may just want to measure your social media marketing ROI or gauge the public sentiment about your product. Whatever the goal is, you need to chalk it out clearly before you start with the social report.
Metrics to Measure
A social media report is a collection of analyzed data. Your report can be customized according to your needs – which metrics would you like to track and so on. Examples of some of the standard metrics available in social media management tools are:
- Reach and Impressions: Reach is the number of people who saw your content. This tells you the truth about the performance of your content, not just the number of likes received. Impression gives the number of times your content was displayed, clicked or not.
- Click Through Rate and Leads: Measure the number of visits to your site from social media, search or paid ad campaigns. Also, the number of visitors who actually converted and signed up for your product or a trial.
- Feedback and Engagement: Sentiment analysis lets you know the kind of opinions prevalent among your audience and the specific pain points that are bothering them. Analysis of how engaging your content is, can be derived from stats like how many clicks, comments and shares it received and also, which of the platforms you’re on is drawing the most traffic.
Time Frame
Following a fixed timeframe helps to track all these parameters, regularly. Decide the intervals at which you would want to review your company’s progress and performance and create these reports. It can be generated randomly at will or at daily, weekly, monthly, half-yearly or yearly intervals.
Presentation
A well-presented report needs to be easy to comprehend. Everyone does not have the time or patience to go through numerous pages of textual reporting. Use tools which offer options for graphs, word clouds, illustrations et cetera. Minimal text about what the viewers see, in the form of key takeaways, can be included. Your report needs to present a brutally honest picture of the organization’s performance and results. If it includes actionable insights too, it would have served the primary purpose of making your brand do better and set it on its path to success.
Creating a resourceful report is a work of art indeed. Fret not; there are plenty of tools to help you. Moreover, if you are clear with the idea, social media reporting will only simplify your job in the future.