Preparing a social media analytics report can seem impossible when you manage multiple social media marketing campaigns. Not only do you extract tangible data from numerous channels, but you also spot the most successful ones to prove and ensure it’s a valuable investment. However, having an analytic report can help your business spot weaknesses and opportunities.
Writing a social media report can be taxing, but it’s mandatory to keep tabs on your efforts and spending. In addition, it lets you analyze valuable data to help improve your marketing efforts and boost your social media ROI.
So, to help you create your social media report and reap its benefits, we’ve created a step-by-step guide on leveraging the right tools:
Getting Started with Social Media Analytics
Here we’ve outlined the basics of analyzing your social media reports:
Understanding How Social Media Analytics Work
Social media analytics lets you gather, analyze, and track data available on different social media platforms to help strategize and assess the performance of your marketing campaigns. In addition, marketers can use various tools that crawl into the networking space to collect the desired data.
Just add a phrase or query to start data collection that will help you better understand the performance of your social media tactics and strategies. It also improves the focus, time, and effort you spend on social media marketing.
Typically, each social media platform has a free, built-in analytics tool that helps you track key metrics, however, you need to invest in paid tools for detailed data-driven reports. Using robust social media analytics tools enables you to scan gated databases like academic journals and offline content. In addition, some revolutionary platforms help you analyze images, brand logos, scenes, and objects.
What Metrics Should You Measure?
Part of social media reporting is tracking an array of different metrics. However, you need to ask yourself: which metrics best meet your business goals? Impressions, likes, shares, conversions, and clicks are among the long list of data you should consider. Moreover, you also need to figure out where you can find your desired metrics.
Here are the essential metrics you should measure:
- Engagement- It encompasses all different kinds of activities on a post or keyword, such as likes, comments, shares, retweets
- Mentions- It means identifying how often a particular word or phrase is used on a specific social media platform
- Share of Voice- How much are people talking about your brand or a particular trend/ topic
- Sentiment- What are consumer’s attitudes and opinions towards your brand, social pages, competitors and associated brands, and your industry
- Visual Mentions- How often does your brand logo appear in an image on social media
- Virality- How fast your post is shared and spread across different platforms
With these key metrics, you can:
- Pinpoint the best social media platforms to enhance your marketing activity for customer acquisition
- Identify your demographics to updated buyer personas
- Hootsuite research reveals that 74% of marketing executives leverage social media to improve customer experience
Why is Social Media Analytics Important?
Here are a couple of pros of social media analytics:
Identify Your Target Audience
Using social media analytics to understand your audience can help you unlock an array of helpful information. For instance, post-analysis enables you to identify the hours your audience is most active.
Posting when your viewers are primarily online and active can help drive more engagement and traffic, thus increasing the chances of conversions and sales. It means that you need to dissect your social media data to identify and understand your target audience and its behavior.
Some social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter offer you this information through their in-built analytical tools.
Gain A Competitive Edge
Another benefit of using social media analytics is that you can track and follow the growth of your competitors. With statistical analysis, you can identify the impact and influence of your competitor’s strategy.
In fact, you can take a sneak peek into their progress levels and strategies to pinpoint flaws and areas of improvement. Learning from your competitors and industry trends can always ensure you’re a couple of steps ahead.
Boost Campaign Performance
Social media tracking and analytics allow brands to effectively pinpoint their audience’s goals and interests. It also enables you to identify factors that influence consumer behavior and purchasing decisions.
Through social media insights, marketing teams can focus on creating a personalized and relevant marketing experience. In addition, social media analytics provides you with real-time feedback that allows you to adjust your strategies mid-campaign.
Helps You Create Valuable Content
While tracking your social networks, you’ll learn what content and marketing activity drives better results.
Twitter and Facebook are the two most active social media channels that allow you to assess which links and keywords perform best. On the flip side, highly-visual channels like Instagram and Pinterest let you see which image does better.
To identify which content, length, and discussions perform, you may leverage social media page analytics.
Identify Favorable Social Media Platforms
Once you check out your social media stats, you can decide where your major success comes from and its reasons. Media analytics help you spot the platforms that best match your marketing strategies.
Stat analysis also helps you evaluate which market your strategies resonate with your brand. It allows you to boost traffic levels and make the right marketing decisions.
This data can also help you streamline your resources to the right platform. Ultimately, you can enjoy far better results with less effort.
Lower Customer Care Costs
Customers are essential for every organization, and catering to their needs is the basic business model. However, due to varied communication sources, such as web portals, phone calls, emails, and social media chat options, offering a consistent experience has become quite challenging.
Using cloud platforms allows you to offer an omnichannel customer experience. Additionally, social media channels help boost the omnichannel experience as they are the happening places where consumers share their experiences, queries, and complaints at all hours of the day.
Businesses can respond promptly with better resolutions to customer requests. It helps improve brand loyalty and seamlessly ensures consistency that helps build long-lasting customer relationships and bolsters brand image.
A Comprehensive Guide on Creating a Social Media Report
When it comes to creating your social media report, you need to answer a couple of essential questions:
- Who is Your Target Audience- Are you writing the report for your marketing team or your boss? Identify what’s essential to a specific audience and create a concise report relevant to their job.
- What Information is Most Relevant in This Context- Social media helps increase awareness and recognition, driving sales, generating leads, boosting profit, and much more. Stay focused on the KPIs and metrics that match your business goals to avoid getting distracted.
Here, we share the basic structure of your social media report that you can present to your client and make complex data legible and understandable.
Start with a Short Summary
Start drafting your social media report with a short and crisp summary. Here you need to include the following:
- What are your goals?
- Key strategies and how are they working?
- What are your success metrics?
Answering these questions, in the beginning, provides context to your readers. This way, they know what to expect while reading the rest of your social media report.
Add a Success Snapshot to Capture Their Attention
Add a short snapshot outlining your social media performance. Depending on your goals and strategies, the snapshot may describe a particular campaign or focus on monthly/weekly performance.
On your social media report, you’ll want to list high-level, valuable data such as:
- Total number of new followers acquired
- Engagement experienced throughout the month/week
- Total website traffic
Remember, this should be a quick overview of the most valuable results. Get into details later.
Data Tracking
Now it’s time to talk about numbers. Consider starting with previous analytics to provide your reader’s context. For instance, if you’re writing a social media report on a campaign, you can look for similar past campaigns and compare your results.
At the same time, if you’re curating a weekly/monthly report, compare it with past results. However you can identify ongoing and seasonal trends.
The specific data present in your report dramatically depends on your goals and related metrics. Here we discuss core data that you need to monitor to assess the performance of your marketing campaign:
- Clicks on the link present in your bio
- Net follower gain/ loss
- Number of clicks per post link
- Post reach
- Total number of posts
- Total number of likes, shares, and comments
- The total page or profile views
- The total number of story and video views
- Your top-performing post(s)
You may even add the following data:
- Leads generated
- Money spent on ads
- Number of conversions
- Revenue generated
- Social sentiment
Simplify the data and align your report with the company’s goals and missions to help your client understand the performance and success rate of each campaign.
Analyzing Your Data
After you report the crucial data, you need to analyze them. For instance, instead of simply writing down the total number of engagements on your profile, you may create a graph chart and predict future outcomes based on the available information.
It also enables you to identify what content best resonates with your audience and how you can improve your future brand activities for better results. In addition, you can also eliminate factors and actions that negatively impact your marketing campaign to reduce the risk of losses. All this helps you tweak your social media strategy to quickly reach your business goals.
Conclude Your Report
Finish your social media report by summing up what you learned through your numbers and analytics. In addition, include a section that outlines how your conclusions will help you in the future.
Why is Social Media Reporting Necessary?
Let’s discuss the benefits of social media reporting:
Results-Drive Scheduling
An in-depth monthly or weekly social media report can provide you and your marketing team with invaluable insights. In addition, you can identify the best times throughout the day, week, and month to post content and interact with your audience. It can also help you pinpoint which topics best resonate with readers.
Understanding this data enables you to schedule weekly posts and run campaigns strategically. In turn, you can enjoy better performance, better results, and better revenue.
Targeted Platform Strategy
Different social media platforms require different strategies tailored to meet the needs of their unique audience and features. However, effective social interaction and engagement go beyond simply delivering information to your viewers. Instead, it includes building meaningful relationships with consumers through a shared culture.
Customized Tracking and Performance Measurements
Tracking your social media efforts and setting achievable targets are essentials to ensure ongoing growth and success.
Plus, social media reports offer incredible insights that firstly – help you tackle specific roadblocks, secondly – allow you to discover new and critical information, overcome challenges, and lastly, help identify areas that require working to drive your business forward.
Brand Voice Preservation
While you must treat every platform differently, it’s also necessary that you preserve your brand voice. Consequently, you can identify whether your corporate personality is consistent across all social media channels through your social media report.
Informed and Valuable Content Creation
Collate data around specific factors like the ideal post caption length, engaging themes for your target audience, and topics that garner the most engagement to drive efficient content creation.
Detect Brands Associated with Your Brand
Using social media measurement tools is an excellent way of gaining a holistic view of your brand’s current position.
In addition, you can identify new and potential competitors, which allows you to tweak your strategies to stand out.
What Social Media Analytics and Reporting Tools Should You Use?
Here’s an extensive list of the top social media analytics to check out:
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights allows you to access valuable data about Facebook users. For example, its in-depth audience demographics show information ranging from job title and education status to age.
The topmost common Facebook KPIs include:
- Average Comments Per Post
- Engagement Rates on Your Page
- Page Likes
- Page Engaged Users
- Total Post Likes
Facebook Insights are helpful for top-of-funnel, as well as bottom-of-funnel marketing. For instance, if you operate and manage a B2C eCommerce client, you can identify the demographics, language, and interests of the desired audience to create relevant posts.
Instagram Insights
This robust tool offers you in-depth and insightful information about your audience, including overall trends across followers, social media data around IGTV videos, and much more.
Following are the most common KPIs on Instagram:
- Engagement Rate
- Likes and Shares
- Number of Followers
- Total comments
Instagram is the perfect platform for fashion and beauty stores. In addition, if you’re part of an influence marketing agency and collaborate with people in the fashion industry, Instagram is a must. Consequently, Instagram analytics will help you maximize your budget, boost your ROI and engage new followers.
Twitter Analytics
The ideal analytic tool to get audience insights is Twitter Analytics. It also helps you identify your top-performing tweets and audience response to each post (tweet).
The common KPIs to follow are:
- Follower Engagement Rate
- Mention Counts
- Retweet Count
- Total Followers
Twitter is an incredible content distribution channel. Research reveals that 82% of B2B marketers leverage this social media platform to promote their content.
Grab a sneak peek at these analytics to help B2B clients increase awareness and recognition within their respective industries.
LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn Analytics is a state-of-the-art analytics tool that helps you learn your users’ professional traits, including seniority, job title, education level, and much more. In addition, you also get to know what type of content they typically interact with.
Here are its common KPIs:
- Engagement Rate
- Follower Engagement Rate
- Followers Count
- Social Interactions
- Total Comments
LinkedIn is a preferred social and business networking. As a result with LinkedIn analytics, you can identify which content drives high engagement or conduct competitive analysis.
Snapchat Analytics
Snapchat also boasts built-in analytics; however, they are only available for verified creator accounts and public business profiles. Here you can access the following KPIs:
- Average View Time
- Story Views
- Number of Followers
- Reach
Snapchat is ideal for content creators and influencers as it helps influence your audience’s purchasing behaviors. Additionally, it also boosts engagement and brand awareness.
YouTube Analytics
These innovative analytical tools offer you real-time data on your videos, subscriber count, and engagement rates. In addition, you can also find out how viewers reached your videos through external sources.
Common YouTube KPIs are:
- Average View Duration (seconds)
- Comment Counts
- Number of Fans
- Subscribers Gained/ Lost
- Total Likes
In addition, you want to make sure you add YouTube analytics to your list if video marketing is integral to your digital marketing strategy.
Improving Your ROI with Socialays
Socialays is an innovative high-tech AI social media assistant tool that helps you by monitoring your marketing activities automatically. Similarly, like other social analytics tools, it tracks, collects, and analyzes social media data to provide you with insightful and regular reports to optimize marketing strategies and curate budgets to ensure everything runs smoothly.
You can use Socialays for tracking and analytics which can help you identify the posts and campaigns that are performing well. It also allows you to improve your marketing plans and tactics that can boost conversion rates. Plus, it can help you pinpoint the perfect social media platform so that you can streamline your time, energy, and money to maximize results.
