Social Media Reporting: The Full Breakdown

Social media is a major source of data for most companies, and yes, tracking and interpreting all this information takes a lot of time.

A well-organized social media report should make matters simpler. It’s a way to present data to key members of a team, a company, or even its partners. Learn everything you need to know about making a social media report and the tools that can help.

Understanding Social Media Reports

Social media reports are detailed breakdowns of a company’s performance on social networks. It includes essential insights tracked from its accounts as well as their interpretations.

Creating these reports is more than a logistical hassle that social media managers have to face. Through the data presented in a social media summary, companies can effectively measure their success, enhance their strategies, and evaluate their performance on such channels.

Benefits of Social Media Reporting

Creating a social media performance report may reveal the following advantages:

1. Understanding Audience Engagement

Social media analytics will include extensive information about a brand’s social following as well as how they interact with these profiles.

Managers and business owners can then understand exactly how the end consumer interacts with a brand through social media, such as:

1. How well they respond to social media content (through likes, shares, retweets, etc.)

2. What type of content gathers the most traction?

3. How many people are mentioning the brand, and what are they saying?

4. How likely are customers to engage with the brand via private messages?

5. Whether social media helped the company reach another campaign goal, etc.

2. Optimizing Marketing Efforts

The metrics gathered in the social media marketing report may reveal essential changes or opportunities brands should take advantage of in their future efforts.

For example, the report could reveal a specific type of content that fails to engage customers repeatedly, which could mean people are not interested in it. The brand could then divert resources into creating content that attracts more attention from its audience.

3. Making Data-Driven Decisions

Knowing what customers want and how they want it presented is a constant effort for brands. Today, social media reports help brands deliver clients exactly what they want by using data and not guesswork.

The metrics may underline key needs and expectations of customers, which enable the brand to create more engaging content or even improve its offers.

4. Identifying New Trends

Consistent social media analytics tracking can also help brands notice emerging trends before anyone else.

For example, a brand may start receiving more social media comments on their posts asking about a specific type of product. This could reflect a change in the market, and customers are taking to these accounts to signal a new need. By monitoring comments closely, you may discover new profitable opportunities.

5. More Effective Communication

A well-crafted social media report helps managers communicate the results of their efforts more efficiently with team leaders, CEOs, clients, and other relevant parties.

Some actors might not be so familiar with social media and its nuances. But through a report, you can contextualize the metrics and help people understand whether your efforts are paying off. This can also be useful when trying to increase the social media budget or wanting to launch a new campaign but needing approval from higher up.

Key Components of a Social Media Report

A social media report is paramount at multiple levels, but the benefits above only apply when the summary itself includes certain key aspects:

1. Audience demographics: know who your audience is in terms of age, gender, location, and even their preferences;

2. Engagement: understand how your audience interacts with your brand, the type of content they prefer, and when they’re most likely to engage;

3. Reach: assess your potential by finding out how many people your content reaches;

4. Impressions: see how many times your content was viewed, no matter if people engaged with it or not;

5. Sentiment analysis: know what people are saying about your brand and whether the discourse is positive, negative, or neutral;

6. Campaign performance: get key stats to assess if your campaign efforts are paying off through the number of leads, clicks, conversions, and more.

These components all paint a wider picture of how well your social media accounts are helping your brand reach its goals.

Mandala AI’s Social Media Reporting Tools

Social media platforms provide many insights into how people interact with brands on their websites. However, since most companies run multiple profiles simultaneously, it’s fair to say that keeping an eye on these stats without social media reporting tools is a gigantic effort.

Today’s landscape offers social media managers several tools to track and monitor social performance, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social. But at Mandala AI, we’ve taken a more comprehensive approach to allow users to get not just social media metrics but also assess their success in the industry.

The tools that can help you create better social media reports include:

1. Mandala Analytics: gathers all the metrics you need to assess success from all your socials.

2. Ripples: a special feed you can set up to monitor specific performances and get data in real-time.

Importance of Social Media Benchmarking

Your social media metrics only make sense when you put them into a wider context. For this, you’ll need to assess the industry standards and compare your performance both to the industry averages and to your main competitors.

Social media benchmarking helps you truly understand your performance and can reveal your strengths as well as your weaknesses. Looking at the numbers in a bubble will not help you make better decisions with your marketing efforts.

Tailoring Social Media Reports for Different Stakeholders

Social media managers juggle many metrics, but not all of them will be relevant for all parties.

Your reports should be calibrated to the people you’re presenting them to and the needs and expectations they bring to the table. Company shareholders will likely have different curiosity regarding social media performance than people in your marketing teams.

The latter needs full access to all metrics to do their job, while the former would likely want to assess the success of the company’s social media efforts.

Visualizing Data in Social Media Reports

Social media reports are not bullet-point lists of key stats and numbers. Effective ones usually convey their key findings using visual tools such as charts or infographics.

These visual aids help everyone understand the key findings of a report and what they mean. This is especially true for those who are not as familiar with how social media works.

Presenting data in a visual format also helps strengthen any message you want to disseminate, such as arguing the success of your campaign in relation to that of a competitor. Luckily, many social media tools can also generate these visual aids in just a few clicks, so managers don’t necessarily have to outsource this task.

Most social media managers know the importance of a good report and how much of an impact it has on decision-making, presentations, and even new proposals.

They summarize all the key information about how a company performs on social media and use visual tools to paint a powerful picture.

With Mandala AI, you can track your most important metrics with ease as well as keep a close eye on customer sentiment at all times.

Get started with a better way to create your social media reports by signing up for free or joining one of our paid plans today.