As a Social Media Manager for a micro, small and large business, you may be asked to produce regular reports to justify the investment in Social Media. Real social media management involves up-front organization, a streamlined system for ongoing maintenance, and measurable results. Below, we’ll offer some guidance for forming social media management reports.
Making sure that you have a clear base line produced by your in depth 360 survey including: screenshots showing engagement on social media platforms, analytics from the website, and level of sales when you start, restart or take over a social media program.
Step 1: Organize your social media efforts.
Producing a quality social media report hinges on three main areas:
- Brand (# of mentions, shares, voice and other key insights)
- Engagement (# of tweets, likes, shares, campaigns & engagement scores)
- Service (# of inquiries, response times and sentiment)
As a social media manager, you are responsible for creating regular reports that demonstrate how you are implementing your social media plan. Decide what data you want to include in your reports and how frequently you want to report to your client(s). On average, most social media reports are generated weekly, quarterly and/or annually to help track and measure success.
Step 2: Deliver evidence of return on investment.
Come up with a list of measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
There are numerous ways to track the growth of your social presence, and many social networking sites actually have their own reporting that you can customize to look at certain KPIs more closely. Examples of KPIs may vary across social channels, but they may include:
- # of followers
- # of comments
- # of likes
- % engagement with posted content
- # of re-tweets or shares
Determine which social media measuring tools to use, if any.
Today, there are countless tools available on the web to help you make sense of your social data. Not only can this be helpful; it can save you hours of raking through data manually to find what you’re looking for. The following are are a few of the online tools worth considering:
Step 3: Put your KPIs into a presentable format/report.
There are a number of ways you can pull together a report, such as:
- Visual
-Powerpoint presentations
– Infographics
– Graphs, etc.
– Prezi.com
– Mindmeister.com -
Data Driven/Analytical
– Excel spreadsheets, etc.
– Google Docs, Spreadsheet
When presenting your information, determine whether you will be showing weekly or monthly data. Determine if you need to include comparative information on competitors, and be sure to note any week-over-week and/or monthly changes in your data reporting.
Below are some examples of different ways in which social media managers have organized their information into reports.
Social Media Report Examples:
Social Media Report Example #1 [source]
Social Media Report Example #2 [source]
Social Media Report Example #3 [source]
Social Media Report Example #4 [source]
Develop the muscle to capture as you go!
– Always have a screen capture program active on your computer. When you see a big win or something you may want to do in the future get a capture of it. One Manager in our class did not know their superior was deleting past posts of some of their best work on Facebook. going back in If they had screen shots, they could have evidence of their good work. You can use Dropbox, Google Drive or even Evernote to capture this information.
In the end, responsible social media management reporting begins and ends with organization – from assessing which social media sites to build a presence on, to researching, establishing and tracking KPIs, to formulating highly organized, structured data to present to clients in a way that will reveal online social trends, success, and places for continued improvement.
The key thing is make sure you take the time to set the baseline when you start with screenshots, sales and analytics from the website. As a Social Media Manager, you are responsible for communicating the value you are creating. Make sure you get all the key information from the beginning (which can be a challenge a times). We go into this more extensively in our Social Media Management training but I hope you got a few ideas that are useful and would love to hear your comments below.
by Martin Brossman and Karen Tiede
Learn more about the Social Media Certificate Training at http://smmcp.wpengine.com
About Martin Brossman
Thanks for the concrete examples and clear ideas for organizing reports. Seeing it broken out by application is helpful. I particularly like the use of the spreadsheet as it can provide a quick chart (visual) that a client can see at a glance.