The 5 EssentialSOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING REPORTS

The 5 Essential Social Media Marketing Reports 2

IntroductionHow often do you review the data generated by your social campaigns?

As a busy social media manager, you need to be efficient with the time you spend reporting on your social efforts. You likely need to gather and review data for yourself, your team, and other departments.

In this guide, we’ll take you through the five most impactful and essential report types for your social marketing program, explaining how to use each one, who is your intended audience, when to produce it, and much more

How to Pick Your Report Type

Yes No

Yes YesNo No

Team Others

Is the report for your team or to communicate with people outside of your team?

Is it for a big campaign?

Are you setting goals?

Campaign Ops Report

Goal Setting Report

Social Team Ops Report

Campaign Debrief

ROI Report

Is it for a big campaign?

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What Do You Want?The best metrics you can report are ones that map to your team’s or your company’s overall goals. We interviewed hundreds of Simply Measured customers and wrapped up their input into the following five common objectives of social media marketing. Then, for each objective, we’ve put together typical metrics that would appear in a report and questions they should answer.

Increase Brand Awareness and Loyalty Audience Growth How much are you seeing your audience grow, period-over-period? Which kind of activities, paid and unpaid, are resulting in audience bumps?

Mentions How many mentions are you receiving? What exactly are people saying around your brand?

Conversation Share How does your brand stack up to competitors when it comes to conversations happening on social, network by network?

Sentiment on Mentions People are mentioning you all the time on social. That’s great. But, are they smiling or sneering?

Become an Industry Thought Leader Content Shares How many people are sharing your content? Is a certain type of content more likely to get shared by your audience than other content?

Shares by Influencers Who are your industry’s influencers? How are they getting people to engage with your social media content? How can you best partner with them?

Increase Lead Generation Site Traffic from Social Is your social audience transforming into a customer base? Which efforts are driving traffic to your site, and how can you boost this traffic?

Visits by Social Channel Which specific social networks are driving the most visits to your site? How does this change over time and on a campaign-by-campaign basis?

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Increase Community Engagement Engagement as % of Audience How active is your social audience? What kind of engagement do you get now, and how can you amplify this engagement?

Influencer Engagement How do influencer activities on social affect engagement levels with your content and social accounts? Which influencers—both partners and non-partners—are making a difference when it comes to building engagement for your brand?

Improve Customer Service Response Time How long does it take your brand to respond to customer queries, complaints, and compliments? How does this average stack up to competitors?

% of Fan Wall Posts with Brand Replies Are you doing a good job of responding to as many engaged members of your social audience as possible? How can you begin benchmarking your efforts here?

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Your Most Essential ReportsNow that we’ve shared our list of objectives, which we figure you either are or will likely report on at some point, it’s time to get into the details on the five reports we suggest you prepare to address different aspects of them.

As you move into a major social marketing push, you need a method of knowing how your strategies are performing so you can adjust and optimize where needed.

Depending on the breadth and volume of your social audience tally and typical engagement levels, you might need daily or hourly reporting. For example, if you have a large, active audience, you’ll want to keep track of their ups and downs on a daily, or even more regular, basis to notice shifts in behavior. With an audience you’re trying to nab for the first time, you can probably report on activity and engagement by day or week.

#1 THE TACTIC REPORTReport SpecificsAudience for This Report: Community managers

Purpose: Monitoring tactic performance

Interval: Hourly or daily, depending on volume of data

Analysis Time: 15-30 minutes max, preferably less

Typical Metrics: Metrics about specific audience actions or activities, such as impressions, shares, Likes, Retweets, and a list of top performing posts

Context: Used for your biggest and most important events and campaigns

Extra Credit: Include progress toward a larger, overall goal, such as lead generation through content downloads or greater sales on your website

This chart from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report depicts one brand’s mentions on an hourly basis during its campaign launch day.

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The first priority for these report types is to help your community managers identify successes they can repeat and opportunities for improvement while the campaign is actually going on.

By delivering operational reports on a regular basis and giving your tactical team access to the results, you empower them to make informed decisions mid-campaign, identify errors before they become crises, and modulate paid efforts as needed.

Developing personas is a crucial social marketing practice. Understanding how various audience segments interact, amplify, and ultimately become customers is essential to any sophisticated social strategy.

Don’t stop at demographic data. Take a look at which content is resonating with your audience. By looking at engagement data, at a page level, or by tagging content and grouping by various personas, you can round out the picture of where and how users interact with your brand, and what you should spend more time doing.

Pro Tip

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After you’ve completed a big social media push, you need to communicate how it went to others in your organization. Depending on the length of your campaign, you may need just one report covering the event time period, or you might need to dial in more specifically to weekly or daily time periods to see what went well and what went not-so-well.

#2 THE CAMPAIGN DEBRIEFReport SpecificsAudience for This Report: Executives and other departments

Purpose: Communicating overall performance of campaigns and reasons for bumps/spikes along the way

Interval: One-time. Can be run for campaign’s entirety and/or for smaller time frames where particular activity bursts took place and require closer observation.

Analysis Time: 1-2 hours

Typical Metrics: Activity totals, such as frequency of posting, stats on content types, response on certain channels to content, as well as comparisons to previous years’ or campaigns’ performance and the original goals for the campaign

Context: Used for the most important events and campaigns

Extra Credit: Include performance relative to overall departmental or company goals

This megaphone from the Simply Measured Twitter Account Report gives an overall sense of how one brand’s campaign went from start to finish.

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The priority for these reports is helping upper management and other departments understand your team’s performance overall, with context. Tell them what you wanted to accomplish, why, and how well you did. You’ll want to give these groups a report that is more high-level and easy to scan than the report you’d create for your team.

Impress your manager by giving him or her not just the what, but the why. Instead of providing a simple “We’ve gained 2,000 followers in the month of May so far,” show him or her a chart over time, and offer context.

For instance, with the chart above in hand, you could say: “In the past two months, we’ve gained 2,000 followers. See where Followers Added peaks? That was the day we started the campaign on Twitter and got some pickup from Good Morning America. There’s some lull in Followers Added the next day, as we expected, but we’re debuting our next campaign on Monday to pick our Followers Added count back up again.”

Pro Tip

This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Account Report shows how and when one brand’s follower count grew.

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Most social teams are running multiple campaigns at a time. You should be regularly evaluating performance over a certain time period so you can adjust and modify your strategies to meet long-term goals. The priority for these reports is understanding progress at a regular cadence.

#3 THE ADJUSTMENT REPORTReport SpecificsAudience for This Report: Community manager and/or social media manager

Purpose: Tactical, for strategy adjustment

Interval: Weekly or monthly

Analysis Time: 30 minutes

Typical Metrics: Change from previous period, progress toward goals

Context: Used as a regular check-in

Extra Credit: Include competitors’ performance during similar campaign or same time period

This chart from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance Report compares one week’s engagement to the previous week’s engagement. Whatever this brand did the most recent week, it worked.

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This report type boils down to answering one question: Are we on track to hit our goals? Whether you want the answer for yourself or need to deliver it to higher-ups, this report is a must-have.

Your weekly report should operate the same way a piece of content would: like a funnel.

Start large, with a complete snapshot overview of your “social health” and trends from across all your key social channels. Then, you can dive into more specific, post-level insights or KPIs you’re tracking.

Pro Tip

This chart from one brand’s Cross-Channel Social Performance Report shows the engagement its content received broken down by post type and channel.

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Goal-setting reports look at whether goals for the past period were achieved, and are used to set goals for the next month or quarter. They often include information that helps identify which tactics are worthy of reuse and which aren’t.

#4 THE GOAL-SETTING REPORTReport SpecificsAudience for This Report: Your department

Purpose: Set strategic goals. Identify which tactics will help the team achieve its goals.

Interval: Monthly or quarterly

Analysis Time: 2-4 hours

Typical Metrics: Period-over-period change in engagement, social audience size, and growth percentages.

Context: Used to define benchmarks to assist in setting goals and broad tactics for the next period

Extra Credit: Use competitors’ past period-over-period performance to inform your goals and benchmarks This chart comes from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance

Report. In goal-setting reports, consider both your past owned and earned social media efforts to inform either reasonable or ambitions planning.

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This report type focuses on answering one burning question: How can my brand set appropriate goals for the future? This information helps you plan and execute better by looking at previous surges, growth rates, and other benchmarks.

If you have specific metrics you’re reaching for each week, month, or quarter, it’s much easier to address the impact you’ve made.

If your goal has been to drive more traffic to your blog from Twitter, focus on those click-thrus.

This component of your report should focus on easy-to-track numbers so that you can give week-over-week summaries of how well you’ve done, and what might be missing.

Pro Tip

This chart comes from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance Report. In goal-setting reports, consider how your efforts on different social channels compare as you go about planning.

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In these reports, the goal is to communicate return on investment to the people who determine the budget in your organization.

Because ROI reports are used to support budget decisions, it’s worthwhile to spend time determining what social ROI means to your organization, in particular, and surfacing the metrics that are relevant to your definition of ROI.

These ROI-related metrics could include moving social users to a landing page on your website or simply growing the number of shares of certain types of content, like promotions for sales.

#5 THE ROI REPORTReport SpecificsAudience for This Report: Other departments and executives

Purpose: Communicate performance and support department budget requests

Interval: Quarterly or yearly

Analysis Time: 1-2 hours

Typical Metrics: Goals achieved measured alongside social budget allocated

Context: Used to communicate successes and setbacks to executive team

Extra Credit: Identify and compare your ROI to competitors’ ROI

This chart comes from the Simply Measured Facebook Insights with Ads Report. C-levels execs aren’t necessarily interested in every detail of your social outcomes. They want to know what they got for their dollars and what they’re likely to get with additional spend.

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This ROI report answers two common questions for executives, “What are we getting out of our social presence?” and “How should we invest in the future?”

This kind of report helps you define what ROI is on social and show how you’re delivering value by increasing brand awareness, making further progress on becoming a thought leader in your field, increasing lead generation and community engagement, and even improving customer service efforts.

When setting up your strategy and developing a plan to measure ROI, there are four key areas to focus your benchmarking:

1. Aspirational Benchmarking Learning from social leaders.

2. Trended Benchmarking Setting goals, projections, and standards based on previous activity.

3. Earned Benchmarking Comparing campaign or promotional efforts against a standard for success.

4. Competitive Benchmarking Setting goals and baselines for performance and growth based on your direct competitors.

Each of these benchmarks will require different tactics, metrics to focus on, and level of detail.

Pro Tip

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ConclusionAs social media matures, it becomes more important to evaluate your efforts so you can help your brand grow and prove the worth of your efforts. By following your progress during campaigns, reviewing key metrics afterwards, and tying your success to company ROI, you’re taking a sophisticated and honest approach to your social media marketing. Having a solid reporting plan means that you can explain why your work is important, know when it’s time to regroup, and, most importantly, when it’s time to celebrate.

Lori is the only Ph.D. epidemiologist (that’s code for population health scientist) she knows working in digital marketing. She’s been working with data for more than 15 years and loves designing custom reports on the Simply Measured Professional Services team. She’s been known to jump up and down when she gets to work on projects that make data easier to understand and more useful for our customers. It’s adorable.

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Social Analytics Framework Reporting at Every Step Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of the process that enables marketers to plan and measure their social programs. Building useful, regularly scheduled reports helps marketers set themselves up for success.

About Simply MeasuredSimply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.

Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

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