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Take Advantage Of Professional Social Media Reports – Examples & Templates

Social media reports examples and templates blog post by datapine

There are billions of social media users across the globe, most of which share their thoughts, feelings, opinions, and recommendations with friends and family. As a brand or business, if you meet your target customers on the platforms on which they’re most engaged, you stand to grow your audience and boost your bottom line exponentially.

By sparking up meaningful conversations and delivering valuable content with your prospects at times that they’re most likely to respond or react to, you will ensure your social success – and in turn, help your company to scale, evolve, and thrive in this cutthroat digital age.

But how do you know where to target your audience? What time is best to connect with them? And which platforms should you focus on the most? Getting your socially-driven affairs in order can seem like an impossible feat, but with social media reporting, you will be able to gain the insights you need to attain the results you deserve. When you add up modern technology and professional reporting software, your reporting processes in the social realm will reap many rewards.

Here, we explore the meaning and value of social reporting plus the value of a social media marketing report, as well as the tools you need to get the job done properly – starting by considering what these reports are and their role in today’s hyper-connected business world. After that, we will present the benefits they have on offer and finish with examples and templates from real business scenarios. Without further ado, let's get started.

What Is A Social Media Report?

A social media report offers a means of extracting value from data based on various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) and metrics (follows, likes, reach, growth, awareness, post-performance, engagements, etc.) over various time frames.

Social media report scorecard example showing social media campaigns

Social media marketing reporting is based on a curated collection of data and statistics that are customized based on your business’s social marketing activities and goals.

By using social media management reporting software to track, measure, and refine your socially-driven efforts, you will make better, swifter, and more informed decisions while maximizing your ROI with every initiative or interaction you make.

Why Is Social Media Reporting Important?

Social platform marketing covers a wide range of platforms, plans, campaigns, and strategic initiatives. Being able to make intelligent decisions that will streamline your efforts will pay dividends.

That said, social media reporting will open your eyes to a wealth of information that will help you generate leads, cultivate long-lasting customer relationships, and create material that is shareworthy and will boost your levels of brand awareness.

In the digital age, shooting in the dark and hoping for the best just won’t do. You have to use data to your advantage and use it well by choosing the right digital marketing KPIs that will help in your overall social strategy. Here are the primary reasons you should use digital dashboards for your social media analysis reports:

  • Smarter content creation: This is the base for any social media strategy. But publishing material just by intuition is not the smartest way to approach your strategy. With the help of social media reporting metrics, you can identify relevant information such as your top-performing posts, if your target likes videos or images, posts or stories, and several other insights. This will help you create and promote more valuable and engaging material on each social channel based on real information.
  • Results-driven scheduling: A monthly social media report can offer invaluable insights into the best times of the day, week, or month to interact or share content with your audience, as well as which topics are likely to resonate with prospects. By understanding this information, you’ll be able to schedule posts and deliver campaigns strategically and, in turn, enjoy maximum results from all of your social marketing efforts. This should be done by selecting accurate social media KPIs, which we will explain later in more detail.
  • Tailored targeting: Social media reporting gives you a level of insight that will allow you to drill down deep into platform-specific data and ultimately plan strategic efforts and activities tailored to each platform rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to your promotional efforts. With the help of an online data analysis tool, this targeting can be built up significantly.
  • Customized tracking and performance measurement: Tracking your efforts and target-setting is the key to ongoing growth and success, and these kinds of reports provide a host of insights that will help you tackle specific roadblocks, overcome challenges, and discover fresh information that will help you drive the organization forward.
  • Identifying trends and new opportunities: Social media is all about conversations, and customers expect brands to be a part of them. With the help of social media reporting, you have the possibility to conduct research that you might not find in other channels, like what topics your customers are talking about, and connect with other international markets while keeping expenditures at a minimum level. Discovering new consumer behavior and detecting new areas of potential selling points can and will increase the reach of a brand.
  • Delivering added value to audiences: Another undeniable benefit of tracking your social platforms’ activities is the fact that you will stand a greater chance of leveraging trending hashtags, viral movements, and trends, finding unique ways to inspire, entertain and deliver value to your audience.
  • Prove the value of your strategy: Rather if you are working for a client or your own brand, there is no better way to understand if your strategies are successful than with a social media analysis report template. By making sense of your social KPIs, you can prove if your posts were successful, if your budget was spent effectively, and, most importantly, if the investment in your strategy was worth it.
  • Identify seasonality effects: Our last benefit speaks about seasonality which in marketing is defined by fluctuations occurring during specific seasons or days of the year. For example, Easter, Christmas, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, among others. These events are commercially critical for businesses as they represent opportunities to increase sales and gain new customers. In order to achieve their seasonality goals, brands need to perform detailed analyses and plan quality campaigns with content that aligns with their target audience. For this purpose, social media analytical reports are an invaluable tool. You can use data from previous years to understand what types of holidays your customers interact with the most, which types of strategies worked and which ones didn't, and prepare yourself accordingly.  

As we just established, tracking and measuring your activity is pivotal to success, and reports are a great tool. If you track your social activity on a consistent basis, you will not only grow your audience but also foster customer loyalty, turning one-time buyers into long-term brand advocates.

Moreover, these kinds of reports, when customized to your specific needs and goals, will help you become more approachable to potential customers as it will allow you to establish the perfect brand voice for each platform while helping you to improve your response rates and levels of social-based customer service.

Seventy-one percent of consumers who have reported a positive social experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. Track and measure your efforts, and you will satisfy your customers, reaping the rewards of growth, loyalty, and prosperity in the process. Need we say more?

Your Chance: Want to test a social media reporting software for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from great social media reports!

Best Practices For Successful Social Media Reports

Graphic displaying the 13 best practices for efficient social media reporting

There is no one, single black-and-white way to create a report. Depending on the specific use case and what kind of metrics you want to track, the reporting process for various social channels will be different. There are some core questions you need to answer before creating a report, and there are some best practices to follow in order to create the best possible one for your social efforts. Here we will name a standard process that should make your practice easier:

1. Define your stakeholders

The first step to start creating the best SM reports is to answer the simple question: who am I addressing my report to? With social media being such a versatile tool, it is possible that you may need to account for results in different departments based on different goals. To put your data into perspective for each stakeholder involved, no matter if it's from sales, marketing, or an external client, you can create a specific report only, including the metrics that are relevant for that specific stakeholder. Try always to include only your KPIs to avoid losing time and resources in analyzing numbers that are not useful. You can include other from time to time if you notice a hidden opportunity or if it can provide context to your main KPIs. 

2. Choose the right metrics

The indicators you choose should be adjusted depending on the social platform. Although they're all social, each network has its own set of rules and best practices. With the help of a KPI tool, you can better understand what kind of operational metrics you want to track, whether you need to focus on strategic and high-level KPIs or you need a combination of both. Apart from considering different parameters for each platform, you should also consider choosing the KPIs that align with the main goal of your strategy. For example, if one campaign was created with the goal of driving sales, then followers or likes will not be a useful parameter to track better leads or conversions. 

3. Provide competitive context 

While your SM report should obviously outline every critical aspect regarding the performance of your strategies across various platforms, it should not only be about you. A best practice to follow for efficient reporting is also to include information about your competitors. Now, when we talk about competitors, we don’t mean you compare yourself to the number 1 business in your industry unless, of course, you are at that level. When looking at competitor analysis, make sure you select businesses that are at the same level as you are. This will help you keep your benchmarks and goals realistic and attainable. From this practice, you can extract insights such as at what rate is your competition’s audience growing, how shared their content is getting, and what works for them the most, among other valuable things. 

4. Concentrate on impactful data

Defining and analyzing the right KPIs is not the only determining factor you should consider when creating your reports. You should always try to look at your information from different perspectives and explore and filter your data to uncover hidden insights that could optimize your performance. For example, if you filter your data by country and realize that 70% of your traffic is coming from one specific country, then you can create targeted strategies for that country or focus your budget a little bit more on it. It is important to consider that you need to be careful when filtering your data not to create misleading reports. 

5. Benefit from text analysis  

Text analysis is the process of analyzing text sources such as social media comments, support tickets, customer reviews, and others and deriving meaningful conclusions from them. This is a very useful practice when it comes to social media. Obviously, you can’t go through every single comment or piece of text that your customers leave on your social channels; therefore, text analysis tools have emerged to automate the process and offer businesses valuable insights. By using this technology on your SM platforms, you can understand sentiment about a specific product or content, measure your share of voice, identify key topics that your customers are talking about, and even identify purchase intention, among other things. This provides a wider and even more valuable approach to data than just looking at numbers. 

6. Visualize all your data in one place

If you work with several social media platforms in your strategy, it means that you will need to extract data from many sources, making the reporting process tedious and time-consuming. Modern business intelligence tools such as datapine offer data connectors to help you visualize all your relevant metrics in one place. This way, you can compare how strategies performed on different platforms and extract meaningful insights for improvement. In addition, the tool will update your data from your social media reports automatically. This way, you can invest your time in analyzing your information instead of extracting it. We will give an example of how showcasing all your social media data into one automated report can be beneficial soon in the article. 

7. Follow design best practices 

Once you’ve gone through all the strategic steps we mentioned previously, it is time to start generating your SM report. To do so efficiently, it is necessary to follow some design best practices to make them as efficient as possible. These best practices include avoiding overcrowing your report with multiple graphs and charts, sticking only to a couple of colors and avoiding colors that are too bright or hard to look at, stay away from 3D effects, among other things. Neglecting the design process can make your reports harder to understand and harm your strategies in the long run.

8. Identify your reporting schedule

While social posts can go viral in no time, it is also important to keep an overview of the big picture. It's advisable to schedule regular reports while connecting to your social accounts on a daily basis (don't forget about community management, although this can be a subject on its own). They can be sent on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, but you need to decide this based on your social schedule. With the help of automated reporting techniques, you schedule reports at a specific time interval without the need to update the information manually each time. More on this point below. 

9. Automate your reports 

Moving on with our list of best practices, we have report automation. As mentioned above, automated reporting technologies allow you to schedule a report to be sent to a specific recipient in a selected time frame. But not just that. Rather you are an agency working with multiple clients or a social media team working for an organization, generating reports is tedious and time-consuming. Luckily, automation tools relieve you from this pain by automatically generating and updating them as soon as new information arises. This way, you will not only save countless hours of work but will also be able to react to any issues as soon as they occur. These solutions also include intelligent data alerts that will notify you as soon as a goal is met or an anomaly is detected, so you don’t need to check manually. 

10. Share your reports 

Rather you are an agency working with multiple clients at the same time or just a company that does its social media internally, it is very likely that you’ll need to share your reports with somebody at some point. While this might sound like a straightforward step, it is always important to be careful about the way you are sharing this information. You can go for the traditional route of an automated email or take it a step further and make the sharing process more interactive. For instance, datapine allows you to share them through a password-protected URL that keeps the interactivity of the report and also protects the data from any unauthorized users. You can also set roles when sharing your reports to make sure each recipient can only access the data they are allowed to.

11. Pick the right social media reporting tools

There are numerous data reporting tools on the market that can help you in presenting your information, but just a few provide features that will make your work extremely simple and straightforward. Especially if you need to combine numerous social networks, you need to be careful in choosing the right software. A tool that will enable you to access real-time data, automate your reports, and simplify your sharing processes might be a better solution than a traditional spreadsheet. datapine is a BI reporting tool that allows you to create powerful, interactive reports to perform advanced data analysis. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to use by anyone in your organization. Thanks to its automated reporting feature and data connectors, you can see all your data live and in one place, making it the perfect solution for your social media reporting. 

12. Integrate predictions in your report 

Apart from tracking the progress of your strategies, you should also use your reports as a tool to predict future outcomes in your data. Unlike many other BI solutions in the market, datapine offers a user-friendly predictive analytics feature that will allow you to extract advanced insights through the recognition of trends and patterns in your data that you wouldn’t get with traditional reporting techniques. By using predictions, you can understand things like customers’ demands, sales promotions, and others. Modern businesses are using more and more predictive analytics technologies to get an edge over the competition. 

To continue exploring the value of social media reporting this time in practice, we have selected a list of examples that will show you not just what goes into a report but also the particularities of each. You will be equipped with enough insights to start creating your own reports and use these templates to your advantage.

13. Learn & optimize where needed  

This last best practice is often overlooked, but it is of uppermost importance when it comes to achieving a successful reporting process over time. Once your social media reports are generated, you should meet up with your team and find improvement opportunities in the process. This way, you can optimize your strategies and ensure your analytical efforts are successful.

Your Chance: Want to test a social media reporting software for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from great social media reports!

What Should Be Included In A Social Media Report?

We’ve covered 13 best practices for building efficient social media reports. Now, to complement this information, we will outline some key elements that should not be missed from the process. Of course, the data you add will depend on the type of analysis as well as the audience. Your boss or clients might need a more general approach to understand the success of your strategies, while your teammates might need something more detailed to use as support for their own work. That said, there are a few elements that should be there no matter what, and we list them below. 

  • Goals and targets: The first element that can’t be missed on a social media tracking report is your general goals and targets. This represents the journey that you are going to take to reach a final strategic objective. It is what will let you understand where you need to improve and if you are going on the right path. Now, setting targets and goals is not an easy task. They should be attainable and realistic for the organization. If you want to dig deeper into this, take a look at our KPI targets blog post.
  • Content metrics: Arguably, one of the most important elements to include in a social media report is content metrics. The way your audience receives your content will be the indicator that they are engaged with your brand. By looking at these types of indicators, you can understand if they prefer video, audio, or image if they enjoy influencers, and much more. You can also compare the interactions with paid content vs. organic one. We list some of these metrics below. 
  • Reach: Following on the same line, including your reach, is also a very important element. Essentially, reach refers to the number of unique people who saw your post. A high reach means you are posting relevant content at a time your audience is active. Businesses calculate the reach for a specific post with the following formula: post reach ÷ total followers x 100 = post reach. 
  • Impressions: The impressions are the number of times your content is displayed. Unlike the reach that only considers a unique view, the impressions consider every time your post is seen. A person can provide multiple impressions to a post without even interacting with it. This is valuable information to understand the value of your content. If you have 1000 impressions but no interaction, then something might need some optimization. 
  • Engagement and interactions: Your engagement rate is another important factor to include, as it will tell you how satisfied and loyal your audience is. The engagement can be broken down into smaller metrics known as interactions. Interactions can be anything from clicks, likes, sharing, or commenting on a post. Naturally, this is critical data as it can help you find improvement opportunities in your own strategies. 
  • Achievements: Since you outline your goals and targets, it is only natural also to show when you achieved them. This is essential information as it will serve as an overview to understand the success of your entire SM strategy and at what pace you are meeting your objectives. You can include any type of achievement that works towards your general objectives, rather its a positive comment or a follower increase. This is especially useful for agencies doing client reporting as you need to show progress to your clients on a regular basis. 
  • Opportunities: Just like you include your wins, you should also include opportunities that are discovered through analyzing all the data you have in hand. For example, you can see through analyzing your comment section that customers would like to have an Instagram highlight story that answers key questions regarding your products or services. This presents a great opportunity to offer them a more personalized experience and boost engagement. 
  • Customer demographics: Another critical element to include is customer demographics. This includes any important information regarding your target audiences, such as the language they speak, age ranges, gender, location, and more. With this knowledge in hand, you can segment your customers and offer targeted campaigns that match their needs and preferences. This is also a good way to select influencers that will be appealing to your audience. 
  • Customer reviews: Customers are the backbone of any organization. If they are not happy with the way things are done, it will significantly affect your performance. With that in mind, including customer reviews or feedback in your social media reports is of great value. These reviews can be analyzed with the help of text analytics and extract conclusions about the general sentiment. Here you can pinpoint specific areas in which your customers are not entirely satisfied and exploit the ones in which they are. This is especially true for businesses that sell through their social channels. 

Discover Our Top Social Media Report Examples

By now, it’s clear just how valuable social reports are for modern businesses looking to make a real impact with their marketing efforts. To help put this into perspective, here is a selection of real-life social media reports examples for your viewing pleasure. With these user-friendly online dashboards, you will see how each interface is intuitive, navigable, and simple to customize.

1. Social Media Marketing Report Example 

Before diving into the specific examples of each social media channel, we want to go deeper into the benefits of displaying all your data in one place with this powerful KPI scorecard showcasing relevant metrics on four platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Social media marketing report example showing key metrics from four platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

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In the example above, we see charts tracking a set of relevant metrics for each platform, such as followers, views/impressions, interactions, and engagement. Every single one of these metrics performs against a target and a comparison with the previous period. At the bottom of each chart, you also have a graph showcasing CTR fluctuations for a 6 months period. By looking at these numbers, you can see if specific strategies that you implemented are working to achieve your goals; for example, we see that Twitter has problems with the number of clicks. Here, you can investigate deeper and see if the content wasn’t interesting for your audience or if maybe it would work better in another type of channel. 

This social media campaign report template can be useful for several scenarios in social media reporting. First, it can serve as a tool to present to clients or managers that want to have access to the live performance of their social media. For this purpose, the simple visuals in red and green can provide insights immediately about positive or negative goals and achievements. Second, as we mentioned before, having an overview of all these platforms’ progress together in one place will save you time that you can invest in deeper analysis to improve your strategies. Finally, this KPI scorecard can also be useful for SMM departments that hold meetings to track the progress of their strategy since the dashboard gives them a quick summary of KPIs to support their discussions.  

Primary KPIs:

  • Average Order Value
  • Average Time To Conversion
  • Engagement Rate

2. Social Media Engagement Report 

Social media engagement report tracking KPIs for various social media platforms

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As you’ve probably learned by now, knowing your audience is a key requirement to be successful with your SM efforts. Our template above provides a 360-view of audience-related indicators as well as engagement metrics to understand if your content is successful or not. Plus, the template can be filtered by platform to get a detailed view of each channel. 

Taking a deeper look into this example, we can see that, while new followers are way higher than lost followers, there is still a long way to go to meet the follower target, especially on Instagram. A similar situation is happening with mentions where the target of all platforms is halfway through. That being said, these metrics only scratch the surface. It is necessary to take a deeper look into each of them to understand if these values are truly positive or negative. Filtering the dashboard by a specific platform can be a good way to start. We’ll discuss vanity metrics in detail later in the post. 

Primary KPIs: 

  • Average Clicks per Post
  • Average Shares per Post
  • New vs. Lost Followers

3. Social Media Reports For Facebook

Facebook is the most widespread social channel in the world. With billions of users across the world, tracking and analyzing social activities on this channel is essential. Here we deliver a sample social media report for your Facebook page and another one for Facebook post management.

a) Facebook Page Dashboard

A social media report example showing insights into all the important metrics on a Facebook page

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This report template is dedicated to the world’s largest social network – Facebook. With 1.47 billion people that login daily, this network is still on top of search engines, with 78% of American consumers that have discovered retail products to buy just on this network. This is an astonishing potential that, if used wisely, can ensure sustainable company development. For this reason, the reporting practice becomes even more important since it can provide the exact numbers on how your company is developing on this social network.

As Facebook has its own set of rules, practices, and metrics, this invaluable report template offers a real insight into page views, behaviors, interactions, priceless follow demographics, likes, engagements, and a host of other essential information that will help you refine your Facebook marketing strategy.

Primary KPIs:

  • Number of Fans
  • Follower Demographics
  • Page Views by Sources
  • Actions on Page

To find out more about this social media report template, explore our Facebook dashboards in greater detail.

b) Facebook Post Dashboard

A social media report template based on post-level Facebook metrics

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Our rundown of social media reporting dashboards wouldn't be complete without taking a closer look at the post level of this social network. While monitoring the big picture of the overall Facebook page is essential, analyzing posts will deliver even more value to your social strategies.

Our template begins with a simple overview of the number of impressions and the average values of metrics such as reach per post, engagement rate, and CTR. That way, you can get an overview of how your posts are performing, but you might want to follow up with more details. That's why, in this example, you can see additional Facebook KPIs visualized in a clean and straightforward way: the average amount of impressions per post, post reactions, top 3 posts by CTR, and average engagement per post. These metrics can tell you a number of things: what type of posts work best, what kind of reactions you generate from your audience, and how many people see your posts, among other important elements, to create a comprehensive social data story.

Primary KPIs:

  • Reach by Post Type
  • Post Engagement Rate
  • Click-through-rate (CTR)

c) Facebook Ads Dashboard 

Social media report template of a Facebook dashboard for Ad performance

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Our third and last Facebook example is tracking relevant details regarding ad development. As of the beginning of 2021, Facebook was recognized as the most popular social media platform for ad marketing, with 93% of SM managers using it to promote their businesses. That said, using this Facebook for advertising is not an easy task. It requires constant monitoring and optimization of campaigns, not to mention being constantly on track with algorithm changes and other developments. 

The template above aims to assist marketers in performing all these tasks in the most efficient way possible. By providing insights into relevant metrics such as ad costs, interactions, and general performance, users can extract relevant conclusions to make their ads targeted and efficient. For instance, you can look at the costs per conversion and per click of the different devices and platforms, such as mobile or desktop, and see which one is performing better. 

Primary KPIs: 

  • Ad Impressions & Frequency
  • CPM & CTR of Facebook Ads
  • Cost per Conversion

4. LinkedIn Social Media Report Samples

If you want your company to thrive in online social settings, you need to develop and manage a LinkedIn account. LinkedIn has numerous benefits, and it's considered the number one platform for business-related social communication. To steer your success on this invaluable network, we have prepared 2 social media reporting templates that you can use for your potential online business influence.

a) LinkedIn Company Page Dashboard

Social media report example with a clear overview of key LinkedIn metrics and results over time

**click to enlarge**

LinkedIn is undoubtedly the planet’s premier professional network, and the second of our social media report templates focuses solely on this ever-expanding platform. With more than 500 million members, of about 61 million users are senior-level influencers, the potential in the B2B environment increases each year. That's just the tip of the iceberg on why tracking this social platform is of utmost importance. Let's see how this can be done in our example.

A prime monthly social media report example (although it's entirely possible to track metrics and interactions on a daily or weekly social media report), our LinkedIn reporting dashboard offers comprehensive information on company update frequency. Follower demographics, engagement rates, and more – all geared towards remaining relevant, present, and growing those all-important professional relationships on a consistent basis.

Primary KPIs:

  • Followers’ Demographics
  • Number of Followers
  • Impressions & Reach
  • Engagement Rate
  • Company Update Stats

To discover more about this particular report example, explore our LinkedIn dashboards & templates in more depth.

b) LinkedIn Individual Profile Dashboard

A social media report template for an individual LinkedIn profile

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Not just important for your company's profile but the individual as well, LinkedIn is one of the networks where you can easily find company influencers and connect with numerous peers across the globe. Individual profile users can benefit from such a dashboard since your business profile on LinkedIn can generate valuable results not just for your company but for your individual efforts as well.

This social media metrics report template is created with the help of a dashboard generator, where you can also find numerous other templates and easily start building your own dashboard or report. Metrics based on post and profile views monitored across specified weeks will immediately let you know how your published content performed over the course of time, how well is received, and do you need to adjust your strategies. This is not only crucial for companies, but if you're striving to brand your name and develop your personal presence, you need this dashboard in your life.

Another LinkedIn KPI, the 3 most recent updates, will remind you of what did you recently publish, and if you see a spike, you might want to consider taking a closer look at those posts.

Primary KPIs:

  • Viewer Information
  • Contact & Network Growth
  • Profile Views by Job Title
  • Post Views & Engagements

c) LinkedIn KPI Dashboard

LinkedIn KPI dashboard as an example of a social media report

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So far, we’ve covered examples for the LinkedIn company page and for your individual page. For our third and last social media LinkedIn report, we will cover an example that focuses on key metrics any organization needs in order to understand its progress, such as Impressions, Link Clicks, Engagement, Social Actions, Engagement Rate, Followers Gained, Number of Posts, etc.

This level of insight allows organizations to get a holistic overview of their strategic efforts and spot any improvement opportunities that can be backed by data. This way, they can avoid shooting in the dark and wasting resources on uninformed strategies and content. The template also differentiates interactions between sponsored and organic posts, so you can easily understand how each of them performs separately. 

Primary KPIs: 

  • Engagement Rate
  • Follower’s demographics 
  • Social Actions 

Your Chance: Want to test a social media reporting software for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from great social media reports!

5. Twitter Social Media Monthly Report Templates

Twitter is another social platform that companies and individuals can use to their advantage, depending on the type of brand they want to build. The content aspect that this channel has established forced brands across the world to keep their message short and clear. This type of content revolutionized online communication and is still popular today. If used correctly, this is a platform that can benefit the business in no time.

Let's start by explaining in more detail a social media metrics report template focused on Twitter performance.

a) Tweet Performance Dashboard

Social media report template showing a tweet performance dashboard expounds on important metrics like the average engagement rate, number of link clicks, likes, impressions, etc.

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Twitter remains one of the most popular and relevant social networking platforms on the planet, and the third of our reporting examples drills down into what makes the platform tick – the tweets. There are more than 500 million tweets sent each day, mixed with the fact that Twitter users are 38% more likely to post opinions about brands and products than other social media users, which makes this platform perfect for reaching out to customers. Let's take a look at our template to see what kind of reports we can extract.

This is a social media performance report template that is certain to enhance your Twitter marketing strategy. The dashboard tracks key activities over a 30-day period while offering a balanced mix of KPIs that will help you boost engagement and streamline your promotional strategy on a continual basis. This is a KPI report example that you should take note of, particularly if you’re looking to achieve total Twitter domination in your niche.

Primary KPIs:

  • Average Number of Link Clicks
  • Average Engagement Rate
  • Average Number of Impressions
  • Top 5 Tweets by Engagement

To discover more about this template and others like it, browse our Twitter dashboards & templates.

b) Twitter Ads Dashboard

A social media report sample depicting the performance of Twitter ads

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If you want to succeed in your marketing efforts, performing paid advertisements on Twitter is one of our suggestions you might want to look into. The potential of this network is undeniable, and by boosting your online social efforts, you can improve your company's bottom line exponentially. Our Tweet Ads dashboard will show you how.

This dashboard, created with social media reporting software, focuses on the most important metrics for managing successful advertising efforts: the total budget spent, the number of impressions, link clicks, and the average values per day for the past month. Looking at a monthly level, you can gain a better understanding of your overall performance but don't forget to generate the daily view of the funnel, just like on our dashboard. That way, you will have a more detailed overview of which days were more successful so that you can adjust your strategies accordingly.

Primary KPIs:

  • CPM of Twitter Ads 
  • Result Rate of Twitter Ads
  • Cost per Result

c) Twitter KPI Dashboard

Twitter social media report tracking metrics related to followers and engagement

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Last, in our social media analytics examples for Twitter, we have one that focuses on metrics related to your follower's behaviors and preferences. Success on Twitter is all about understanding the tone of the platform and what works best for your audience. The more you know about them, the more you can implement successful strategies to increase their loyalty and engagement. 

With that in mind, our template provides metrics that assist you on that journey. Which includes your gained and lost followers, the topics of interest by gender, and the most successful hashtags, among other things. This gives you a complete picture of your audience demographics as well as their interests which allows you to make informed decisions for your future strategies. 

Primary KPIs: 

  • Interests of Followers
  • Number of Followers
  • Hashtag Performance

6. Social Media Report Templates For YouTube

YouTube is a social network focused on videos. We have seen numerous cases where videos go viral; hence, this network shouldn't be disregarded that easily. In fact, YouTube leads the way in regard to video platforms in the world but is also the second-largest search engine right after Google. The potential is indisputable. We will start with an example of a monthly social media report for video performance.

a) YouTube Video Performance Dashboard

Social media report template to track your YouTube video performance with specific video-related metrics and indicators

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YouTube is the top video platform in the world, and that's a fact. With more than 1.9 billion logged-in monthly users, you can navigate the platform in a total of 80 different languages and over 91 countries and reach more 18-49 year-olds than on any broadcast or Cable TV network. These astonishing facts put YouTube also as the second largest search engine and the third most visited site after Google and Facebook. That being said, the monitoring and reporting of this network are invaluable for any video marketing strategy.

One of our social media report templates of the video variety, this YouTube dashboard, will help you improve your video-based marketing efforts.

Offering key metrics on viewer engagement as well as retention, this social media analytics report example will allow you to improve the visual content you produce as well as tailor it to the needs, preferences, and interests of your target audience.

Plus, KPIs like total watch time and video views will help you understand what is and isn’t working, allowing you to make essential tweaks to your YouTube strategy over time. A report example that every business should explore, regardless of industry or sector.

Primary KPIs:

  • Total Watch Time
  • Total Number of Video Views
  • Viewer Retention
  • Video Engagement

To find out more about this reporting template and others like it, explore our mix of YouTube dashboard examples & templates.

b) YouTube Channel Performance Dashboard

Example of a social media report created for the channel performance of the YouTube network

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While monitoring your video performance is essential, your channel performance is another important element in your social strategy, and we will now explain why and how you can use these notions to your own advantage.

This social media marketing report template focuses on the analytics part of your channel production. You need to deliver results in order to be successful on YouTube, and producing videos only will not suffice. The data behind the channel will tell you if your audience resonates with your message or if you need further adjustments. An operational dashboard focused on your channel success will answer all questions related to your subscribers and traffic.

c) YouTube KPI Dashboard

YouTube KPI dashboard as a social media report format

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Just as we saw with the examples of our other social media platforms, knowing your audience is the recipe for success when it comes to SM marketing. It is a waste of time and resources just to create content because we think it's cool instead of actually generating material that is interesting for your audience. This is especially true for YouTube, where you need to make sure you provide your subscribers with interesting videos that will give them added value. 

With that in mind, our template displays the needed data to help you understand your audience on a deeper level. By providing insights into subscribers' demographics as well as their favorite video type, you can easily generate targeted strategies that will most likely be successful. For instance, here we can see that 42% of this company’s subscribers use mobile devices, which means all videos should be fully optimized for those devices. 

Primary KPIs: 

  • Subscribers’ Demographics
  • Top 5 Videos by Views
  • Video Engagement

d) YouTube Growth And Revenue Dashboard

YouTube growth and revenue dashboard as a social media report example

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Our last YouTube report example focuses on a channel that monetizes its content and provides a long–term view of critical indicators, including the CPM and RPM. The value of this template lies in the fact that it can be filtered to view the performance of the entire channel or a specific video. This way, you can understand which type of content has more monetary value and boost it to maximize the returns. 

The report is divided into two sections. The first one contains three charts showing the monthly development of the views and watch time, the RPM, and the CPM and playback CPM. Getting this long-term view can help the business identify high-performing months and replicate that kind of content but also identify improvement opportunities in low-performing months. This information can be complemented with the second section of the template, which provides a summary of the previously portrayed metrics for the top 10 best-performing videos. 

Primary KPIs: 

  • Revenue Per Mille (RPM)
  • Playback-based CPM
  • Positive & Negative Comments
  • New & Lost Followers

Social Media Reporting Common Challenges & Mistakes To Avoid

So far, we’ve gone through a list of benefits, best practices, and examples of modern social media reporting. While the process might sound straightforward, it doesn’t come without challenges. Many organizations fail in their data-driven efforts because they ignore important details that can bring big negative results in the long run. These details relate to inaccuracies in the information, communication between teams, but also how you handle sensitive customer data. 

To help you avoid falling into any of these pitfalls, we put together 5 of the most common SM reporting mistakes and provide ways in which you can avoid them. 

1. Using vanity metrics

We’ve already talked about the importance of picking the metrics you’ll need to monitor, analyze and optimize your social strategies. That said, picking the right performance indicators is not an easy task, especially when it comes to social media, where many businesses end up tracking a bunch of vanity metrics to measure their success. These are indicators that often offer a positive result but don’t provide any further insights into the true success of your campaigns. Common examples of vanity metrics include follower counts, likes, or shares. While these do provide a level of insight, they don’t really tell you what kind of return you are getting from your efforts. That is not to say you should discard them entirely, but use them as a complement to other more actionable indicators such as CTR, conversion rates, or leads. That way, you’ll get a brother more accurate picture of your performance. 

2. Using the wrong types of charts

This next mistake is more about reporting in general, but it is so important that we couldn’t leave it out of the list. Choosing the wrong chart type to display your data can lead to misinterpretation during the analysis process, which can then lead the businesses to generate inaccurate strategies that will end in a significant waste of resources and time. To prevent this from happening, it is important to think of what you are trying to show. For instance, if you are trying to show relationships between two variables, then a bubble chart or a scatter plot would be your best choice. On the other hand, if you are trying to show a comparison over time, then a line, column, or area chart is your best choice. 

If you are feeling a bit lost with this topic, we put together a lengthy and insightful guide on the different types of graphs and charts with real-world examples of when to use them. 

3. Cherry-picking data

This next mistake is considered one of the most common misleading statistics techniques in the analytical world. Cherry-picking data means you only pick and choose results that favor your analysis goals. While this technique has been purposefully used in many industries, including the media and advertising, it can also happen by mistake. Many times, businesses or teams who are not too familiar with data analysis tend only to showcase positive results to clients or managers. This is critical because it can not only mislead the audience about the bigger picture, but it can also hide valuable trends and patterns that can extremely valuable to the development of your SM strategies. For instance, going back to our vanity metrics point, you can generate a report showing clients that followers increased 20% after the last campaign, hiding that only 1% of that 20% ended up converting. This means the campaign was actually not that successful and hid improvement opportunities that could be uncovered from the data. 

4. Using only historical data

Traditional means of reporting involved the use of historical data, which was displayed in a static document, often in Excel or PowerPoint. This is no longer enough for businesses that want to stand out from the competition. Today, the reporting process has mutated into an interactive, real-time approach that enables marketers and social media managers to make important strategic decisions as soon as something comes up. For instance, you might generate a report showing the real-time performance of a campaign. After a week since the campaign was launched, you look at the report and realize that the numbers are not developing as expected. This provides the opportunity to tweak the campaign before the whole budget is spent. Something that would not be possible if you used only historical data. 

5. Ignoring data privacy and security 

Last but not least, we have a challenge that is becoming increasingly important. We are talking about security and privacy. 5 years have passed since the Cambridge Analytica scandal taught the world about the importance of the protection of sensitive data gathered on social media. Since then, security and privacy have become a top priority for consumers, and ensuring their information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands should be a top priority. To prevent this from happening, you should invest in the right tools and processes to ensure your follower's sensitive data is protected when sharing and generating reports. This involves setting roles and responsibilities for who can access and manipulate sensitive data as well as ensuring secure sharing methods such as password-protected URLs and others. 

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Key Takeaways On Social Media Reporting 

While it may be a competitive landscape, social platforms are potentially prosperous, profitable playing fields for brands that know how to use them to their advantage. It's no secret that the huge potential of utilizing these networks, with both organic and paid opportunities, should be one of the top priorities for companies that know how to target their audiences and create performance-based analytical reports. For that reason, a neat reporting practice is an invaluable resource to obtain the benefits of your social networking strategy fully.  Embrace the power of social reporting today, and you’ll reap endless rewards tomorrow – and long into the future.

We hope you enjoyed and learned the benefits and the power of creating these reports. Here we leave you a small summary of the benefits and best practices for your social media analytics efforts. 

Why Is Social Media Reporting Important? 

  • Smarter content creation 
  • Results-driven scheduling 
  • Tailored targeting
  • Customized tracking and performance measurement
  • Identifying trends and new opportunities
  • Delivering added value to audiences 
  • Prove the value of your strategy 
  • Identify seasonality effects 

13 Best Practices To Create Powerful Social Media Reports: 

  1. Define your stakeholders
  2. Choose the right metrics
  3. Provide competitive context
  4. Concentrate on impactful data 
  5. Benefit from text analysis
  6. Visualize all your data in one place
  7. Follow design best practices 
  8. Identify your reporting schedule 
  9. Automate your reports
  10. Share your reports
  11. Pick the right reporting tools
  12. Integrate predictions in your report 
  13. Learn & optimize where needed 

For more insights into the virtues of data analytics, you can explore the 250 KPI examples we have carefully prepared.

And if you want to tackle even deeper into social networks and reports, you can try our social media reporting software for a 14-day trial completely free!