Social media reports: what they are and why to create them regularly

Interacting and exchanging information with technology on a day-to-day basis has become an essential part of any business. Being trained and competent in terms of social media management is no longer an option to add to your skills, but a necessary requirement.

However, not everyone thinks about the other side of the coin: it is not enough to be able to ‘manoeuvre’ social media, you also have to listen to them. And know how to listen to them. Commonly used platforms are real wells of information that can be extremely useful, relating to our brand, our site and our audience. But how do we extract it all and keep up to date on a regular basis? Here’s the answer: social media reports.

Social media reports: what are they?

Specifically, these are documents made up of all the data collected by a given platform. All of this is shaped according to our needs or wishes. The process is not always obvious, but the reasoning behind it is quite straightforward: any social network records the movements – of all kinds – that are made within it and allows users to consult them.

It is then up to the user concerned to select the most relevant statistics and to be able to separate them from the others: from their order, group them together and process them in order to obtain a document that can be really useful. Social media reports can provide extremely important information on the performance of a page and on improvements that can be made to it.

In fact, there are many variables on the basis of which a social media report can be created. First and foremost, the temporal frequency: the most relevant data can be highlighted through daily, monthly, quarterly and so on, or special reports based on specific campaigns. It is also important to specify which aspect of the brand you want to give more importance to: performance, promotion, protection and so on.

Social media reports: the key steps for creating them

Let us now try to draw up a list of steps that we must take when creating a useful and professional social media report. It is precisely for this reason that this type of document must be entrusted to a professional in order to be considered truly constructive.

Firstly, it is essential to define the objectives of our business with complete clarity. We must always remember that these must be ambitious, but always realistic. As already mentioned, one of the first steps must necessarily correspond to the definition of what we consider to be the key parameters for our analysis: we talk in this case of KPIs to define precisely those aspects (and data) on which we want to focus our attention.

The most interesting metrics to monitor are usually those corresponding to parameters such as leads, conversions, impressions, engagement, audience, clicks and bounce rate; but each specific case is different. Obviously, the peculiarities of each channel have to be taken into account: not all channels have to be and cannot be evaluated according to the same parameters.

The last steps are those relating to the aesthetic factor, i.e. the presentation of the report itself. There is only one watchword: clarity. Any means (graphic and visual, such as graphs and tables) that can help to achieve this objective is extremely useful. Similarly, the inclusion of images can make the document more pleasant and flowing, as well as explanatory.

Why regularly creating social media reports

It is clear that a process such as the one described so far cannot be truly useful or indicative when it is an isolated case. Social reporting needs to be done on a consistent basis: it is not necessary that the various reports are created at short intervals, as we explained at the beginning, but that there is actually a path of continuity linking them.

The reason should be clear by now: by monitoring your own web pages and their results, it will be much easier not only to follow them but also to improve them on a daily basis, in a constant manner. Following a project with a consistent overview over time can only bring benefits, especially when it comes to social media.