Social data is so important, in fact, that 33% of social marketers in a hiring position list reporting ability as the top skill they look for in candidates. Yet with so many metrics and differing department goals, where do you start in communicating the right data to the right team? And how do you share that data with them in a way that is digestible and makes sense to your colleagues? Social media reports can help you synthesize your data succinctly and package it in an easily digestible format to share with a variety of stakeholders across your organization. To give you a head start, we’ve compiled a list of 10 social media report examples to fuel your conversations with teams across sales, product, finance and more.
1. Profile Performance Report
Maintaining a pulse on all of your brand’s social profiles is a must in order to ensure you reach your goals and better understand all of your social efforts. Social teams can use a profile performance report to track awareness and visibility across networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This type of report is ideal for providing a high-level overview of your social performance to the broader marketing organization. Key metrics to look for:
Impressions Engagements Audience Growth
Sprout’s Profile Performance Report brings key metrics for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest together into one streamlined report. This social media report provides comprehensive performance metrics broken down by network and tracks progress across weeks, months and years. The Profile Performance Report is a go-to report for both weekly check-ins and year-end presentations to share with your direct manager to your executive team.
2. Post Performance Report
A post performance report allows social marketers to present isolated metrics for published content, showing everything from impressions to reach to post link clicks. This is beneficial for any team that wants to better understand what types of content resonate with their audience or drive people to take a specific action. For example, content teams can determine which pieces of content inspire engagements while sales teams can identify which posts bring potential customers to the website. Key metrics to look for:
Engagement Rate (per impression) Impressions
Sprout’s Post Performance Report dives deeper into individual posts, granting you access to lifetime metrics and the ability to identify your top-performing content. In this report, users can choose to view all networks or filter to identify trends for publishing on one network, like Twitter.
3. Instagram Business Profiles Report
Social media analytics can also help marketers zero in on performance for pivotal networks like Instagram. Fifty percent of consumers said they plan on using Instagram more in the coming year, making this an important network—especially for targeting Generation Z consumers. Instagram performance metrics are also valuable to content and design teams in understanding what types of photos, graphics or videos are performing well. Instagram-specific reporting can help build social’s partnerships with these teams and ultimately lead to better performance for everyone. Key metrics to look for:
Instagram Stories Performance Instagram Outbound Hashtag Performance
Social media marketers can use Sprout’s Instagram Business Profiles Report to pinpoint unique ways to connect with their growing audience on this key network. While the Profile Performance Report provides a great overview of all networks, the Instagram Business Profiles Report provides network-specific insights for Instagram, such as Stories and hashtag performance.
4. Cross-Network Paid Performance Report
When you’re promoting posts and running ads, your marketing director or finance team will want to see that their investment is bringing in desired results. Paid metrics are key to understanding which network returns the most value, which in turn can inform your next ad placement and allow you to defend that investment when requesting budget allocation. Key metrics to look for:
Cost per Impression (CPM) Cost per Engagement (CPE) Web Conversions
The Cross-Network Paid Performance enables social teams to analyze paid results across all of their networks. Cost per impressions, for example, is a useful metric for digital marketing teams who want to know if their paid content is reaching their intended audience. And tracking web conversions is great for demonstrating to sales and customer success teams the impact of paid social on lead generation goals.
5. Facebook, Instagram & Twitter Competitor Reports
Industry benchmarks can tell you how your brand compares to competitors, offer additional context into current trends and inform your social goals. Acquisition and product teams can use competitor social media reports to understand which brands stand out amongst the competition, and which content and features are leading those competitors to success. Key metrics to look for:
Top Posts Public Engagements per Post Audience Growth
Sprout’s network-specific Competitor Reports can be used to benchmark your metrics against your competition and to track top-performing brands in your industry. With the top posts metric, you can see what pieces of competitor content are performing well for certain profiles and inspire your own content creation teams.
6. Inbox Team Report
In addition to tracking your outbound messages, you also need to track your incoming social messages. Customer support teams, for example, need metrics that show how they engage with their audience and measure customer service effectiveness. When 40% of consumers expect a response within one hour on social media and 78% expect a response within 24 hours, analyzing and improving reply times is a must to maintain customer satisfaction on social. Key metrics to look for:
Average First Reply Time Unique Messages Replied To
With the Sprout Inbox Team Report, you can track reply metrics for your team overall as well as for particular team members. This is especially useful for customer support teams who want to measure their agents’ productivity and to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience.
7. Publishing Team Report
Both customer support and marketing teams need to track metrics per user for productivity purposes. Outside of identifying productivity concerns or top performers, tracking productivity helps managers monitor for signs of potential burnout on their teams. Keeping a pulse on team publishing metrics can help managers manage bandwidth while also challenging their teams to grow. Key metrics to look for:
Daily Average % of Total Posts
Sprout’s Publishing Team Report provides per user metrics to show productivity across your entire team. Social marketing teams can use this report to track productivity trends for all Sprout users and surface coaching or recognition opportunities for your agents.
8. Tag Report
Outside of profile and team performance, campaign performance metrics can provide key stakeholders the information they need to make informed decisions. With tags, social teams can track a product launch campaign and communicate those insights back to their product teams. This insight then allows product teams to quickly pivot on negatively received launches or capitalize on the most successful releases. Key metrics to look for:
Received Messages Volume Sent Messages Impressions
Sprout’s Tag Report allows users to isolate both inbound and outbound content they want to track by type. For campaigns, use the Tag Report to track performance on posts from that campaign directly or to measure the volume of incoming messages based on that campaign. With Premium Analytics, you can also filter by tag on the Post Performance Report, adding even more context to your published content.
9. Custom Reports (e.g. Organic vs. Paid)
Social media managers can customize social media reports for particular stakeholders, including year-end reports for managers and executives. For example: Analyzing your integrated paid and organic social media strategy can be difficult when all the data is on separate reports. But with a combined paid versus organic report, you can consolidate data from multiple sources and deliver a comprehensive analysis of your social plan. Key metrics to look for:
Organic and Paid Engagements by network
Sprout’s Custom Report Builder gives social teams the ability to combine various reports, insert text annotations and includes a Paid vs. Organic Comparison widget for Facebook and Instagram. This is an indispensable asset for social teams looking to compare the side-by-side performance of their paid and organic posts, and also gives marketers access to organic engagements on Facebook.
10. Social Listening
Take your reporting to the next level with social listening, which provides a more complete picture of your current and potential audience. Social listening allows marketers to not only understand how a campaign is performing, but which campaign your team should run next. For example: if sentiment is positive toward an offering but volume is low, this signals an opportunity for an awareness campaign. Key metrics to look for:
Volume Sentiment (Positive and Negative Mentions) Share of Voice
With Sprout’s Advanced Listening query builder, teams like sales, product, public relations and more can better understand how to connect their audience with relevant content and products. For example, sales can track industry terms to find new leads, like when users ask their Twitter networks for product recommendations. Product teams can surface feedback even when your brand isn’t directly mentioned, making sure no opportunities to improve or celebrate success are missed. With listening, public relations teams can see the signs of an emerging crisis and then retroactively track how that impacts their brand. With social listening data, social media becomes the go-to resource in your organization for real-time, valuable insights.
Get sharing your social data today
To showcase the true value of social, you need more than social data—you also need to be able to present it in a way that makes sense to your colleagues. These 10 social media reports will empower you to showcase your work and its wider impact on business goals in conversations with anyone in your organization. Ready to get even more from your social data and social reports? Download our cheatsheet to learn how to broaden your social listening efforts and develop a strategy that supports multiple teams and goals across your organization.
