You’ve spent long hours working on your last social media campaign, and that’s it: D-Day for the launch has arrived! And now? It’s time to market your results internally. Show your managers what you’ve accomplished with comprehensive reports documenting your campaign’s performance. Here’s how to correctly write a social media report.
Social media marketing in Pakistan is now an integral part of digital marketing strategies, and yet many professionals in the industry still find it challenging to demonstrate the performance of their campaigns through their reports. It’s indeed easy to get lost in the numbers and fail to come up with the information that is most relevant to your manager, your team, and your customers.
In this guide, I suggest you explore the essentials to incorporate into your reports/deliverables, as well as the available reporting tools and the best ways to present your information. BONUS: You will also have access to three model reports to inspire you!
Why do you need web and social media reports?
Never assume that your managers know everything you know about marketing and the digital world. It’s up to you to educate them and demonstrate the value of your work and that of your team, you must be able to justify what you are doing, and why, as well as the goals you have achieved, and the budget spent to make them.
Here are some great reasons to write useful social media reports:
- Measure the ROI of your campaigns to be able to demonstrate their value and impact.
- Show your customers how their accounts are performing on social media.
- Identify your successes as well as your failures so that you can optimize your future initiatives in every sense of the word.
- Save time with automated social media reporting, using videos, images, and comments to make them easier to understand and remember.
Continually evaluating the performance of your strategy and your various channels will help you identify what works and what does not, for example, by identifying the platforms most frequented by your target audience, as well as the best performing content on these. With these deliverables, you will be able to share your most successful initiatives with other departments and demonstrate the value of your team’s work.
Six questions to ask to build a good report on your marketing activities
It’s all in the details – who, what, how, why …
Step 1: who are the recipients of the report?
Who are the people who will receive your reports? Senior executives, sales teams, or in charge of marketing or customer relations?
Each team has its own goals, and usually lacks time to read all the documents it receives. For more effective reporting, keep the needs of the recipients in mind and keep it direct and concise.
Step 2: What are your report objectives?
What are the goals you want to achieve using your reports? Depending on these, the frequency of your reporting can vary greatly:
- Regular reports aimed at monitoring the progress of a brand or a product on the web and social media and which can also incorporate elements of competitive intelligence.
- One-off reports to track the launch of a campaign, event, or product, which generally focuses on basic metrics and qualitative analysis of the situation.
- Research reports seeking to explore or identify new trends by listening to the web and social media.
Step 3: What questions would you like to respond to?
No matter what type of report you write, you must answer one or more specific questions. To better define them, keep in mind the SMART method (Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic, and Temporarily defined).
In the case of a campaign report, for example, you might want to know how many conversations were generated with your target audience.
A research report might ask a question such as: What values are 40-year-old men sensitive to when they shop for their clothes?
Step 4: which indicators to take into account?
Just because you have the option to add new indicators to your reports doesn’t mean you have to. Remember to stay as direct and concise as possible, not only for the sake of your colleagues who have limited time to read your reports but also for your well-being: the more indicators you will incorporate into your stories, the more time this task will take you.
What you are going to measure should depend on the information you need and the channels you are using. Try to avoid creating too many custom metrics that you will need to calculate each time unless they have real added value.
Measure the metrics that will help you make better strategic decisions.
Tip: Use traceable links to identify leads generated and to be able to determine if they become customers.
- Conversion rate – the efficiency rate of a given form or page in converting a visitor into a qualified lead.
- Reach and Impressions – the number of people who potentially see your posts. For an influencer on Twitter, for example, his reach is equal to the size of the latter’s community. When we talk about impressions, on the other hand, it is the number of times your content has been displayed, whether or not it was clicked.
- The volume of results – the number of times your brand, products or keywords have been discussed on the web and social media.
- Engagement – this is an indicator aimed at measuring the relevance of your content by counting all how Internet users interact with it (retweets, shares, likes, comments, etc.). It will allow you to detect your top-performing posts and identify winning and losing strategies on each channel.
- The characteristics of your audience – who participates in the conversations around your brand? Who are the most active or influential people? What are their demographics? You will be able to show your clients or your management that you are talking to the right people in terms of languages, gender, interests, professions.
- Frequency and type of content – track how often you post content in a given period (weekly, monthly), as well as the kind of content published (video, image, text, etc.).
- Bounce rate – English term referring to the percentage of visitors leaving your site after viewing only one page. Compare this indicator for the different acquisition channels of your website (direct, social, organic, etc.). Let’s imagine that it is lower for social media than for other channels: this will allow you to demonstrate to your manager that you are attracting prospects to the company’s site who are interested in your message and, therefore, with more potential value for the latter.
- Share of voice – with this metric, you will be able to compare how much consumers are talking about your brand compared to your direct competitors.
Step 5: which reporting tools to choose?
Once your objectives have been clarified, you will be able to choose better the best tools to support you in your work. In order not to waste time, you should limit yourself to one or two solutions depending on the information you need. The more tools you use, the more difficult it will be to put all of this information together and make sense of it.
Step 6: the question of timing
Daily, weekly, monthly, or even one-off reports to take stock of a campaign. There are many possibilities!
When you write a report about yourself last campaign, be sure to set goals before your campaign begins so that you can judge your success.
You can also prepare monthly reports on the performance of your content strategy, including things like the number of sessions, page views, objectives completed, the ” bounce rate, “the number of leads, downloads … If you are targeting specific keywords, you can also add your site rankings before and after posting an article. With this information, you will be able to identify the peaks of activity and trends that dominated the month and better analyze what is working with your audience.
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