How to Write a Social Media Report
As social media is taking a bigger role in business marketing, you need a way to evaluate your results to see what you have done right, what you have done wrong and what you could have done differently – and, to see if you’re getting any results all from it.
In this article, we’ll present you with a guide on How to Write a Social Media Report and everything you need to know about it.
From collecting data to identifying your goals, this article covers it all.
Identify your goals
The first thing you need to do is identify your goals.
By having already thought of the purpose of the report you’re doing you can stay more focused towards the end goal, and complete it without ever wondering what you need to do next.
Social Media reports can have different thoughts behind them and look a bit different based on the purpose of it.
Generally, these can be split into 3 sub-categories.
- A regular report, often done regularly to see how your brand is performing on social media and what results it generates. A report of this nature often lets you get a slightly better insight in how your strategies have helped you reach success and if they actually worked.
- A report after particular campaigns to help you evaluate individual campaigns, for example, a giveaway done on social media.
- A more thorough and deep report studying social comments and involves social listening to learn what your audience says about your brand.
Decide on what you want to know and ask the right questions
A social report can tell you a lot of things, but making your social report targeted on the things you need to know will give you more fruitful answers. More correctly, the better questions you ask, the better answers you’ll get.
The questions you ask will decide what methods you’ll use to get the answers.
Decide the duration
The duration of your measuring is important to have great control over, as having a too short measuring period might give you incomplete results. For example, if a particular event has taken place, and you measure over a too short period of time, the results might be far from the reality.
Measuring over a longer period of time will often give you more accurate results.
Start with the report
Now comes the main task. When writing your social media report, it is important to think about who you are writing for. Are you writing the report for someone who has never had an encountering with social media before? Then you probably keep it at a very basic level.
If you’re writing for a top boss, you might want to limit the amount of page, as they might not have time to read page after page for hours.
Get to the point quickly
Those who are going to read your report are probably busy people. You don’t want to waste their time nor force them to read clutter that’s only there for visual reasons. Get to the point quickly and keep it simple. Almost anyone should be able to read it, not just social media experts.
Present data, graphics etc.
There has probably been a lot going on social media that you now want to report on. Describe the statistics with fun, yet easy to read and easy to understand graphics and data.
Describe the graphics
Graphics don’t tell a lot unless someone explains them and tells you what they resemble. As we talked about before, people who aren’t working with social media, and those who have never worked with it should be able to understand what the graphics mean.
Add your own thoughts
Present your data, and then explain them and add your own thoughts. It’s important that your graphics get presented in the right context, otherwise, something that you report on might look like a complete disaster while it is only a tiny part of the conversations on social media.
Put the important stuff at the beginning
A social media report might not be the most fun thing to read for people, however, they are necessary. Yet, if they only would read the first pages of your report, they should have gotten access to most of the important information.
Presenting the important and interesting stuff, in the beginning, makes people carry on reading and won’t quit until they’re done.
