How to Build a Complete Social Media Management Report for Your Client

Social media management reports are designed to assess a brand’s reputation, social performance, and key campaigns, among others. For agencies, a full report should do the following:

• Identify the initial goals and KPIs
• Benchmark the client’s performance against or the previous time period depending on the length of the campaign or trend in question; competitor benchmarking can also be included
• Measure the ROI with data visualisation to support
• Make recommendations based on the data

From KPIs that matter to best practices, here is a guide on how to build a complete social media management report for your client for the aforementioned purposes.

1. Reputation report 

This report analyzes the overall health of the brand’s image within a time period, including the quantity and quality of brand related conversations and customer perception. For regular reports, they can be produced weekly, monthly or quarterly. In cases of product launches, partnership announcements or digital crisis when the client requires updates in real time, they can be produced daily or even hourly.

1.1 KPIs 

• Buzz: What is the share of voice commanded by the client’s company? Are digital PR campaigns paying off?
• Customer perception: What is the sentiment expressed by customers towards the brand? What are the key topics turning up in their conversations and opinion sharing?
• Positioning: Considering the weightage of partnerships, influencers, products, and content marketing in influencing the brand’s perception by customers

1.2 Metrics to include 

• Share of voice: Volume of mentions related to the client’s campaigns, promotions, events, products, and even the brand, out of the industry or the brand’s line of offerings. Segment the data according to channel coverage, geo-location, level of influence, media authorities involved, as well as analyze the impact of the volume of mentions on the audience.
• Sentiment: Assess the receptiveness of customers towards the client’s brand or product through social media postings, forum discussions, and feedback left on the client’s social media channels. This is especially crucial in times of product launches or digital crises. Also delve into the key topics and concepts behind the positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.
• Trend: When did the conversation peak or dip during the specified period?
• Channels: Identify the platforms where most brand related posts are being made.
• Media and influencers: Identify the influencers, bloggers and media channels with the most authority on your industry, as well as their audience, and their bearing on the client’s reputation and positioning.
• Google searches: Examine the key search terms related to the client, as these contain clues as to what customers are most interested in about the brand. To further optimise, examine the top Google results  and their evolution which can also influence the perception of the brand - most notably, customer feedback forums and reviews by influencers.

1.3 Best practices 

Reputation reports can be optimised by:

• Explaining the reasons behind the trends in buzz and share of voice
• Giving the client’s performance some context by benchmarking it against competitors or a previous time period
• Visualising the data with pie charts and graphs
• Identifying potential opportunities for brand positioning and business based on the client’s reputation report
• Making recommendations for fine tuning the client’s communication strategy, i.e. issues to address, what channels to communicate on

2. Social performance report

As the name suggests, this report analyses the performance of the client’s owned social media pages, and is produced monthly or quarterly.

2.1 Key KPIs

• Growth: How much has the client’s community, interactions and publications grown compared to the previous time period?
• Engagement: Number of followers who are actively interacting and commenting on their posts, and the rate of these interactions
  
  Besides these two KPIs, agencies can also consider:
• Social selling: Opportunities for the client to direct traffic and sales to their e-commerce sites from their social media channels
• Social care: Speed at which customer care teams resolve complaints made by customers on the client’s social media channels. Benchmark this response rate against the client’s competitors.  

2.2 Metrics to include

• Community: Number of followers and fans on each social media channel, or across all the client’s channels
• Interactions: Number and frequency of likes, comments and shares earned on the client’s social media channels
• Activity: Number and frequency of postings made by the client on their social media channels
• Click through rate: Number of visits made to the client’s website from social media
• Conversion rate: Volume of sales, sign-ups, etc.  made from customers visiting the client’s website from social media
• Top performing post: Identify which posts earned the most interactions or CTRs on each channel

2.3 Best practices 

Social performance reports can be optimised by:

• Segmenting the abovementioned metrics by channel and market (if the client has more than one social media channel or more than one page per channel for all their markets)
• Segmenting the top performing post by organic or sponsored posts
• Assessing the quality of interactions, i.e. whether followers are truly engaging with the posts or hijacking them to air their complaints and questions
• Including screenshots of posts and comments, with the date and time to determine the best time to post

3. Post campaign 

The post campaign report focuses on the performance of a social media campaign and ultimately, how it contributes to the overall success of the brand.

3.1 Key KPIs 

• Reach: Did the content and campaigns help the client reach a wider audience?
• Influence: How much did your agency’s initiatives affect the mindset - or purchase behaviour - of your audience?
• Hashtags: Did the official brand or campaign hashtag trend on social media? How did people react or interact with it?
• Messaging: Was the campaign successful in communicating the brand’s messaging? Did the client achieve greater visibility? Were people receptive toward the messaging? If influencers were used, did they communicate the message successfully to their followers?
• Customer loyalty: Did the campaign strengthen brand customer relationships? Are customers more engaged after the campaign?
• Compare the impressions vs CTRs, and CTRs vs conversion from the campaign

3.2 Metrics to include 

• Impressions: Number of times the campaign was displayed
• Traffic: Number of visits made to the client’s website or campaign landing page
• Sales and sign-ups: Volume of conversions that resulted from the campaign
• Market share: Did the campaign improve the client’s position against the competitors?
• Brand recollection: Was there an increase in customers recognising the brand image or messaging as a result of the campaign? Compare Google search behaviour and results around the brand or product promoted before and after, as well as key topics and concepts discussed.
• Influencers: If the client engaged influencers, which one brought the most traffic and sales? This requires a strong tracking strategy to be set up before the campaign, and can include unique tracking links, discount or sign up codes, and landing pages

3.3 Best practices 

As social media campaigns are performance driven, it is best to assess said metrics as part of a trend, namely: pre campaign, during campaign, and post campaign. Don’t forget to mark when the campaign peaked and include factors and recommendations behind this trend.

At the end of the day, social media management reports are about being digestible and value adding for the client:

• Simple visualisation dashboards can make data easily viewable, drill-able, and actionable especially when tracking on-going campaigns.
• Balancing quantitative and qualitative analysis helps to give the client a complete perspective of said campaigns.