How to Create a Social Media Report Like a Pro

What if I told you there’s a way to know what to post on social media to drive engagement and revenue, no crystal ball required? Instead, all you need is a social media report fuelled by the “magic” of data.

Dive into the wonderful world of social media reporting as we cover the following topics:

• What is a social media report?
• Metrics to include in your social media report
• How to create a social media report in 8 steps

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a comprehensive overview of your social media performance over a specific period. These reports display and track social key performance indicators (KPIs) related to your campaigns, offering actionable insights into the success of your social media activities across different platforms.

Social media reports serve as a roadmap to improve your overall performance on social media channels, including next steps and areas of opportunity. With powerful insights from your social media reports, you can prioritize the strategies that positively impact your bottom line and drive revenue for your business.

Metrics to include in your social media report

Not all social media reports look alike. What you include in your social media report will depend on your business goals, objectives, and the platforms you use. 

To help you get started, here are 12 social media KPIs you can cover in your own report:

1. Follower growth
2. Profile views
3. Engagement
4. Top-performing posts
5. Posts
6. Mentions
7. Audience insights
8. Reach
9. Conversions
10. Click-through rate (CTR)
11. Cost per click (CPC)
12. Competitor performance

1. Follower growth

Rather than focusing on follower count, pay attention to your follower growth. This social media metric shows you how extensive your reach is and how fast it’s growing. Follower growth can give you a better understanding of the size of the audience you’re reaching with your posts. 

2. Profile views

Profile views are another important social media KPI to track. They give you better insight into your brand awareness and tell you how well your strategy attracts people to your page.

You should notice a correlation between your profile views and follower growth — both should increase simultaneously, much like website views and conversion rates. When this happens, it means you’re on track to start driving revenue through your efforts.

If your profile viewership is significantly high while your follower growth is subpar, it could indicate that you should optimize your profile to encourage more engagement.

3. Engagement

Engagement indicators like post likes, comments, shares, and views are essential for social media reporting because they tell you how your followers react to your content (literally). Consistent post engagement signals an active social media audience, and, more importantly, it means your content is reaching people.

4. Top-performing posts

Knowing which of your social media posts are top performers is incredibly helpful in social media reporting. By understanding what content engages your audience, you can adjust your content creation strategy to prioritize this content and fuel your growth.

In other words, you’re giving the people what they want!

5. Posts

Along with your top-performing content, keeping track of all the content you put out each month is a good idea. By doing so, you may notice a correlation between the amount of content you post and audience engagement levels.

Does your audience engagement increase with the amount of posts you make? Or are your followers a “less is more” kind of crowd? By tracking this simple KPI, you can strategically ramp up or slow down your content creation efforts for better social media performance.

6. Mentions

Mentions aren’t a metric you have control over, but if one of your social media goals is expanding brand awareness, it’s a good one to keep an eye on. Mentions from customers, leads, and other users can help you gauge your brand’s perception and understand who’s talking about you on social media.

7. Audience insights

Audience metrics help you understand who your content is reaching. By understanding who makes up your audience, you can better tailor your content to your audience’s interests and increase engagement.

Audience metrics include characteristics like:

• Age
• Gender
• Location/Region
• Occupation/Industry
• And more

8. Reach

How many unique people see your content, and how often do they see it? Understanding your social media reach will tell you how many people have had a chance to engage with your brand and how effective your different types of content are. 

Social Media Reach vs. Impressions

When talking about KPIs, it’s important to distinguish between social media reach and impressions:

• Reach refers to the number of unique people who saw a piece of content.
• Impressions refer to the total number of people who saw a piece of content.

As you create your social media report, remember to avoid the pitfall of focusing on impressions, a metric that doesn’t offer valuable insights into social media campaign performance. Instead, focus on reach, which offers more actionable insights into your campaign.

9. Conversions

Your conversion rate is an important metric to follow because it helps you understand your overall return on investment (ROI). Conversion rates tell you how well your campaign drives people to complete a specific action, like visiting your site through a link in your profile or engaging with your page.

Ultimately, your conversion rate is a KPI stakeholders scrutinize when assessing whether to continue investing in social media marketing efforts.

10. Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR), or click rate, is a social media metric that pertains to your organic and paid ad efforts.

On the organic side, tracking the total number of clicks your content receives indicates how well your content performs and what types of content encourage more engagement.

On the paid advertising side, your CTR will show you what ads and content are successfully driving traffic to your website.

11. Cost per click (CPC)

Speaking of paid social ads, monitoring your social media cost per click (CPC) is another metric to consider including in your social media report. By tracking your CPC, you can compare it to platform averages and your campaign results. Then, you can determine whether your paid ad spend results in a positive ROI or if you need to readjust your spending to benefit your bottom line.

12. Competitor performance

Regularly monitoring your competitors’ social media data is a great way to benchmark your performance. Measuring your competitors’ growth, posts, and audience engagement can help you identify opportunities to improve your campaign.

Watch: 9 Tools To Help You Spy On Your Competitors In 2025

How to create a social media report in 8 steps

Now that you know what to include in a social media report, it’s time to create one. Follow these eight steps to create your own custom social media report:

1. Outline your social media goals
2. Choose relevant KPIs
3. Determine your reporting frequency
4. Gather your data
5. Visualize your data
6. Summarize key findings and recommend next steps
7. Examine competitor and industry data
8. Rinse, repeat, and adjust as needed

1. Outline your social media goals

Every social media report is built around tracking progress toward specific goals. So, what are yours?

The first and most important step in creating social media reports is to outline what you want to achieve. Set achievable and specific goals, and give yourself a realistic time frame.

By building your reports around your goals, you can accurately measure your progress and identify ways to improve your campaigns if your growth stalls.

2. Choose relevant KPIs

Once you’ve outlined your goals and objectives, it’s time to choose the metrics you’ll use to monitor your campaign’s progress and success.

Remember: every social media report is different, and the KPIs one business uses in their reports may not be the ones you’ll use. The KPIs you focus on will depend on your unique goals. For example, if one of your goals is to increase your social media presence, you’ll likely prioritize metrics like reach, follower growth, mentions, and engagement.

Don’t limit your social media reporting capabilities, either — include metrics in your reports that give you a comprehensive, 360-degree view of your social media performance.

3. Determine your reporting frequency

Next, you’ll want to establish a reporting timetable. It’s important to regularly monitor your social media performance, which is why you’ll typically see brands create social media reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly basis.

Each reporting frequency has its benefits:

• Daily and weekly reports offer short-term insights into emerging trends and time-sensitive notifications like brand mentions, comments, and direct messages from followers.
• Monthly and quarterly reports are best for monitoring trends and how they evolve over extended periods. These are incredibly helpful for planning your next steps and quarterly goals, especially when reporting results to stakeholders.
• Annual reports offer a comprehensive overview of social media campaigns and are an excellent resource for planning social strategies for the new year.

4. Gather your data

Now, it’s time to gather your social media data. Most social media platforms have built-in analytics tools for businesses, so you can go directly to those platforms and pull information from the appropriate reporting period. If you’re tracking conversion metrics like link clicks, you’ll want to collect the relevant data from your website.

That said, doing this yourself can be a hassle, especially if you don’t have a dedicated social media team. To make social media data collection simpler, consider investing in a social media reporting tool.

Social media reporting tools are platforms that centralize social media data and assist with analyzing and reporting on social media efforts across platforms. With these tools, you can streamline your social media data collection process and create personalized social media reports based on a variety of templates.

Explore More: Top Social Media Dashboard Tools

5. Visualize your data

Data reporting is an art — it’s all about taking rows of data and presenting them so that people can understand what they mean with just a glance.

Incorporating visuals like graphs, charts, and tables makes complex data easy to understand and allows your team to highlight campaigns’ performance effectively. Enhance your social media report by using some of these data visualization techniques:

• Linear graphs: Best for showing data growth and trends over time (e.g., audience growth)
• Bar graphs: Great for comparing sets of data (e.g., follower counts on each platform)
• Pie charts: Ideal for comparing the performance of different channels or identifying unique characteristics within a dataset (e.g., audience demographics)
• Tables: Another option for comparing data from different channels (e.g., followers on Facebook vs. Instagram)

6. Summarize key findings and recommend next steps

You’ve presented the data, but now it’s time to explain why these numbers matter and what it means for the future of your campaign.

Are you on track to meet your goals? What’s hindering your progress? What data trends do you notice, and what do they mean for your business? Include a detailed summary in your report that addresses key takeaways from your data, like what your campaign is doing particularly well or anomalies you notice in your data that require further monitoring.

As you identify trends in your data, include actionable next steps to improve subsequent campaigns. Whether this means renewing your emphasis on a particular channel or adjusting your paid ad targeting, recommending next steps gives your team a clear path forward and a new set of goals to hit for your next report.

7. Examine competitor and industry data

You’ll also want to pull relevant competitor and industry data for your reports. Comparing this information with your own will help you benchmark your campaign’s performance and identify additional areas of opportunity to outperform direct competitors and improve your market position.

As you do your competitor research, consider expanding your efforts to look at non-competitors. While they may not be in your industry, studying other businesses targeting the same audience as you can lead to helpful insights to better connect with your audience.

8. Adjust your social media report as needed

As you continue creating social media reports, remember to be open-minded about how you present your data and the goals you set. Your social media report template will change and evolve with your business.

Whether that means setting different goals, prioritizing new KPIs, or adjusting your reporting style, ensure your social media reporting process is adaptable to ensure continued social media success.  

Take your social media reporting to the next level with WebFX

Now that you’ve learned how to create a social media report, it’s time to take action. 

From strategizing to analyzing the results, WebFX offers end-to-end social media marketing solutions. Plus, with the help of our industry-leading marketing technology, we have the tools and expertise to help you perfect your social media reporting strategy and start driving revenue from your efforts.

Give us a call at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist, or contact us online today to learn more about our social media services!