With the evolution of generative AI and the changing digital landscape, themes surrounding newsroom transformation are shifting.

Our newsroom is striving to keep up with these developments, but progress is slow. One of the biggest challenges we face is data fluency. This involves identifying the right data points to measure and transforming that data into meaningful insights.

While we are using data more often, it’s not always applied effectively. We need to dedicate more time to understanding what our audience wants.

As a publisher, we usually aim to drive traffic from social media through link sharing, and we create brand awareness through videos and photo cards. It’s also crucial to recognise not all posts are equally successful on different social media platforms. What works well on Facebook may not be as effective on Instagram or other platforms.

Collecting and analysing data on top-performing posts, audience engagement, and even our less successful efforts is essential for improving social media performance.

It’s important to emphasise that if we’re not creating social media reports to track our progress and analyse performance, we are wasting our time.

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a detailed document that analyses social media performance over a specific period.

These reports help track key performance indicators (KPIs), measure the success of social media campaigns, and identify opportunities for optimisation. For example, a report on a brand’s Instagram account may show followers engage more with videos than photos. It might reveal Instagram Reels are reaching a larger audience compared to Instagram carousel posts.

In this way, each data point helps to identify patterns, allowing brands to better cater to their audiences both online and offline.

A well-crafted social media report provides valuable insights into your efforts and supports informed decision-making.

Five steps for social media reporting

Here are five crucial steps for social media reporting.

1. State social media goals or objectives.

You must create a clear vision of what you want to achieve. While you can think big, it is best to keep your initial goals simple.

Goals should reflect a clear direction, whether you want to increase followers, enhance engagement, or boost conversions. Also, adhere to the principle of setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals.

2. Report on the frequency.

Brands typically generate social reports daily, weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly.

Given the ever-changing nature of social media, using data throughout the year provides various snapshots of performance. Each reporting frequency offers different insights.

3. Create visualisations for reporting.

Regardless of your audience, including visuals in your reports is crucial. While reporting is analytical, it’s also an art form. Use data visualisation to enhance your reports and make them more engaging.

Visuals are effective for highlighting significant events, such as engagement spikes or shout-outs from influencers.

4. Provide competitive reports for context.

Analyse competitors’ social performance as well. Understanding their social presence can inform your campaigns, inspire content, and help you stay updated on industry trends. Focus on competitors with similar social profiles to your brand.

5. Summarise key learnings and next steps.

Reporting is ultimately a reflective exercise that informs future actions. Consider it the inspiration that guides the finer details of your overall strategy.

Conclude your report by outlining your next steps based on what you’ve learned (aiming for SMART goals). This could involve running more ads or publishing additional user-generated content. The options are endless, guided by your data.

Social media KPIs and metrics

Social media KPIs for reach

“Reach” is an umbrella term for how many people come across your social media accounts and posts. It also includes the potential number of people your marketing message can access.

• Follower count: An essential metric to track, follower count is how many accounts are keeping up with the brand. Every platform has its own version of followers or fans.
• Impressions: Social media impressions are not the same as social media reach. Impressions are how many times a post or profile has been seen. It doesn’t distinguish between unique accounts, but only totals up the views.
• Post reach: In the social media world, post reach (a more specific metric than the overall category of reach KPIs) indicates the number of unique accounts that saw the post. Post reach is often found in the same analytics area as post impressions. It is also readily available for some platforms and can also be found by using a social media analytics tool.
• Web traffic: Web traffic is a great way to see how well your posts with links to your Web site are performing, and it’s also another good measurement for campaign performance. Web referral traffic indicates the number of times someone clicked from your social media account to get to one of your Web site pages. This can be found from Google Analytics or similar tools.

Social media KPIs for engagement

Social media engagement is vital to a brand’s success online. No engagement is akin to you talking to a group of people and everyone is either staring at you silently or just passing by.

• Clicks: Traditionally, clicks were about posts that had links that you could click on. But as social media posts have changed, so have clicks.

Clicks are everywhere. At the post level, a click could be an expansion of an Instagram caption or a tap on a Tweet to look through photos. There are also clicks that are made on your Instagram profile page and clicks you make to expand a Pin.

• Video views: This metric is the total number of times people watched your video. Your Facebook video view count gives you an accurate picture of how your video performed because it goes beyond reach. That means it doesn’t only show you how many users saw your video in their Feeds but how many of those people actually watched the video.

• Likes: Likes and favourites indicate an account appreciated your post enough to interact with it. While some platforms like Instagram and Facebook are now hiding the like count from public view, you’re still able to see these numbers in the analytics table.

• Shares: Post and profile shares are an excellent way to measure engagement. It means your post was so intriguing that your audience had to send it to someone or share it to another platform.

Shares have different names on different platforms. On Pinterest, it’s a save; on X, a repost; on Instagram, use of the share icon to either DMs or a Story; and on Facebook, it’s still called a share, but you have many options to choose from. A high share count is also an indication of how viral a post is.

• Comments: Along with likes, comments are another of those essential interactions that every platform has. Comments include those on posts and livestreams.

Just like shares, comments are a good indicator of an engaging post. Not only are they as meaningful as metrics, but you should also be developing a strategy to effectively manage social media comments so you’re engaging with your fans through replies and interactions.

• Mentions: Mentions are when an account tags your business account or mentions your brand. It can happen in a post, in a comment, in a story, or directly to you. This metric is not always tracked natively so you may need to use a social media monitoring tool to track how and how often your brand’s accounts are mentioned.

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