a beginner's guide to social media reporting

Well, howdy there! Happy Sunday? What did you do this weekend? For those of you in NYC, I am hoping you got outside to finally enjoy the sun that decided to show up.

Switching it up with a Sunday evening send since this week was INSANE since getting back to NYC after three weeks of straight travel, but we’ll be back on our usual schedule (Thursday morning for you new folks- thanks for joining btw) this week. I enjoyed a nice sushi lunch with some friends after a nice workout at AARMY, which is my fave workout class in NYC. And now, I am anxiously holding my breath hoping Taylor Swift announced Reputation TV tonight.

Also, can we all agree that it feels like it’s not even February and that January was approximately 47,000 days long or was it just me? Nonetheless, consider this a little friendly reminder to take a second to remember all the things you accomplished in the first month of the new year whether it was personal, professional, etc. If you feel like sharing it, I am all ears so just hit that reply button.

Today’s newsletter is super quick, easy and close to my heart.

We’re chatting about social media reporting.

I’ll break down:

• What the heck is social media reporting and why you should be doing it

• How to start an easy and digestible reporting structure within your company

• The template I love to give to teams and even use for myself

If this email is done right then you should be able to hand this over to your social media manager if you’re a founder or on a marketing team or implement into your own work flow if you work in social media.

This week’s newsletter is once again brought to you by my friends at Social Snowball, one of the platforms I love using for influencer attribution and gifting. It’s similarly loved by brands I admire in the space such as True Classic, Sour Strips, and more.

If you’re a brand looking to lower your customer acquisition costs, increase your monthly revenue, search and find new creators, improve your community efforts, especially when it comes to rewarding your top customers and creators, Social Snowball is one of the platforms that you should be adding to your tech stack. Plus, you get a free 30-day trial to see if it’s the right fit for you and your brand.

If you’re looking for new influencers to help product launches or region-specific/retail-specific campaigns, their AI Influencer Discovery tool is officially in beta and Noah and the team are letting you guys be the first to try it when you click here.

Anyway, here’s how Social Snowball is changing the influencer game:

Automate Product Seeding and Gifts: Save hours of time of answering DMs and making sure you actually sent that order out by replacing it with Social Snowball’s easy gifting tool. You can automatically send gifts to new creators when they join so that they can get to doing their thing. It doesn’t stop there. Create tiered incentives that allow creators to unlock gifts and products from your Shopify catalog as they reach performance goals. They choose what they want, submit their shipping, and an order is automatically made in Shopify. Chef’s kiss.

ACCURATE (!!) Influencer campaign attribution: WOOOOOOO DATA. Track all of your influencer revenue in one place. Create separate programs easily for different creators with unique attribution settings (ex. commission structures). I personally like tiering and separating campaigns for new product campaigns, retail awareness initiatives based on location, and more. Plus, instead of spending so much time in Google’s Campaign IRL Builder, you can autogenerate UTM links and discount codes for those who sign up. UTMs ARE UNDERRATED IN GENERAL SOMEHOW. PLEASE USE THEM.

SOCIAL MEDIA REPORTING: WHAT IS IT?

Ok, so what does reporting actually mean when it comes to social media?

Well, first off, if you aren’t using the data supplied to you by the platforms that you’re posting on to inform your ongoing strategy and creative approach, that would be the first place to take a look. You’ll be able to find your growth across content interactions, followers, comments, and more all in a few clicks.

It’s not a secret that managing a social account or a few at a time is hard work.

Reviewing the data of your hard work should be a key step in helping you work smarter and now always having to work harder. This data will help you inform your teams that specific efforts are paying off and more.

The biggest issue? Finding a way to deliver all the greatness you have created online into a digestible format for anyone and everyone who reads it. Reporting should give a glimpse into tests that were performed across channels, what worked and what did not and help you justify your strategy and/or the changes that you want to add or remove from it.

LET’S GET IT STARTED

I hope you read that in the tune of the Black Eyed Peas song.

1. Remember what your goals are for your social media channels.

I still like to use the SMART approach, but add some pressure where I can. For those not familiar with SMART goals, they are goals that are:

• Specific - Get clear with what you want to use to reach your goals and how. For example, are influencer campaigns you want to have going to help you reach your growth goals

• Measurable - REPORT YOUR DATA. This contains so many of your learnings that you can take into the future months. Also, taking this moment to please remind you to add UTM links to all your social media profiles so that you can track your traffic and conversions from your organic channels.

• Achievable - This is where I like to add some pressure and go a bit bigger, personally, when it comes to growth goals.

• Realistic - This is important to equally relay back to your team if someone outside of marketing doesn’t fully understand how social works and how gaining 5 bajillon followers or “going viral” doesn’t just happen in 5 days.

• Time Sensitive - Are they weekly goals? Monthly? Quarterly?

2. When should social media reporting be handed in?

The beauty of reporting these days is that you can customize your reporting dates.

When it comes to reporting, I have a few main time checks.

• Daily: Nothing major needs to be reported every single day, but it is important to inform your team when something is doing well or why you may think something didn’t perform incase the rest of the team might be wondering. Also, please note that “didn’t perform” is very relative. I like using slack to update clients on perhaps more social listening so think: influencers who are worth sending to the team to show them that they posted, something that we need to handle immediately, etc.

Personally, when it comes to weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly reports, I do like using the template that is coming shortly for you.

My weekly reports are usually letting the brand know about our overall week over week growth, what our best performers are and why, what our “worst” performers were and why AND what I would want to test to make them work, any influencer initiatives that went live that week and their performance, and what we have coming up and are testing in the next week (ex. new content series).

My monthly reports are more in-depth and are made to really help teams I work with gain a better understanding visually, especially when it comes to metrics, creative and campaign testing.

Quarterly, I like using that bigger chunk of data that I have now collected to report on the above. They blend my weekly and quarterly structure in a bigger span of time and any data that wasn’t present in those reports.

Although, giving a quick view every week into the land of social is helpful, it’s important to remind everyone that social is marathon and not a sprint. Days are going to have insane engagement and some may not and THAT IS OKAY.

HERE’S THE FREE TEMPLATE YOU CAN USE TO GET YOU STARTED

Ask yourself:

1. What were you hoping to accomplish during this reporting period? An increase in the number of followers, perhaps? Maybe you were hoping to increase traffic to your website. Whatever yours is, outline this so everyone reading the report understands what “success” specifically means.

   Also, use this as a way of education to show that “getting a lot of likes” isn’t a sign of pure success.

2. Present the social media KPIs that you’re tracking. It probably goes without saying, but these metrics should align with your goals. Metrics you might want to showcase could include engagement, reach, followers, website clicks, or conversion (UTMS!!!!!).

   1. How did they compare to last month? Ex: More comments? If so, why? Did we test more Direct Reponse creative?

   2. Were there any specific drops or increases to call out and why? Example: Did we have a giveaway? Did a huge influencer post? If so, who? Should we try and do more with them?

3. If you ran specific campaigns over the reporting period, create a separate segment to share insights about their performance.

   1. These can apply to influencer campaigns or brand partnerships.

      1. What worked well? What could be tweaked for next time? For example, what was the total reach of your seeding initiative vs. expected reach of those who posted? Did youtube creators produce better conversions over instagram creators? Should we be testing more Youtube?

4. Share up-to-date demographic information about your audience. Understanding who is consuming your content allows you to tailor future posts accordingly and even who you activate for your bigger influencer campaigns. This can also help highlight what communities you can still break into and come up with a strategy for how.

   1. Who are your followers? Where are they from, how old are they, what else do we know about their interests and behavior?

5. There may be some interesting insights to be found in the type of content that’s trending or flopping.

   1. Evaluate the performance of different types of content — text, images, videos, and so on. Identify which content resonated the most with your audience. Share screenshots and links to it. Why do you think it resonated? Did we test specific hooks on the creative? Was the creative in a certain time zone for recording (6 second video vs. 60 seconds)?

6. Now that you’ve soaked up all this juicy, juicy data, it’s time to make some educated suggestions on what should happen next. Are we testing more video creative? Are we testing more carousels? Are we posting later in the day or earlier? Are we leaning into specific pillars more in the coming weeks? There are tons of things that can come out of this data so have a ball and brain dump it.

7. Does your team need to invest in specific aspects to help unlock certain goals that you didn’t realize you needed or did a test work so well that you know need to ask for more of that support internally or externally?

   1. For example, are some creators needed in your stategy to improve your reach because collaborative posts are helping growth? Should you double down on creating TikTok videos? Do you need to hire more creators to help delegate content needs to help increase your output across platforms?

8. Provide actionable recommendations for future campaigns, whether that means suggesting content ideas, creators that you want to activate more deeply, etc.

You can go to town here. So, have at it and remember that your data is your driver. Use it to your advantage.

You know what time it is.

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THE END…KINDA

As always, thanks for spending time with me.

If you liked it, I would love to hear more about what you would love to see or what you’re wondering about so that I can help! It’s a team effort.

If you have a friend or coworker who you think would love to join the part, just shoot them this link - would mean a lot🙂 https://kendalldickieson.beehiiv.com/subscribe 

Okay, time to see Taylor Swift take over the world. TTYL.

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