Behind all of the glamorous images, fun graphics, and witty captions in social media are metrics that can tell you how your content is resonating with your audience. While gathering and analyzing that data might not seem like the most exciting part of the month compared to content creation, reports are one of the most important things your business can be doing to grow your social media channels – and your bottom line.
Why you should create a monthly report
Creating a monthly report will help to improve your social media. Reports are essentially the same as holding a focus group. Tracking exactly what your audience likes to see from your pages can help you create better content in the future. And, you can see what type of audience is engaging with your content based on demographics, allowing you to alter content to reach a different group of people. Without tracking the numbers, your social media channels can plateau fast, and even cause you to backtrack, resulting in a loss of fans and followers. Social media is not only a promotional tool, but also a place where you can experiment with new ideas that could help grow your business. However, without tracking the experiments through reporting, you won’t ever know what’s working and what’s not.
How to create a monthly report
Reports should be done on a monthly basis. If you do them too far apart there will be too much data to go through and it may be overwhelming. However, looking at the data too frequently won’t give you a big picture idea of what is really going on. You’ll get lost in the weeds. Create a deadline for yourself to have a report done at the end of each month, as well as a template you will use each month to fill in the data. You also need to come up with the metrics that are important to track, such as followers or fans, engagement rate, organic reach, video views, clicks, traffic to website, and top demographics. All platforms have analytics built in that give you access to this information. It’s also helpful to look at the “top posts” for each month. The top posts will show you what type of content had the most engagement, clicks, and reach. If the post was a video, or a graphic, it may mean you should post more videos and graphics. All of these little details will help you create better content moving forward.
Adding reports to your strategy is a sure way to help not only your social media channels grow but your overall business as well. Start small by recording a few numbers and looking for trends – as you determine what information is most valuable for your business, your reporting can increase in complexity. You can learn more about what kind of content you should create or brush up on what you don’t know about social media by reading our KWSM blog, or checking out our YouTube channel.
