It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, or your position - when your boss asks to see a report on your social media performance, you want to make it count.

Why?

• Because it takes 30 seconds to explain how improving numbers are good for business, but 2 hours (that you won’t get) to walk your boss through the nuances of your job
• Opens the door to that longer conversation about social raising business value
• Quickly justifies your budget requests
• Helps you identify your most successful strategies and content pieces

But what makes a great report? And what’s the best way to impress your boss with one? We’ve put together a list of five tips on how to make your reports both useful and impressive.

1. Be Relevant

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A great report is relevant and easy to understand. You might think that this goes without saying, but it’s all too easy to throw a bunch of metrics into a generic mix, and end up with a report that looks great, but says very little about what’s important to your brand and to your boss.

The best reports are concise. With a custom-designed report, you can create reports for different people in your organization, depending on the metrics that matter the most to them. Nothing left to filter through, just the facts they need.

For instance, let’s say you work at an e-commerce brand and need a report on your Cyber Monday performance for your brand manager. For this, you would probably want to include:

• Total Interactions (and their growth over time)
• Fan Growth,
• Effectiveness of Post Promotion, a tool made uniquely available to Socialbakers clients with our Promoted Post Detection feature

But if the report was for your client services head, you’d probably go in the direction of customer care metrics (e.g. response rate and response time) instead.

The important lesson to remember is that social can help every part of your company. Departmentally-relevant reporting makes that clear for everyone.

2. Use Easy-to-understand Visualizations

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Messy Excel sheets are a thing of years past – nobody has time for them anymore. Your managers want attractive, well-organized visualizations of your data (whether or not they tell you!). Even if your performance on social is stellar, that won’t speak for itself. Your report should show it in a clear and attractive way.

In Socialbakers Analytics, for example, we take the various metrics from a brand’s performance, and then combine them into a PowerPoint report that, with straightforward and beautifully laid-out graphs, shows precisely how a brand did on all selected KPIs.

3. Create actionable goals

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Speaking of realistic goals, looking at your own results in a vacuum on social won’t tell you much. Sure, you can (and should) compare your current results with past results, in order to evaluate your progress. But to objectively evaluate your activities, it is necessary to compare your results with competitors. The best way how to set realistic goals is to benchmark your performance against industry averages and competitors. For real competitive benchmarking, you’ll need a competitive benchmarking tool, such as our Analytics platform, to make sure your social media marketing is on target.

4. Report Regularly and Often

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If you’re only reporting quarterly, you’re doing it wrong. The world of social media moves fast, and situations change rapidly; to stay on target, reports on your social media performance should be regular and consistent.

Regular reporting enables you to:

• Flexibly react and adjust your content strategy. What worked last month might not work now.
• Assess the accuracy of your reporting – have you been using the right KPIs? Are you comparing your performance against the right benchmarks and competitors?
• Continually evaluate your progress and create realistic goals. Where should your brand be on social media in one month? In one year?

5. Take it to the next level – Install an Executive Dashboard or Social Media Command Center

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If your social media performance is crucial for your brand’s marketing strategy – and, we’re betting it is – consider investing in more serious infrastructure. For large brands and enterprises that are managing multiple pages, it can be really difficult to set social goals, set metrics for measuring success, and integrate best practices across all brands.

In this case, it’s important to smartly visualize social media activities in a way that can be used in each of your brands. That means having an executive dashboard or social command center, where you can place all of your KPIs and metrics (both from social and from other sources), into one place your organization to use.

Here are some of the biggest benefits you can receive:

• Get a fully customizable, tailored solution, allowing you to visualize what you need according to your specific business goals.

• Create a comprehensive high-level summary for management – focusing on the most important KPIs determined by your business goals and social media strategy.

• Integrate different data sources, put them in context, and uncover valuable insights.

• Get a complete view of your social marketing performance with easy-to-understand overviews and real-time data, allowing you to take immediate action

Get the reports you need today

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These tips are only a start to boosting your brand’s social media performance. For an easy way to pull all (or most of) these tips together into one package, try out Socialbakers Analytics. With Analytics, you are able to create relevant, timely, straightforward reports on the KPIs that matter most both to you and your brand.