Creating social media reports your clients will love

Sahail Ashraf posted on 28 February 2023

There is a real skill to creating high quality social media reports that clients appreciate. This guide outlines the key aspects.

Preparing a social media report for your clients shouldn’t be a chore. As long as you include the following features you should find that your clients love receiving them.

Know your audience

It’s important to bear in mind who you are presenting the report to. If you’re going to be reporting to a group of people who understand social media marketing inside-out, then your report can be granular and technical.

However, if the audience for your report is a little less up to date with social marketing terminology and processes, respect this by keeping things as clear and straightforward as possible. You can offer more explanatory sections, for example, so the audience is able to feel comfortable.

Have a clear focus on goals

Your clients won’t have time for anything other than absolute clarity, so you need to make sure your reports are goal-based.

This means knowing what your clients are hoping to achieve with social media. This way, you will know what needs to go into the report.

The most common goals for brands are:

1. Building awareness. A brand may want to build awareness through social media. With your work aimed at the target audience, the aim will be to build awareness of the products, brand messaging and so on.
2. Conversions. Social media marketing can be used to build your sales pipeline and it can also play a crucial role in selling your products.
3. Build a community. Social media is all about community. Marketing on social can help build a tribe that becomes loyal to your brand.

Get the timing right

While it’s quite true that many brands like to receive reports every month, this doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way. Of course, you can ‘over report’, but sometimes brands like to have more frequent contact.

On top of this, be ready for the possibility that you will have to create quarterly reports for senior figures in the organisation.

Platforms

Remember how we mentioned knowing your audience? Well, making sure that the platforms you report on are appropriate is a big part of that.

If you’re focusing on one campaign and the outcomes are what the brand needs to know, then your report may just highlight that particular platform you are working on.

But if you are doing a lot of work across all platforms, then you will need to produce a concise and meaningful report that covers all of those platforms.

Metrics

Going back to the granular thing, your client will want to focus on certain metrics. You are literally wasting their time if you don’t show them the data that matters.

Get to know (quickly) the metrics that truly matter to your client. If they are anxious to know the conversion rate results, that is what you should be showcasing in the report. If they’ve committed a sizeable budget to a collection of posts, then that campaign and the metrics needs to be explored in that granular detail.

The truly successful social media marketer ensures that they give clients the metrics that matter.

Remember the competition

Your clients will love to see the impact of the work you do, especially when it comes to how the work fares against their competition.

You can pull up competitor reports, and show how the campaigns you develop are having more impact than the work the competition is doing. Include those granular data points and you have a report your clients will love.

Are you a social media professional? Then get your hands on Locowise. This platform gives you all the data on the metrics that matter to your clients.