Step by step: How to make a good social media report

3 min reading
27 March 2014
Step by step: How to make a good social media report

BBVA API Market

Few businesses today doubt about the need to promote themselves and interact with their customers through the social networks. What is not so clear to many is whether that investment of time and the effort to maintain a daily feedback is giving the desired results. For this reason, it is essential to get some basic information to know if what we’re doing in the online world works the way we want or, on the contrary, we must consider some changes. In this sense, a report of online reputation is a good picture of the prestige of your business in Internet.

First step: gather information

The first step to make the report is to gather all the information available. Quantifying and evaluating the data in a qualitative way we can know if the brand’s objectives are being achieved.

To do this we must establish a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are key metrics that will help us to make a diagnosis of the actions we perform on the Internet and the feedback received by our business. According to our objectives we will define more or less KPIs for each social network or corporate blog. Below we list some of the most important:

Twitter:

Facebook:

LinkedIn:

Corporate Blog:

Second step: control and monitoring

The analysis of the results and statistics are essential to check if the work is being carried out properly and the objectives are being achieved. 

There are many tools available for the analysis and verification of results. Google, for example, has created several applications that provide useful information for our periodical performance reports.

Similarly, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have created their own tools to provide users information about the status of their profiles and their influence: Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, respectively. There are also platforms created by third parties that provide us with all the data required for monitoring our business on the Internet. Depending on the network to be analysed certain parameters or KPIs mentioned above should be taken into account.

Regarding blogs and websites, you should not forget tools such as the Google Analytics report, which includes data like the average length of visits, the most read posts or purchases made.

Once we have the necessary information it’s very important to make a comparison with previous periods and see if the evolution is being positive and if you are going towards your established objectives, which should be clear and concise. Once we have an idea of ​​our trend it is also essential to analyse our most immediate competition and see in what position we are compared to them. Observing others we can get inspiring ideas and also discover mistakes to avoid.

Third step: acknowledge your mistakes

It is also advisable to point out not only what is done well, but exercise self-criticism and recognize our failures in order to overcome them. To do so we must use the last part of the report to alert about a potential crisis; include negative messages that have helped us improve; weak points of the client that can be improved, as well as an overall assessment of the activity and a set of new objectives.

The bounce rate is an error indicator representing the amount of people who do not continue browsing your website. If you have a high bounce rate you should review content, design and navigability aspects of your site.

Fourth step: the final presentation

When presenting the report keep in mind that it should contain graphs and diagrams that clearly show the evolution of the impact of social networks. A more accurate perspective would be provided if the report is prepared on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Finally, it is important to note that preparing these reports you will be able to build your own record of social networks management results and will avoid losing all your data if your chosen analytical tool fails. Besides, with them you can measure the ROI (Return on Investment) of social networks management, something that probably won’t be positive in the first months and which requires patience. What is important is to find the direction to follow in order to obtain benefits.

 

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