Almost every social media marketer is working for someone. Depending on the size and scope of your brand or company, it may be a marketing leader or you may report directly to high-level executives or the business owner. For this reason, it’s important to know how to create a social media report template that you can use for your boss or clients.

This report, that is often sent as a monthly or quarterly report, lets your company or clients know that you are making progress with your social media and digital marketing efforts. Social media reports can help you paint a story on how well the company is performing across the various social platforms, that numbers could not do alone. Generally, putting a social media report is pretty simple, but there are some guidelines you can use to help you get started.

The following tips will help you create an outstanding social media report template that will impress your clients or boss.

1. Choose a time frame for your Report

Your report needs to focus on a particular time frame. It could be a weekly, monthly, or quarterly report. It could cover a specific campaign. You can opt for 30, 60, or 90-day increments. A common schedule for social media reports is every 30 days. Ultimately, whatever time frame you choose is up to you and the people you report to. Just try to keep it consistent so you can compare one period to the next.

2. Know your goals

The time frame you choose and the frequency of the social media reports you develop may depend on what your goals are for the social media report. Are you looking to see how well a particular campaign did? Do you want to know how your metrics change and improve over the course of a week, month, or another time period?

Perhaps your report is more of a research project that allows you to explore all of the social media relating to a particular topic, brand, product, or service. Make a list of what you want to show with your report before you get started.

3. Choose metrics that relate to those goals

There are dozens of metrics & KPIs you can use when reporting on your company’s social media performance, but if you use too many, you run the risk of boring your audience. Few people in leadership want to hear you rattle out number after number. Most just want to hear the ones that actually have an impact on your goals.

The problem is finding which metrics will correlate with your goals. There are some marketing aspects that have a time lag and are difficult to measure a direct correlation with your goals and objectives (like building your branding, exposure, etc.) With that in mind, here are some important ones you may want to consider including:

• The number of mentions your brand receives during social conversations
• How much engagement your posts receive, and how much engagement your brand receives in general
• Who is in your audience, participating in your conversations? Are they active users? Influencers?
• The number of followers you have and how that number grows (or doesn’t) for each time period
• Volume of posts — in other words, how frequently you post and how it impacts other numbers like followers and engagement
• Your reach or how many people actually see your tweets and posts (on Twitter, this is referred to as impressions)
• Clicks and traffic, or how often a social media user visits your website or content via one of your social media posts (if you have the tools, you can also measure what your social media followers are doing once they click on your website)

4. Take advantage of good tools for a social media report

The bigger social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, offer you some help with metrics, analytics, and the info you need to create a social media report, but there are many great tools out there that will take you much further. Look for tools that have been around for a while and that have grown and changed as social media has.

You’ll want to choose those that are going to be around for the foreseeable future once you grow comfortable with them. Find a tool that has a good relationship with the various networks and that gets it data from reputable sources.

Make sure the tools you use will gather the information you need from the social media networks you are most concerned with. Finally, don’t be afraid of tools you have to pay for. If you are on a tight budget there are free alternatives to popular social media tools. There are many free sites out there that offer extra features for a fee, and sometimes it’s definitely worth the price.

5. Find out if your leadership has requests

This may be an obvious one but check with your boss or clients to see if they have any specific requests regarding your social media numbers.

Even if you feel like your report already provides that information, you may need to reword it in such a way that it makes sense to those who aren’t as familiar with the networks as you are.

6. Things to keep in mind when writing your report

Give your clients or boss a little insight into how you made the report. Even if they aren’t interested, it covers you should any questions arise, and it shows that you didn’t just throw something together haphazardly.

Get to the point as quickly as possible. Once again, no one wants to study a social media report. Your audience wants to know the important parts and what it means for the brand or company as a whole.

Don’t just rely on text. Use charts and graphs. Pull out actual quotes, profile pictures, videos, and other media from your users to make your point. Turn those followers into real people in the minds of your audience. This is key to creating a great social media template. You can use google sheets or excel to create the graphs from the data.

Break it down: Finally, keep in mind that all of your clients or boss may not be social media savvy. They may not understand why a certain number is important, or why something is good or bad. Be prepared to break it down in the most elementary way possible, depending on who you are presenting your report to.