While social media reporting might take time and lots of brainpower, this practice is critical to refining your content strategy and communicating performance ebbs and flows with stakeholders.
If you’ve never created a social media report before, or simply want to give yours a refresh, we’ve rounded up a bunch of tips that’ll help you maximize your output.
Everything you’ll need to smash your social media reporting, including our top metrics for 2025 and a step-by-step guide to your best report yet, is just a scroll away.
What is a social media report?
A social media analytics report is a comprehensive overview of your brand or business’s performance across its social media accounts for a specific time period – usually a month or a quarter. Social media marketers produce these reports to communicate the return on investment (ROI) of creating quality social media content to others within the business.
By creating regular reports and circulating them within your company, you can:
- Pivot your social media strategy to lean into what works and ditch what doesn’t
- Demystify the importance of a strong social media presence to non-social media natives
- Communicate the need for additional resources or funding with cold, hard facts
- Keep stakeholders across relevant marketing stats like share of voice, channel demographics, and competitor performance
What to include in your social media report
While there’s no set social media report template you have to use when reporting, it helps to define a structure. Consider including these sections in your next social media report to help showcase your brand’s performance online and express the ROI of your time, energy, and money.
Overview
All good reports start by setting the scene! The overview section provides readers with context on your brand’s social media objectives and goals.
Time period performance and KPIs
Assuming you send reports regularly, dedicated readers should have an idea of your social media performance to-date. So, the aim of each new report should be to offer a detailed update on performance for that specific time period as it correlates with your social media key performance indicators (KPIs) and the previous time period.
Consider including a broad snapshot of performance in your social media report to set the scene.
Channel performance breakdown
Once you’ve given readers a strong idea of whether you’re in the red or green overall, break things down by channel. Depending on the structure of your business, this might be by platform (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) or it may include performance across multiple social media accounts if you manage more than one per platform (e.g., a university may have its main Instagram account and an alumni account).
Content analysis
Now your readers know how you’re performing on each channel, you’ve got to tell them why! Holding up a magnifying glass here can help you identify trends and understand why content is or isn’t performing as expected.
Actions and next steps
Before you wrap up your social media analytics report, recap your brand’s performance and offer suggestions for the next steps to support your goals going forward. You might choose to do this by platform or account or offer cross-platform recommendations – this will depend on how much resourcing you allocate to social media.
What social media stats are important for a marketing report?
Every social media marketer knows there’s heaps of hype around the best metrics to track – but it truly comes down to what works best for your business! If your biggest aim is to broaden your audience, you might prioritize follows and impressions, whereas if you plan on driving sales, link clicks might be more appropriate.
Here are some of the most relevant social media stats to include in your marketing report in 2025.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate is a top-tier stat to track in 2025, as it goes beyond ‘vanity metrics’ (such as reach and impressions) and gets to the heart of your content performance. It tells you whether people enjoy and resonate with your content on a deeper level than just seeing it appear on their feeds.
There are two types of engagement rate: by following and by reach. The former can give you insight into how your content is resonating with your followers, whereas the latter provides a broader look at how engaging your content is overall, including to those outside of your audience.
Engagements (comments, likes, shares)
To accompany your engagement rate stats, you can also include the total number of engagements, either as a whole or by type (comments, likes, and shares). This is helpful if one of these metrics correlates with a broader goal – for example, comments could support your goal of building community, whereas a high share count may inform a goal of reaching new audiences.
Reach
While reach and impressions are often criticized for being ‘vanity metrics’, they’re still important to track, even if they don’t inform your decision-making as much as other, deeper analytics. Reach refers to the number of unique users who saw a piece of social media content you created. This can help you track the ‘virality’ of your content and identify inefficiencies or best practice violations stopping you from being seen.
Impressions
Impressions means the number of times a piece of content has been seen in total, including by users who have seen it more than once. It’s a particularly important metric to track for paid ad performance, as it can indicate the efficacy of your ad creative and copy and your targeting.
Followers and new followers
If your goal is to build your digital presence, you can’t escape tracking your overall followers and new followers gained in your social media reports. This can inform many broader conclusions about your brand, including how strong your content strategy is and the effectiveness of your branding.
Saves
The importance of tracking your saves has come to light in recent years, as it’s a strong marker of content relevance – saving often indicates a deeper resonance with a piece of content compared to the humble like. Adam Mosseri of Instagram has said that saves are one of the most important metrics on the platform, so take the big guy at his word, and add these into your next report!
Link clicks
Link clicks are a valuable metric for many businesses, as it indicates the traffic sent from social media to your website. Plus, once someone has landed on your site, you can then follow their journey and attribute conversions to social media – as long as you have tracking set up correctly!
Video views
Lastly, we know video is king in 2025, and its reign shows no signs of ending. By monitoring your video views, you can determine how engaging your content is to both followers and non-followers and make inferences based on additional information like total watch time and viewing peaks.
How to create a social media report: your step-by-step guide
Now that you’ve got all the info on the best social media report statistics in 2025, here’s how to implement them into a shiny (and informative!) report that’ll knock the socks off your colleagues.
1. Define your audience
Start by figuring out exactly who your report will be seen by – this will inform how detailed or top-line your output is. If you’re circulating it within an extremely digitally literate team, you may decide to go ham on the details, but if it’s being forwarded to higher-ups with limited time and knowledge, you could opt for something simple.
2. Select a reporting format
Depending on the social media reporting tools you have access to and your internal resourcing, there are a few ways you could present your report, such as a PDF, a PowerPoint, an interactive dashboard, or a simple email with stats broken down. Pick the one that’s the most sustainable for you to create regularly and will make the most sense to your readers.
3. Access your stats
To support quality reporting, we always suggest using a social media reporting tool to gather your analytics. These are often built into social media schedulers (like Plann!), but you can also subscribe to analytics-only platforms. If you don’t have the budget or know-how for a dedicated tool, it’s possible to use the native analytics within each of your social media platforms, however, their data access is usually on the limited side.
4. Start with an overview
Build your overview section by outlining your major social media goals and giving readers a lay of the land. This might be something you lift and shift from each report – no need to reinvent the wheel every month.
Here are two key components to include in the overview of your monthly social media report:
- Channel overview: Which channels does your business have a presence on (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc.)?
- Channel purpose: Why do you have a presence on each channel, and what are your top-level, cross-platform goals?
And, if you’re stuck on your social media goals, here are a few to get you thinking:
- Attract new audiences: Find and nurture people who fit your audience profile with the intent of eventually converting them into customers.
- Drive traffic to your website: Encourage new and existing audiences to explore your products or services online and click ‘add to cart’.
- Build a strong community: Establish your position in the market and grow audience trust by facilitating a community space.
5. Summarize KPI progress
In your next section, report on your overall KPI progress regarding cross-channel performance. These are the big, hefty metrics like overall following and total impressions and reach. This will give you a snapshot of whether your social media has performed well or poorly month-on-month.
6. Break it down by channel
Next, split out your performance by social media channel. You can do this by accessing your analytics data in your chosen social media reporting tool and filtering by platform.
From a formatting perspective, we recommend including each platform (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) as its own major section within your report and then including the following recommendations as sub-sections.
7. Profile your audiences
Audience information is always helpful for marketers, so why not give your demographics some love in your next report? Here are some audience statistics to consider including:
- Age range: Knowing how old your audience is on average can be super helpful, as it’ll offer you more insight into what content resonates with them and how they use social media.
- Gender: Find out the gender balance of your audience so you can further tailor your content to their interests and behaviors.
- Location: If you can pinpoint where your audience is located, you can deliver content that’s highly relevant to them, including event information and in-store updates.
8. Pull out key metrics
Within each of the sections dedicated to a different social media platform, report on your chosen top metrics, such as engagement rate, reach, saves, and link clicks. Always aim to relate your main metric back to those big qualitative goals we’ve established, as it will ensure your reporting is focused.
9. Measure month-on-month or year-on-year
To add value to your social media report, include month-on-month and year-on-year comparisons against your key metrics in the form of a percentage change. This will help you glean deeper insights – for example, if you notice that your engagement rates are up year-on-year but down month-on-month, you can determine why by digging into the content pieces published during those time periods.
10. Perform a content analysis
Now for the fun part! For each channel, step out your top and bottom performers with a short explanation of what you attribute their performance to. You can use both qualitative and quantitative analysis here to drive your point home.
11. Make actionable recommendations
Using the insights you’ve collected throughout the report, include recommendations by channel for how to support better performance during the next reporting period. This might look like new content pieces to create, campaigns to prioritize, or back-end fixes to make. If you want to double down, you could even assign specific KPIs to each of these actions.
12. Finish with a glossary
One of the indicators of a good social media report is that it can be picked up by anyone across your team and they can understand it without too much experience or context – and an easy way to do this is to include a glossary of key terms at the back of your report! Then, if anyone’s unsure about a certain metric or its relevance, they can simply flip to the final page and look it up.
Including definitions in your social media reports can help acclimatize new readers.
How to take action and implement your findings
Once you’ve created a killer social media report, what comes next? Having the data is one thing – you’ll see true success when you analyze your findings and implement them into your strategy.
Here are our top tips for getting the most out of the reporting process:
- Track campaign performance over time: Consider including breakout sections in your report to round up performance by campaign. This is extremely helpful as it will feed into broader business efforts for that specific campaign, such as paid advertising, email communications, influencer marketing and more.
- Continually amend your strategy: The whole point of reporting is to determine trends, spikes, and dips in content performance and use them to tailor your posts month to month. You should amend your social media strategy at least quarterly to reflect what you have learned from your social reports.
- Take a holistic approach: Incorporating detail around broader marketing efforts that may influence social media performance, such as influencer work and paid ads, is always helpful in showing stakeholders the bigger picture. Consider adding a slide or section to explain the interplay between each area.
Ready to supercharge your success on social media?
Looking for an all-in-one content creation suite that allows you to manage your social media channels effortlessly? From mapping out your strategy and designing your graphics to saving plug-and-play hashtag sets, you’ll find everything you need inside Plann.
Go on, redeem your 7-day free trial of Plann Plus. If you don’t like it, keep using Plann for free!
