The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Reporting: Tools, Benefits, and Tips

Social media marketing is a numbers game.

It's not just about constantly pushing out content and keeping an eye on the comments section. In the grand scheme of things, social media marketing success is about who can adapt better and maintain consistent growth.

Social media reporting can guide you through this painstaking process.

In the right hands, these reports can lead you — step by step — through the steady path to growth.

Here's everything you need to know about social media reporting.

What is Social Media Reporting?

Social media reporting involves gathering relevant data and presenting key insights in a more digestible form for non-technical stakeholders.

Reports revolve around metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to specific goals, be it brand awareness, lead generation, or networking. But unlike data dashboards, reports are all about surfacing key takeaways and fostering collaboration toward better decision-making.

Today, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn have built-in analytics tools. These tools utilize basic data management and visualizations to improve readability, but usually fall short in terms of reporting or data export capabilities.

Benefits of Social Media Reporting

Here are five important benefits of social media reporting:

• Campaign-level analytics. Reports centered around social media marketing and advertising campaigns can reveal weaknesses, improvement opportunities, and your top strategies. This sharpens your decision-making by helping you grasp what actually works and what doesn't, be it through Marketing Mix Modeling.
• Justify and optimize your marketing spend. Using reports makes it easy to gauge the cost-effectiveness of your social media campaigns, especially if you highlight KPIs like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), or any other type of data analytics to make data-driven decisions.
• Understand who your real customers are. Reports that focus on your social media audience improve your ability to create and deliver more personalized, targeted customer experiences. Tapping into their pain points also lets you identify underserved topics or areas of interest, helping you cut through the content noise with unique strategies.
• Utilize data as social proof. Statements, suggestions, or claims in your social media content hold more weight if they're backed by cold, hard data. This is useful whether you're attracting potential clients or building your brand's reputation in general.

Social Media Reporting Metrics Examples

One of the first steps in building social media reports is itemizing the relevant metrics you need to track.

These can be categorized under a few buckets, like engagement metrics, growth metrics, performance metrics, and qualitative metrics.

Take a closer look below:

Engagement metrics

These are metrics that gauge performance on a content-level — useful if you're looking to improve specific aspects of your social media marketing strategy.

• Post reactions
• Comments
• Shares

Page or profile growth metrics

Next up, growth metrics allow you to pin tangible and measurable units that reflect your social media presence.

• Follower count
• Reach or impressions
• Follower growth rate
• Brand mentions
• Share of voice

Campaign performance metrics

Reports can also give you an overview of social media performance on a campaign level, which means you need to zoom out on key results for business objectives.

• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
• CAC per cohort
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) per cohort

Qualitative metrics

Lastly, qualitative metrics in social media reports tell a story beyond the numbers themselves.

• Top social media channel
• Audience demographics (e.g., language, age, gender, and country)
• Audience interests
• Audience sentiment

Social Media Reporting Tools to Consider

Knowing which metrics to track allows you to pick a social media reporting tool that perfectly aligns with your goals.

Without further ado, here are the best social media reporting tools to consider:

1. Polymer

Polymer that's delicately designed to streamline analytics — from data collection to data collection to reporting. With the right tactics, it can also be one of the best social media reporting software money can buy right now.

Polymer uses native data connectors to simplify data collection and management. It also takes in direct imports and real-time data from other services like Google Sheets.  

So, how can Polymer help with social media reporting?

Let's start with the available data visualization options you can include in your report:

• Column and bar charts
• Time series
• Line plots
• Funnels
• Pivot tables
• Heatmaps
• Scatter plots
• Dependency wheels
• Correlation charts

Now, for sending reports, you have a few options with Polymer:

• Embedding your dashboard. Share your dashboard or any individual data visualization externally using an embed code (all interactive features will be retained). This is useful if you have an investor or client portal on your website where stakeholders can freely access reports.
• Sharing a direct link to your board. A more practical approach is to share a direct link to your dashboard. Simply copy the board link and share it with stakeholders via email or any other communication channel.
• Turning your report into a presentation. Use Polymer's presentation mode to let viewers focus on one visual at a time and deliver a more impactful experience. Polymer's AI also automatically generates descriptions, predictions, and recommended actions based on your data, which are all customizable if you want to highlight specific information.

Polymer pricing

Starts at $10 per month.

2. Vista Social

Vista Social is a feature-rich social media management platform with flexible reporting tools. It seamlessly integrates with all major social networks with the addition of other services like Google Analytics, Bitly, and popular review platforms.

When it comes to reporting, Vista Social presents you with five options:

• Social media performance report — Get an overview of your online presence across all networks.
• Post performance report — Inspect the performance of your social media content in terms of engagement and reach.
• Review performance report — Check overall sentiment by analyzing data from review platforms.
• Tasks performance report — Evaluate the productivity of your social media team within Vista Social.
• Competitor analysis report — Analyze a competitor's social media for an idea of what you're coming up against.

Vista Social's social media reports can be cross-channel or platform-specific, which can then be exported as PDF and CSV. You can also build custom report templates, but the visualization and customization options are limited.

Vista Social pricing

Starts at $39 per month.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most trusted names in the social media management landscape.

Despite launching way back in 2008, Hootsuite continues to be a top competitor in the space by consistently adapting to new trends and implementing modern features. It has everything you need to run, track, and grow on social media — from AI-powered content generation to analytics.

This takes us to Hootsuite's reporting tool,  which features a diverse selection of templates to help get the ball rolling. These templates focus on specific aspects of your social media presence, like:

• Brand awareness
• Audience growth
• Post reach
• Brand engagement
• Social profile overview
• Facebook Ads reporting

If you have more particular social media reporting needs, Hootsuite can also help you create a custom report from scratch.

From there, it's only a matter of picking the metrics you need and dropping them into your report. While there are plenty of ready-to-use metrics, the visualization options are very limited with only 11 visuals available.

Hootsuite reports can be exported as CSV, PowerPoint, PDF, and XLSX files. You can also schedule automated reports to save time in the future.

Hootsuite pricing

Starts at $99 per month.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another well-known social media management platform that offers a few unique benefits under the hood. This includes integrations with third-party services, free live webinars, built-in case management, and a handful of advanced tools for power users.

Sprout Social also matches the likes of Hootsuite when it comes to social media reporting.

Reports fall under four main categories:

• Strategy & Insights — Keep track of trends, opportunities, and engagement over selected platforms.
• Competitive Analysis — Compare your social media marketing results against competitors.
• Content Performance — Measure the performance of individual social media posts, including paid campaigns.
• Customer Care & Team Performance — Evaluate your case management team's efficiency along with customer feedback.

Sprout Social generates clear-cut reports with interactive elements, revealing additional context wherever needed.

However, the visuals themselves are fixed and cannot be customized. When completed, you can share Sprout Social reports using a CSV or PDF format.

Sprout Social pricing

Starts at $199 per month.

5. Buffer

Buffer is a lightweight social media management platform that provides a great bang for your buck. It primarily focuses on social media publishing, but it also has analytics and reporting tools baked into the app.

Although Buffer is crammed with features for boosting engagement and ramping up content publishing, its reporting capabilities are barebones at best.

You build reports by clicking the 'Add this chart to a report' button.

There are no customizable visualizations to create or personalize. On the flip side, Buffer lets you add your logo and rearrange the charts in your report before exporting it as a PDF.

Buffer pricing

Starts at $6 per channel per month.

6. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is an all-inclusive suite of marketing tools that allows you to manage all your channels in one place.

Its "Social Calendar" app includes AI-powered tools and automation features to accelerate the growth of your social media presence. For measuring your results, you can view and interact with reports that focus on specific campaigns or user engagement across social channels.

CoSchedule also lets you build custom reports tailored to specific stakeholders. These can be scheduled to be sent via email or downloaded as a PDF, making them more accessible during meetings or quick huddles. 

CoSchedule pricing

Starts at $19 per user per month.

How to Streamline Social Media Reporting with Polymer

To import social media data, Polymer links up directly with Facebook Ads, Instagram Business, Twitter Ads, or intermediaries like HubSpot and Google Sheets. Of course, you can also import data directly via XLS or CSV uploads.

Once your data is ready, you're ready to create interactive data visualizations using Polymer's drag-and-drop dashboard editor. But first, remember that you can save time with a template or an AI-generated social media dashboard — instantly turning your raw datasets into customizable data visualizations.

If you started with a blank board, Polymer has other time-saving features you can leverage. This includes recommended insights based on your data and configuration suggestions for specific visualization types.

You're free to resize and move visualizations around within Polymer's dashboard editor.

This allows you to emphasize the most important metrics and KPIs. In turn, your intended audience will have an easier time viewing the report and extracting actionable insights.

Polymer also lets you include personalization and presentation elements in your dashboard. You can add headers, galleries, grids, images, rich text, and videos embedded via Loom.

Additional Polymer reporting features

• Customize your theme. Polymer allows you to change theme colors on a block level or for your entire dashboard.
• Integrated filtering tools. Create filters to help viewers find relevant information in your reports.
• Built-in data management. Clean up your datasets, customize headers, or create custom metrics to fine-tune your social media reports.
• Add branding elements. Upload your brand logo or set up interactive features, namely banners and popup modals, to deliver unique reporting experiences.

Get Started with Polymer for Free

All in all, Polymer has one key advantage over the other social media reporting tools listed above.

Our platform relies on data already collected for you by each social network's built-in analytics tools. And, since Polymer is a full-on BI platform, it lets you consolidate all your business data into a single source of truth.

This lets you take advantage of our powerful data visualization and AI-powered tools — letting you and your stakeholders gain a new, unique view of the story behind your data.

Click here to experience Polymer for social media reporting for free.