Master the art of social media reporting (downloadable template)

Managing social media is complex. If you’re responsible for your brand’s social presence, you’ve likely felt the pressure before. Your boss wants to know that your efforts are paying off, or other teams want to make sure you’re on the same page.

Like an artist perfecting a particular technique, social media reporting is an essential skill for marketers. You have to pay attention to the right details to convey a meaningful story that your audience understands and gain actionable next steps for your business. This requires a balance of social media analytics and creativity to paint the entire picture.

The biggest challenge? Presenting your social data in a way that makes sense to your colleagues. As businesses invest more in social media, they want to make sure they’re receiving a positive return on investment (ROI). Reporting supports you in illustrating your social activities to your team and justifying your strategy.

Throughout this post, we’ll cover reporting essentials, examples and templates so you can explain and bring context to the bigger picture. We’ll also share how to use Sprout Social’s suite of social media reporting tools for a deeper, more personalized understanding of your brand’s performance.

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a document that compiles and analyzes data from your social media activities over a specific timeframe. It transforms raw metrics into actionable insights that guide strategy and prove ROI.

Effective social media reports include:

• Performance metrics: Engagement rates, reach, conversions and other KPIs
• Audience insights: Follower growth, demographics and behavior patterns
• Strategic recommendations: Data-driven next steps to improve results

Create reports that focus on competitors, specific campaigns or individual social media platforms based on your key performance indicators (KPIs).

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Regardless of what type of social media report you need, the six steps below will support you in building an effective one for your brand.

Social media reporting metrics to consider

The most important aspect of assessing social media ROI is conveying your KPIs.

The social media metrics you track should align with your goals, so select KPIs that support your brand’s vision.

Here are key metrics that should be front and center in your social media reporting:

 

Metric	What It Measures	Why It Matters	Best For
Reach	Potential unique viewers for your content (vs. impressions, which count total views)	Shows audience expansion and content distribution	PR teams, brand awareness campaigns
Engagement	Shares, comments, likes and interactions	Proves content resonates with your audience	Content teams, social media managers
Traffic	Visits to your website from social media platforms	Connects social activity to website performance	Web teams, digital marketing
Conversions	Desired actions taken (purchases, sign-ups, downloads)	Demonstrates direct revenue impact and ROI	Sales teams, executive leadership
Clicks	Link clicks, CTA clicks, promotion-specific engagement	Highlights compelling content and effective CTAs	Marketing teams, campaign managers
Video Views	Total views, watch time, completion rate	Measures video content effectiveness and audience retention	Content creators, video marketing teams

Data from our 2025 Content Benchmarks Report shows the majority of businesses use video in their marketing. Track video-specific metrics like repeat views and completion rates to understand whether your production value and length appeal to your target audience.

Track multiple KPIs to understand your social presence holistically versus fixating on a single metric. Find this data through native analytics or via Sprout Social’s reporting tools.

6 steps for getting started with social media reporting

Let’s cover a few concrete steps to creating social media reports so you can get started ASAP:

1. Consider your company’s social media goals

What are your social media goals?

Create a vision for what you want to achieve, such as increasing followers, engagement or conversions. Start simple, then scale as you gain momentum.

Also, stick to the principle of setting SMART goals:

• Specific: Say which strategies you’re going to employ (user-generated campaigns, influencer marketing, Facebook ads and so on).
• Measurable: Track any social goal with numbers.
• Achievable: Make sure you have the resources (creatives, budget) to achieve your goals.
• Realistic: Don’t promise results you can’t produce (think doubling your follower count in a week).
• Time sensitive: Give yourself a quarterly or annual timeframe to achieve your goals.

Framing your data in this way helps you understand if you’re reaching your goals and clues you in on opportunities to pivot if you’re not.

2. Choose your reporting frequency

All social media platforms allow you to pull data from their native analytics based on specific date ranges.

Different reporting cadences serve different strategic purposes. Here’s a quick overview of the benefits of different timeframes:

Reporting Frequency	Primary Use Case	Best For	Key Benefit
Daily	Monitor brand mentions and timely conversations	Community managers, crisis response teams	Immediate response to trending topics
Weekly	Spot emerging trends and optimize tactics	Content creators, social media managers	Quick pivots based on performance
Monthly	Track campaign performance and content strategy	Marketing managers, department heads	Progress toward growth and conversion goals
Quarterly	Assess overall social performance	Directors, VPs, strategic planning	Larger data sets reveal long-term trends
Annually	Year-over-year comparisons and strategy planning	CMOs, executive leadership	Inform annual marketing budget and strategy

Short-term reports capture real-time performance, but anomalies sometimes skew them. Quarterly and annual reports reveal genuine trends and give you time to dig deeper into your data.

3. Assess your reporting audience

Before building your report, identify your audience. Marketing teams want campaign data without jargon, while executives focus on conversions and ROI.

Audience	Primary Interest	Metrics to Emphasize	Presentation Style
Marketing Teams	Campaign performance and content effectiveness	Engagement rate, reach, content type performance	Detailed breakdowns with platform-specific insights
Sales Teams	Lead generation and conversion tracking	Click-through rate, conversions, lead quality	Direct connection between social and pipeline
Executive Leadership	ROI and business impact	Conversions, revenue attribution, cost per acquisition	High-level summaries with financial implications
Customer Care Teams	Response efficiency and customer sentiment	Response time, resolution rate, sentiment analysis	Operational metrics tied to satisfaction scores
Product Teams	Customer feedback and feature requests	Sentiment trends, common questions, feature mentions	Qualitative insights with quantitative validation

Pull the data that’s most important to stakeholders and use those metrics to guide your report’s context.

4. Make your social media reporting visual

Include visuals when reporting to stakeholders. Data visualization transforms analytical reports into engaging stories.

Visual representation makes your data easier to digest at a glance. Use charts to highlight engagement spikes, influencer mentions and other milestones your audience cares about.

With Sprout Social, you customize your reports beyond the data you get from native analytics. These presentation-ready reports range from platform-specific metrics to your entire social presence.

Social media reporting is more than a numbers game. Providing real-world data examples from your brand’s social media can open your stakeholders’ eyes. For example, use visuals to guide your audience to that light bulb moment to understand the impact.

5. Provide competitive reports for more context

Pay attention to your competitors’ social performance. Studying their presence informs campagnes, inspires content and keeps you ahead of industry trends.

Seek out competitors with similar social presence to your brand. A local coffee shop shouldn’t compare itself to Starbucks. But industry leaders inspire your content strategy.

Once you have a good idea of your industry peers, use competitive benchmarks to report on the following:

• Audience growth: Are you and your competitors growing at the same rate? If someone’s outpacing you, it’s worthwhile to do a deep dive on their content strategy.
• Share of voice: Which brands are getting content shares the most? Which social accounts are getting lots of love via hashtags? It’s time for you to get a bit louder, so to speak.
• Content performance: Which brands are dominating key social terms in your industry? How often do these top performers post? Consider the type of content that’s doing well too—do they use stories or short-form videos?

Third-party competitive analysis tools support you in answering some of these questions. Sprout Social has a number of tools that do some of the legwork for you, such as our Instagram Competitors Report and Facebook Competitors Report.

6. Summarize your key learnings and next steps

Reporting drives action. Use insights to shape your strategy’s next moves.

Close your report with clear next steps based on data-driven SMART goals. This includes running more ads, publishing more user-generated content or adjusting your posting schedule—let your data decide.

As a final tip, remember to aim for conciseness when sharing information. Bullet points are more than enough—if someone needs further elaboration, they can ask.

How to set up social media reporting in Sprout Social

Let’s walk through creating reports in Sprout Social. Start a free 30-day trial to follow along.

1. Access the reporting dashboard

To build your first report, connect the social media platforms you want to focus on, like Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok or X (formerly known as Twitter).

To access the reporting dashboard, go to the left side menu and click Reports. You’ll find different reporting tools like:

• Custom Reports (for Premium Analytics)
• Cross-Network Reports
• Profiles by Network
• Paid by Network
• Competitors by Network
• Twitter Analysis
• Internal Performance
• Reviews

Navigate to Cross-Network > Profile Performance (shown in the menu below) to select the dashboard.

2. Customize and filter your reports

Customize and filter reports by social media platform and dates within each dashboard (like the Profile Performance dashboard). You’ll also find graphs of key metrics like Audience Growth and Engagements right on the same page.

To analyze your Instagram profile’s engagement, here’s what you do: Select a date range and scroll down to the network’s engagement chart. Below, you’ll find Instagram’s daily engagement statistics displayed in red.

Rather watch how to use the Profile Performance Report? Watch the video.

These reports include metrics that align with your goals. Export data to CSV files with up to 50 columns, broken down by day, network or profile.

Each dashboard offers unique features tailored to the metrics it tracks. The Tag Performance dashboard filters by source platform, tags, message types and date range.

3. Analyze key insights

Use the Profile Performance dashboard to analyze audience growth over time. The filtering features support side-by-side comparisons across different time periods.

The example below compares audience growth in March 2025 with March 2024:

Once you’ve set your parameters, you can start analyzing key profile performance metrics like:

• Impressions
• Engagements
• Post link clicks
• Engagement rate per impression
• Audience growth
• Video views

According to our 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report, 81% of consumers want more short-form videos—making video views one metric to keep a close eye on. An analysis of video views would look like this:

You can get a similarly detailed analysis of your overall Cross-Network Audience Growth with a report, like the one shown below:

4. Automate, export and share reports

Once you’ve analyzed your data, share insights with your team and stakeholders.

Navigate to the Share button (next to Filter) at the top of your dashboard. Choose to download your report as CSV or PDF, or send it by email.

Schedule automated deliveries for up to 25 contacts. Click Share in the report’s upper-right corner and select Schedule PDF delivery.

If you want to shave time off routine tasks, put your reporting on autopilot. Advanced Plan users can set automatic, recurring PDF report deliveries to go out every week or month.

5. Optimize your social media strategy

You’re now equipped to optimize your social media strategy with data-driven reporting.

Connect all your social media platforms and analyze their analytics side by side. Monitor progress, then share insights with your team starting today.

Social media reporting examples and tips

These examples work for small businesses and enterprise teams alike.

Include charts and graphs, but don’t stop there. Grab screenshots of high-performing posts, customer praise and industry accolades to illustrate impact.

For example, G2 customers rated Sprout Social as the Best Software Product out of all products on the market in 2024. If your stakeholders are interested in brand awareness, reach or thought leadership, this LinkedIn post) illustrates how social is amplifying those goals.

You can also showcase when a customer applauds your product on social, like in the X post below:

If your stakeholders want to know if customers like a new feature or update, including visual praises like the one above is a great way to drive that point home.

For more real-world examples, we’ve highlighted several bold brands who are delivering ROI using social data.

Competitor reports

Remember to pay attention to your competitors’ data as well to benchmark your social media performance. Sprout Social’s competitor reports show several relevant KPIs at the top, along with a graph illustrating audience growth.

Network report

Sometimes your stakeholders want to focus on one network. To support this, Sprout Social’s network reports show views, engagements and other metrics for your social media platforms.

Custom reports

Build completely customizable reports with My Reports. Add multiple charts, tables and visualizations to compare performance across networks.

Filter individual charts by metrics, tags and content types. Get granular in one chart while viewing high-level data in another, all within the same report.

Customize reports for specific business units and stakeholders. Add annotations to build executive summaries and rename components to tell the right story for each audience.

Learn about Sprout Social’s Premium Analytics

Campaign reports

Social media campaign management is challenging, but you can use reporting to guide your team and determine success points, gather insightful data for future campaigns and highlight which metrics to hone in on the most.

In Sprout Social, you can use the Tag Report tab to track a campaign.

Creating social media marketing dashboards that track and update in real time supports fast, consistent reporting.

Social media report templates

Social media reports are essential but time-consuming, especially when meeting multiple stakeholders’ needs. Templates give you presentation-ready reports you can customize, saving you hours in your day.

Here are six social media reporting templates you can download today:

 

Template Name	Primary Purpose	Best For	Key Features
Social Metrics Map	Define objectives and measurement approach	Strategy planning, goal alignment	Funnel stage tracking, consistency framework
Social Media Analytics Spreadsheet	Track paid and organic performance	Performance analysis, campaign comparison	Cross-platform tracking, goal alignment
Social Media Scorecard	Executive-level performance snapshot	C-suite presentations, board meetings	Competitive context, ROI demonstration
Creative Testing Worksheet	Design and track A/B tests	Content optimization, format testing	Hypothesis tracking, results analysis
Social Media Market Research Worksheet	Gather audience insights	Strategy development, positioning	Question framework, competitive landscape
Social Listening Insights Deck	Communicate listening findings	Leadership presentations, strategy sessions	Sentiment trends, conversation drivers

Social Metrics Map template

Define your social media objectives and document your measurement approach. This template includes a guide for tracking each stage of the social media funnel.

Download the template

Social media analytics spreadsheet template

Track and compare paid and organic performance across all platforms. Tie your performance metrics directly to business goals.

Download the template

Social media scorecard template

Provide C-suite executives with a bird’s-eye view of performance, brand health and competitive context. This visual deck connects social activities to business goals and demonstrates ROI.

Download the template

Creative testing worksheet

This worksheet supports you in designing A/B tests, tracking results and gaining insights into what your audience wants.

Social media market research worksheet

Turn your social channels into a focus group. This worksheet helps you gather insights by narrowing down the right questions to understand your competitive position.

Download the template

Social listening insights deck template

Social listening delivers insights that make or break a brand. This deck helps you summarize findings, identify sentiment trends and pinpoint conversation drivers.

Start creating better social media reports today

Social media reporting transforms raw data into strategic intelligence. When done right, it proves ROI, guides strategy and secures stakeholder buy-in.

Here’s what you’ve learned:

• Define clear goals before building reports
• Track metrics that align with business objectives
• Visualize data for stakeholder comprehension
• Automate reporting to save time
• Use templates to maintain consistency

Sprout Social’s intuitive reporting platform creates presentation-ready reports in minutes—not hours. Connect all your social media platforms, customize metrics and automate delivery to stakeholders. Start a free trial or request a demo to explore Sprout Social’s reporting features.

Frequently asked questions about social media reporting

How long does it take to create a social media report?

Manual reporting takes several hours to days, depending on platform coverage. Sprout Social automates data collection, reducing reporting time to minutes.

What's the difference between social media analytics and social media reporting?

Analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing performance data. Reporting compiles those insights into documents that communicate value to stakeholders.

Can I automate social media reports?

Yes. Sprout Social allows you to schedule recurring reports that are automatically delivered to stakeholders weekly, monthly or quarterly.

What should I do if my social media metrics are declining?

Investigate external factors like seasonality or algorithm changes, then review whether your audience’s preferences have evolved. Use these insights to experiment with new formats, posting times or messaging angles.

How do I explain social media ROI to executives who don't understand social media?

Connect social data to business outcomes like website traffic, lead generation and revenue. Frame reporting around business impact, not vanity metrics like likes or followers.