All great content has a hook—something that grabs the viewer’s attention while driving meaningful engagement. Think of your social media strategy’s executive summary as the “hook” for your performance reports. It highlights clear, digestible insights that capture your leadership team’s attention while demonstrating your work’s value.

A well-received social media report can lay the groundwork for more resources, recognition and trust. In this guide, we share how to draft executive summaries that communicate social’s impact in a concise and compelling way.

P.S. To fast-track report setup, use our social media scorecard template. Fill it in with your own data for a C-suite-ready overview of your brand health and social strategy.

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Why executive summaries matter to your social reporting strategy

To most social marketers, metrics like impressions, engagements, conversions and clicks require little to no explanation. These are the numbers you probably already monitor regularly to measure your social performance and identify areas for improvement.

While these metrics may make sense to you and your team, things like follower count and reach are as good as gibberish to an executive unfamiliar with the nuances of your social strategy.

And even if executives understand these metrics, they may not value them as highly as others. Per Sprout’s 2025 Impact of Social Media Report, marketing leaders are often more interested in competitor and audience insights, performance data contextualized with data from innovative brands and intel into the latest network updates.

Due to such gaps, executives might fail to see the value of social in achieving business goals.

That’s where a strong executive summary can prove helpful. It bridges these gaps by translating raw data into a concise narrative centered around audience behavior, preferences and sentiments. This is the kind of data that resonates with leaders—including C-suite executives—because it shows them not only how performance shifted but why.

For example, say a recent post received record-level engagement; this could indicate growing audience interest in a particular product or service, trend or cause.

Supplying this intel to leaders is essential. It makes your insights and recommendations more impactful, ensuring that stakeholders see social not just as a marketing channel but as a powerhouse for driving business success. In turn, they’ll be more likely to engage with the information provided and take desired action, such as increasing investment in social.

3 reasons to upgrade your reports with social media summaries

At first, you might think of social media executive summaries as just another task for your to-do list. But when you look at the bigger picture, you’ll see it’s a little task that can save a lot of time and reap invaluable rewards for your team.

Here are three of the top reasons to include executive summaries in your social media reports:

1. To earn executive buy-in

When leadership can’t immediately connect how social influences different parts of the business, they’re less likely to throw their support behind the social team’s efforts.

We asked marketing leaders what is crucial for securing social investment in The 2025 Sprout Social Index™. More than half (65%) say demonstrating how social media campaigns are tied to business goals. Some 52% say quantifying the cost savings of using social compared to other channels, followed by sharing contextualized social data (45%), such as dashboards and data visualizations.

What marketing leaders say is crucial for securing social investment, per the 2025 Sprout Social Index.

A standard social report can contain dozens of unique KPIs. Each has its own importance, but only a select few ladder up to your unique business goals. An executive summary creates space to spotlight those metrics so their impact is crystal clear.

Capitalizing on these opportunities to communicate results can help secure executive buy-in when it’s time to ask for things like additional budget and resources. Suppose you want to increase your budget for a paid social campaign. You stand a much better chance of winning your finance executive over if you can show them how your social campaigns are performing and measure the return on investment (ROI).

2. To personalize information for different audiences

Social media is no longer exclusive to your marketing team. Leaders across customer care, product development, HR and more now have a stake in your social strategy. When it comes to results, they’re all looking for something different.

Executive summaries can tailor your reports to the expectations of several unique audiences, so you can accurately showcase your impact. Sprout’s My Reports tool–part of our Premium Analytics–allows teams to scale this process through the power of annotations. Users can create team-specific text annotations that provide rich context on strategic goals and big wins as they relate to the collaborator’s discipline.

A custom report open in Sprout Social's analytics solution. The report is a social dashboard detailing the user's progress toward Q1 goals. They use the annotation widget to share details on their strategy and ongoing A/B tests.

Once those notes are set, you can share several different versions of the same report using links based on custom reporting views. In such reports, when a customer care leader clicks their unique link, they might see engagement and team activity metrics, paired with a written update on feedback from recent NPS surveys shared via Facebook and Instagram. Your sales leader, on the other hand, will see organic and paid click-through and conversion rates, along with a recap of trending products.

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If you’re not using Sprout, you can still recreate this effect with some more time and effort. For example, if you share reports via a spreadsheet, you can make several copies and use the first tab of each for tailored summaries.

3. To start strategic conversations about social insights

Over time, a detailed report can socialize the power of social media with even the most offline business leaders. Regularly communicating your social results eliminates any ambiguity in your social strategy and ensures executives are always looped in on relevant efforts.

All of this works in tandem to elevate your company’s social media maturity. When leaders have the right context, they can ask the right questions and provide the right amount of support. Over time, this will refine your strategy and strengthen your skills as a marketer.

A text-based image explaining the three stages of social media maturity: Emerging, Evolving, and Mastering.

Evolving social media discussions within your organization is the first step to evolving your brand’s approach to social media. A social media strategy executive summary is the perfect way to start the dialogue.

How to create a social media strategy executive summary that cements social’s value

According to the 2025 Impact of Social Media Report, less than half (44%) of marketing leaders rate their social team at the expert level when it comes to measuring the business impact of social.

For many leaders, reporting gaps are driving these ratings. As we mentioned before, there’s a discrepancy between the metrics that matter most to social marketing teams and executives. That means, all too often, leaders across the company receive reports packed with analytics that don’t resonate.

This is especially problematic when you consider the fact that these reports are typically executives’ only look at social performance—meaning marketers have one crucial chance to impress them.

Fortunately, you can make the most of these opportunities and overcome misperceptions by refining your reports. And a key step in that process is crafting a high-quality executive summary.

Below are some of the must-have sections of a social media strategy executive summary:

  • A result-centered headline: Describe performance highs and lows from the previous month or quarter. No need to go too in-depth; the goal is to provide an overarching view of the period’s most relevant updates for executives.
  • Bright spots: Spotlight some of the key wins from the period. Providing an overview of success will help grab executives’ attention, foster their trust in your team and convince them of social’s value.
  • High-impact metrics: Focus on attribution and ROI-centric social media metrics that ladder up the pipeline and impact business revenue. Think conversions, leads, pipeline channel performance, cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS). Underscore how these metrics relate to one or more of the period’s core objectives.
  • Challenges: While positivity is important, transparency is vital. Don’t solely focus on the good from the period; describe some of the yellow or red flags that arose as well. This information will empower leaders to plan and prepare for potential risks.
  • Recommended action items: End by informing leaders what you want or need to do next to ensure future success and resolve weaknesses in your social strategy. If leader approval is required to initiate these next steps—such as hiring new staff or investing in a new tool—flag that here for their consideration.

As seen below, Sprout’s executive summary template works alongside our social media scorecard templates to convey the value of social to executives.

Sprout Social’s formula for creating a high-quality social media strategy executive summary.

See it in action: Social media strategy executive summary example

To help you better visualize a high-quality executive summary, here’s an example using our template:

Headline: We ended Q2 with a strong performance, including a notable 18% increase in social-driven product purchases and a 12% lift in ROAS Quarter on Quarter (QoQ).

Bright spot: Instagram Reels and TikToks delivered the strongest results, accounting for 81% of total social-driven sales. Influencer collaborations performed particularly well on both platforms, driving discovery and direct purchases.

Key metrics:

  • Social-driven purchases: +18% QoQ
  • Return on ad spend (ROAS): +12 QoQ
  • CPA (Facebook paid): +7% QoQ

Challenges: However, Facebook ads underperformed, with a 7% higher CPA in comparison to Q1.

Recommended actions: To maintain momentum, we will ramp up short-form video production, which will include tapping into influencer partnerships and user-generated content (UGC). As such, we recommend allocating additional funding to the social team’s influencer marketing budget for Q3.

Craft a social media strategy executive summary that gets noticed

Armed with an executive summary of your social media report, you can convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact of social on your business. All you have to do is make reporting and data sharing a regular habit.

Use these social media scorecard templates to get a head start on your next executive update. Just compile your data, conduct your analysis and fill them in. You’ll be left with an engaging, C-suite-ready report that will keep leaders up-to-date on social’s impact on your organization.