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. Perhaps 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 actually 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 can help you illustrate your social activities to your team and justify 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 you can use Sprout Social’s suite of social media reporting tools to get a deeper, more personalized understanding of your brand’s performance.

What is a social media report?

A social media report is a comprehensive document that compiles and analyzes data from a brand’s social media activities over a specific period of time. Social media reports typically provide actionable insights into your followers and their level of engagement with your content. They also identify opportunities to enhance your social media channel’s overall performance.

There are different types of social media reports, such as those that focus on your competitors, a particular social network or a specific campaign. You can also create a custom social media report based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your organization.

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

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. You can think big, but keep your goals simple at first. They should indicate that you’re working toward something—like increasing your followers, engagement or conversions.

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 networks allow you to pull data from their native analytics based on specific date ranges. You just need to determine the timeframe for your reports.

Brands typically produce social reports daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Social media is ever-changing, so it’s important to use data throughout the year to see various snapshots of your performance. Each reporting cadence provides a different value.

Here’s a quick overview of the benefits of different timeframes:

• Daily: You can monitor brand mentions and timely conversations that require immediate attention.
• Weekly: These reports are great for spotting new and trending topics, along with timely optimizations.
• Monthly: Gain a better understanding of metrics, especially pertaining to your marketing campaigns and content strategy. This cadence is great to present to managers since they track progress toward goals like account growth and conversions.
• Quarterly: You can assess overall social performance to inform your strategy. Quarterly reports allow you to collect and synthesize a larger data sample size.
• Annually: This is great for reviewing year-over-year comparisons and informing your overall marketing strategy.

Although short-term reports are helpful, they can be skewed by anomalies (think random high and low-engagement days). Quarterly and annual reports convey long-term trends and give you more time to prepare and dig deeper into your data. This informs your strategy more than surface-level data.

3. Assess your reporting audience

Before putting together the report itself, think about who will look at the report. Who are you trying to show the bigger picture to? Perhaps the marketing team wants a simple breakdown free of industry jargon, or you need to report to a manager who isn’t social savvy. Or maybe your entire organization wants to know what you’re doing.

Based on your audience, you can better determine the level of detail you need and what points to highlight. For example, marketing teams are interested in campaign-specific performance data, while leadership might be laser-focused on conversions and financial figures.

No matter who’s going to see your report, they’re going to want to see hard numbers related to your efforts. 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

Regardless of your audience, include visuals when reporting to stakeholders. Although reporting is analytical, remember that it’s an art form too—so data visualization can help you curate your masterpiece and make your reports engaging.

A visual representation of your data and talking points makes your social media reporting even easier to digest at a glance. Visual reporting is also great for highlighting events like engagement spikes or shout-outs from influencers and other milestones your reporting audience is most interested in.

With Sprout, you can 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 as well. Studying their social presence can inform your campaigns, inspire content and ensure that you’re staying on top of industry trends.

Seek out competitors that have a similar social presence to your brand. For example, if you’re a local coffee shop, you wouldn’t compare your company to Starbucks—other small- and mid-sized coffee shops are closer competitors. However, Starbucks could inspire content as a leader in the industry.

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 might be 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? Maybe 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 can help you answer some of these questions. Sprout 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 is ultimately a review to reflect on your current results and take action. Think of reporting as the inspiration that drives your overall strategy’s finer details.

To round out your report, you need to let your audience know what you’re going to do next based on what you’ve learned (think SMART goals). This could include running more ads or publishing more user-generated content—the choices are endless, and your data can inform where to go.

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.

Bonus: Your social media reporting template

If you’re ready to enhance your reporting, we have a downloadable template to get you started. This social media analytics template features an editable spreadsheet that you can adapt to your brand’s needs and your preferred platforms.

With it, you can track paid and organic performance for all your platforms. Plus, you can analyze data to paint the entire picture.

Download the template

There are also a variety of social media analytics tools you can use to gather data to guide your reporting as you fill out the template.

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. The KPIs in your report may vary depending on the intended audience.

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

• Reach: Note the difference between reach and impressions. Reach refers to the potential unique viewers a post could have, while impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline. Expanding your reach should translate into expanding your audience. This is another great metric to show to public relations or corporate communications teams.
• Engagement: Shares, comments and likes are valuable currencies for social marketers. Increasing engagement proves that you’re posting content that people want to see and interact with. Engagement is an important metric for content and social media teams that want to know what resonates with audiences the most.
• Traffic: The more traffic to your site via social, the better. You can measure this easily in Google Analytics–show these metrics to your web team or the wider marketing org.
• Conversions: This is the most pressing metric for those who want to know your financial ROI. You can either set conversion goals in Google Analytics or look at the performance of your social ads to figure this out.
• Clicks: Like engagement, click-throughs highlight compelling content. You can divide these into link clicks, promotion-specific clicks and more. For example, use click-through for your ads and posts, which could be important to your marketing team.
• Video views: Video is arguably the king of social media, which is why the majority of businesses use video in their marketing, according to Sprout’s 2025 Content Benchmarks Report. As a result, it’s important to track the specific metrics for this medium, such as how many times your users view videos and how many repeat and unique views each video gets. These analytics help you determine whether your video’s content, production value and length appeal to your target audience.

Tracking multiple KPIs allows you to look at your social presence in a more holistic way versus harping on a single metric. You can find this data through native analytics or via Sprout’s reporting tools.

How to set up social media reporting in Sprout Social

Let’s run through creating reports for your social media channels with Sprout. Want to try it yourself? Start a free 30-day trial using your business email to follow along.

1. Access the reporting dashboard

To build your first report, connect the social networks you want to focus on, like Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok or X (formerly 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

You can easily customize and filter reports by social media channel 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. For a more granular view of your results, you can export the data to CSV files with up to 50 columns, broken down by day, network or profile.

Each reporting dashboard offers unique features tailored to the metrics it tracks. For example, in the Tag Performance dashboard, you can filter your report by source platform, specified tags, message types and date range.

 3. Analyze key insights

If you’re in the Profile Performance dashboard and want to analyze your audience growth over the past month compared to the same period last year, simply use the filtering features for a side-by-side comparison.

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

Okay, the audience growth insights from the Video Views report look great. Now, it’s time to share your positive findings with your social media team and stakeholders.

Navigate to the Share button (next to Filter) on your dashboards at the top of the screen. Click for options to download your report as a CSV or PDF or send it by email.

When you’re ready to share your valuable insights, you can schedule automated deliveries for up to 25 contacts. To schedule report delivery, 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

Now that you know how to connect platforms, have learned the fundamentals of social media reporting and know how to schedule report delivery, you are well-equipped to start optimizing your social media strategy.

Your first step? Plug in all your social media channels and analyze their key analytics side by side. Monitor your progress. Then, use the reporting features to share status updates with your team and other stakeholders—starting today.

Social media reporting examples and tips

From small business to enterprise reporting, these examples inspire you.

Although you should include charts and graphs, you can also grab screenshots of social posts that knocked it out of the park, like posts with a lot of engagement or praise. Shout-outs, accolades and mentions from fellow industry players are also fair game.

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.

Competitor reports

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

Network report

Sometimes your stakeholders might want to focus on one network. To help with this, Sprout’s network reports show views, engagements and other metrics for your social channels. Along with showing metrics, the thumbnails illustrate the specific post in the report. This can help stakeholders visualize why one video outperformed another.

Custom reports

Build completely customizable reports in Sprout with My Reports. This lets you add multiple charts, tables and visualizations—like bar and line charts—to a single report so you can compare performance across a number of networks and dive deep into the metrics that matter most.

With the My Reports customization, you can filter individual charts by a variety of different metrics, tags and content types. You can also get granular with filters in one chart and look at high-level performance data in another within the same report. This chart-level filtering lets you slice and dice your data to view different subsets of social data all at once.

You can customize reports to specific business units and roles, with the option to create views for key stakeholders from marketing leaders to customer care managers. Plus, My Reports offers annotations that make it easy to build executive summaries and rename different report components. This lets you change the story you tell with your data to fit different audiences—like your C-suite. It also helps them understand social’s impact at a glance, in a format that resonates.

Learn about Sprout’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, you can use the Tag Report tab to track a campaign.

Creating social media marketing dashboards like these that automatically track and update can help you report quickly and consistently.

Social media report templates

Here’s the thing: While social media reports are an essential tool for any social media marketer, they can be time-consuming, especially if you have to meet multiple stakeholders’ needs. Whether you’re creating the report for your own use or to share with your leadership team, it has to be presentation-ready and easy to digest.

For those who are looking to optimize their time, using social media reporting templates is the way to go. You not only get a prebuilt report you can use as is or customize based on your needs, but you also get a few extra hours back in your day.

Below, check out six social media reporting templates you can download and use today:

Social Metrics Map template

The Social Metrics Map will help you define your social media objectives and document your approach to measuring performance. This template comes with a guide that breaks down what to track for each stage of the social media funnel. It’s ideal for maintaining consistency and telling a story with your social media metrics.

Download the template

Social media analytics spreadsheet template

If your social media strategy involves both paid and organic tactics, you’ll have even more metrics to review and analyze.

The social media analytics spreadsheet template helps you track and compare paid social media performance, compile top-level analysis of your paid and organic efforts and tie your performance metrics to your business goals.

You can easily customize the template to visualize both your organic and paid social media efforts for a comprehensive picture of your social campaigns and performance.

Download the template

Social media scorecard template

Use the social media scorecard template to provide C-suite executives with the social data they need to inform their business decisions. This scorecard provides a bird’s-eye view of your social media performance and brand health and contextualizes performance in the competitive landscape. It also demonstrates social media ROI in the context of larger marketing initiatives.

It’s a visual-forward deck that helps connect your social media activities to larger business goals in a way that’s interesting and thought-provoking.

Download the template

Creative testing worksheet

If you’re unsure about what kinds of content work best for your target audience, then social testing can help you determine the best topics to focus on, the best formats to use and the best times to post. But figuring out what to test and tracking your A/B testing efforts is no small feat—especially when you’re running multiple tests at the same time.

This creative testing worksheet template helps you test your hypotheses, identify campaign goals and develop designs for A/B and multivariable tests. It also includes a spreadsheet template for tracking results from each of your tests, which allows you to gain insights on the kind of social media content your target audience wants to see.

Download the template

Social media market research worksheet

Do you need a focus group? Look no further than your social media channels.

You already have access to readily available conversations happening on social media. Use them to glean valuable insights to inform your social media strategy and future business decisions.

This social media market research worksheet helps you gather essential insights by narrowing down the questions you need to ask to gain a better understanding of where your brand stands in the competitive landscape.

Download the template

Social listening insights deck template

Social listening offers insights that can make or break a brand. To communicate those insights effectively to your leadership team, you need a social listening deck template that adds meaning to metrics.

This deck will help you summarize key findings and overarching themes from your listening topic. You can also use it to identify trends in topic sentiment over time, as well as the key drivers of conversation for your brand and industry.

Download the template

Activate your social media reporting strategy with Sprout

From improving your social ROI to justifying your campaigns, social media reporting is a must for modern brands. Creating a comprehensive social report is much less daunting when you know what to focus on.

Here are a few key takeaways to keep in mind:

• Consider your company’s goals and show how the data ties back to those goals.
• Focus on KPIs that fit your stakeholders’ interests.
• Select the appropriate timeframe for your report.
• Use visuals like graphs, charts and social media posts.
• Provide a competitive lens by presenting your peers’ data.
• Summarize key insights and offer next steps.
• Save time by using a prebuilt social media reporting template.

With the help of Sprout’s reporting tools, you can craft reports that paint the entire picture like the social media artist you are. Try your hand at Sprout’s social media reporting tools by signing up for a free one-month trial today.