How to Create a Social Media Report for Instagram

Tracking your metrics in a report will help you get a full picture of your account’s performance, so here’s our step-by-step guide on how to build your own social media report and why it’s so important to keep track.

Posted last year

Written by

Mackenzie Taylor

Posted last year

So you’ve got your brand on Instagram and started posting all of your content but … what’s next? How do you know your content is doing well? How do you track that you’re actually achieving the goals you set out for yourself and your account? According to a recent report from Google, marketers are struggling to manage their data, and the key to management? A social media report. Whether you’re presenting the analytics to your team, client, boss, or just to yourself, being able to track your metrics in a report will help you get a full picture of your account’s performance. We’re taking you step-by-step on how to build your own social media report and why it’s so important to keep track.

Why do you need a report?

Tracking your social media growth on a month-to-month basis will help you stay focused and ensure that you’re hitting your goals for your account. While not everyone’s goals will be the exact same (everyone wants different things!), it’s important to clarify your goals so you can make sure your report is tracking and measuring what you need it to.

How to create a social media report

What reporting style is best for social media?

When building your social media report, you need to focus first on what kind of report is going to work for you. Are you going to put it all in a Google Doc and share it with your team? Excel file? PDF? Powerpoint? One option is to turn your Google Doc into a PDF, making it easy to share and access. However you want to create your report, you need to find one that works for you, is easy to use, and is easy for the rest of your team to understand what information is being presented.

How to identify your social media goals

Okay, let’s think: what are your overall goals for your marketing strategy on Instagram? If you’re new to the social media game and trying to build awareness, you’ll want to focus on your engagement and follower metrics. If you’re a small business, getting people to go to your website and buy your product is important so you’ll want to focus on website clicks.

Whatever your goals are, you need to determine and lay them out before starting your social media report.

Keep it short and sweet

Now, whether you’re presenting these findings to a client, a boss, or just to yourself, it’s best to keep things short and sweet. You don’t need to throw in every single detail into the report but do a general overview of each of the metrics and make sure to focus on the goal that you’re looking to achieve for the month.

You should think of your report as an overall highlight of your wins, losses, and all the opportunities that were presented during that month or week (depending on what kind of time period you’re running your reports for!).

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How to use your social media metrics to create a report

The data is the most important information on your report and the reason why you are making these reports in the first place! If you’re reporting on overall growth, focus on the data that tracks the growth of your account. If you’re reporting on a campaign, compare the current campaign to a past campaign. If you’re creating a weekly or monthly report, track the results compared to the previous week or month. You’ll be able to track your overall trends and be able to see what is working for you vs what needs to be worked on.

The best way to know how your account and metrics are doing is to understand your Instagram analytics. Get a full understanding of Instagram analytics in our guide to getting started. But for now, if you’re needing to know which info to put on your report, here are some of the most common items to include:

Number of posts
Followers (gains and losses)
Likes
Reach
Shares
Comments
Overall engagement
Profile views
Story views
Top performing posts

What should be in a social media report?

We recommend dividing your report into different categories:

Strategy

In this section, you’ll highlight everything you were working on and towards during this week/month. Did you launch a new campaign? Try a new approach with posting? Focus more on video content over static images? This is the area you want to explain what the approach was!

Throughout the week/month, keep track and note things you switched up during the strategy. It will help you build out your report more and give you better metrics to discuss in your report.

Data/Metrics

In this area, you’ll want to include all the data and metrics you pulled from your Instagram Analytics (if you need help figuring out all the details of your analytics, you can view our Instagram Analytics guide here).

This part of the report should be a simple copy and paste (or if you have a Flick account, you can export this report easily without running through the numbers yourself!) from your Instagram Insights page.

Layout all the data and numbers you think will be relevant to your team and show how far you’ve come or how much further you have to go!

Growth

This is your moment to shine! Celebrate how well the account did over the week/month period by highlighting your victories.

Go back through old reports and compare the performance from the previous report to now. This will help you identify areas where you grew. Pssst: Even if the win feels small, it’s still a win and you should highlight it!

Insights

Now that you have given all the facts and details on numbers and overall strategy, it’s time to start explaining what these metrics actually mean and why they’re important.

Ex: Say you’ve just launched a campaign and you noticed that the amount of profile views is actually less than last month, it’s important to note this in your report and discuss why this might be the case. Was the image impactful enough? Was the caption engaging? What could have been done differently?

This is the area where you dive deeeeep into your stats and give clear insights and background into why the numbers are the way they are.

Next Steps

Lastly, you should talk about the next steps! Now that you know how you’ve done compared to the previous report, what are you going to do differently or the same? Are you going to approach your next week or month in the same way? What are some of the biggest takeaways you’ve learned that’ll help your strategy for the next week and month ahead? Talk about it here.

How to access your analytics

If you’re trying to figure out where to find your Instagram Analytics for your report, you’ll want to check out this blog post where we break down exactly where and how to find your analytics. Plus, we give you full details on what each metric means and why it’s important for you to track.

Now that you have all the details you need to create your social media report, it’s time to start thinking about the strategy you’re going to implement for your account so you can impress on your social media reports week after week.

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Content

Why do you need a report?

How to create a social media report

What should be in a social media report?

How to access your analytics

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