Client reporting is one of the critical tasks for any social media manager. It encourages you to track your performance and learn what tactics are working and what are not working for you.
Most importantly, it enables your clients to track each campaign’s progress and understand the steps that you have taken to improve their social media presence until now.
Sending social media reports to your clients helps in building a stronger relationship between you and your clients.
Presently, from the start, making a social media report may appear to be a walk in the park.
You collect a bunch of statistics, metrics, and information from your social media analytics tools. After that, you analyze and prepare a detailed spreadsheet that you send to the client.
Sadly, it isn’t so straightforward. Excessively complex, confusing, and lengthy reports will not help your clients and it would be difficult for them to read and understand.
If you really want to learn how to create a report that your client will love then you need to follow a few steps that are listed below:
SETTING SMART GOALS
You first need to plan a meeting with your client and ask them what they need to accomplish by hiring you. You and your clients both should sit together and decide the clear goals that you have to achieve.
This is the foundation of your reporting process. Defining the correct goals directs what strategies and tactics you are going to take and what are the different metrics that you will track.
Considering all the factors you should set smart goals – achievable, measurable, realistic and timely. Social media goals should always rotate around your customer’s needs.
Suppose they are focusing on improving brand awareness, you will need to help them in increasing social media shares, likes, and comments.
This the time where engagement and follower’s metrics are important. On the other hand, if your client has an eCommerce than the focus will shift to sales.
This implies your social media tactics should have a priority of both organic and paid traffic or sales.
WORK TOGETHER WITH CLIENTS WHEN CHOOSING METRICS
Since you’ve defined reasonable objectives, it’s an ideal time to pick which metrics you will be tracking. A few customers may provide you with a list of metrics that they want you to track.
The issue is that in social media marketing all the metrics are not equally relevant. Most of these metrics such as social media likes will boost your client’s confidence but won’t really inform you the reach or the ROI
On the off chance that you notice that your client focuses on such metrics than you need to talk to them. This is an educational part of your social media reporting process and it’s important for your future relations.
You will likely clarify why those metrics won’t work for a client and why it is crucial to go with the right metrics to create the right social media goal.
Without a doubt, picking the correct information relies upon your customers’ specific needs. However, some of the common that you would probably like to track are:
• Reach – This is the number of audiences on social media platforms. Once more, this data can be pulled straightforwardly from the social media analytics tool. For example, if you want to check the reach on Facebook, go to Insights > Reach.
• Engagement – These metrics tell you the number of users interacted with your post it can like, share or comment. On Facebook, you can find this metric on page data. On Instagram, activity tab will show you these metrics.
• Audience – This metrics is one of the important metrics which you will definitely like to track. It tells you what type of audience is engaging with your social media content. You can track the Age, gender, language, and location of your audience. In fact, twitter has a separate section that tells you about all these data.
• Clicks and traffic – Organic traffic is one of the most important metrics that you would like to track in your social media report. You would like to know how much traffic your social media content drives. You can track the organic website traffic from social networks or from google analytics.
You can track all this data manually, but this will consume lots of time. In this scenario, you can use marketing reporting software which will save all your time.
There are many digital marketing tools available in the market that interact with social media marketing tools and let you create the report that your client wants.
This way you can track all the metrics that you have set, filter all the irrelevant data and arrange your campaign data according to the client’s expectations.
LET YOUR CLIENTS TRACK DATA IN REAL-TIME
Social media marketing is changing every day. Your aim is to track your data in real-time, keep pace with any changes happenings and react accordingly. This is the time where automating your reporting process can be helpful.
With the right social media software, you will pick your most vital data sources, make a customized marketing dashboard for every customer, and share the access to this platform with your team and clients.
Rather than sending complicated reports in spreadsheets, you will have the option to make interactive and easy to understand social media dashboards that can be seen on a single screen.
Hence, rather than overpowering your customers with a lot of irrelevant data, you will concentrate on the most significant data and support it with solid visual content, for example, graphs and charts.
DECIDE HOW FREQUENTLY YOU WILL SEND REPORTS
Sit and speak with your clients about how frequently they will like to receive social media reports. The idea is to send reports on a consistent basis and build trust with the clients and keep them updated about the progress.
You can send the report weekly, monthly or quarterly. While sending a weekly report may irritate you as well as your clients, that’s why most of the social media manager prefers to send reports monthly.
But you should definitely respect your client’s necessity and send the reports as per his requirements. Realizing when they will get reports from you, they will be bound to open them and read them.
This is where, once more, client reporting software can help you. Most of the reporting tool has the function of sending reports automatically to clients.
You simply need to pick when and how you need to offer reports and the tool will send the reports for you.
KEEP YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT SWEET AND SHORT
Your clients are very busy. They need your reports to be short and clear, else, they won’t read them.
For someone who is creating the report for the first time, it is recommended that you focus on your writing style.
Don’t use lots of technical jargon, unclear languages, and complicated sentence, try to keep your report simple but informative. Make use of short sentences and regular language to make your social media report simple and easy to understand.
Always try to explain the metrics to your clients that will be difficult for them to understand.
Finally, design your social media report properly. From text styles to colors, everything impacts client experience. Report design should always be in line with your content, making the most significant facts prominent on your page.
To make your content easier to read break them into small paragraphs, make use of headings and bullets. Choose the proper color, typography, and visual content that will highlight the main data of your reports and make it easy for readers to read.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Creating social media reports is essential for building a strong relationship with your clients. That is the reason it should be done properly. First of all, speak to your clients, give guidance, and set the perfect goals and metrics that are important for them.
Next, deliver the social media reports on time as discussed with your client. Finally, design the perfect social media reports that will be easy to understand.