Social media reporting: key metrics and best practices

You've invested time and resources into building your social media presence, yet you might wonder if your efforts genuinely impact your business. Social media reports aren’t just a nice-to-have—they’re essential tools for translating likes, comments, and shares into strategic insights and measurable results. 

What’s a Social Media Report?

A social media report aggregates essential data from your social platforms (like Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok), highlighting metrics like follower growth, engagement, reach, and click-throughs. This data reveals what's working, what's not, and how you’re progressing towards your business goals.

For example:

• E-commerce: A social media report might focus on metrics like conversion rates, sales attributed directly to social media, and cart abandonment rates from social ads.
• SaaS Companies: These reports typically highlight metrics such as free trial signups, demo requests driven from social channels, and customer engagement or retention rates.

From an agency's perspective, a social media report demonstrates value to clients by clearly outlining performance and proving ROI on marketing spend. For brands and advertisers, such a report offers critical insights to inform strategy, allocate budgets effectively, and identify areas of improvement.

The frequency of social media reporting will depend on your goals and stakeholders:

• Weekly Reports: Best for quick tactical adjustments and immediate performance evaluations.
• Monthly Reports: Ideal for analyzing trends, assessing performance consistently, and planning short-term strategies.
• Quarterly Reports: Excellent for deeper strategic insights, long-term performance analysis, and reporting to stakeholders.

What’s Inside a Social Media Report?

A comprehensive social media report typically includes several key components. It should present an overview of your social media goals and ensure that all metrics align with your overarching business objectives.

For example, for an e-commerce website or a SaaS website with an internal marketing team, you can follow these metrics : 

LinkedIn KPIs:

• Impressions: Total number of times content was displayed (e.g., 15,000 impressions on recent posts).
• Reach: Number of unique users who viewed your content (e.g., reached 8,000 unique users).
• Engagement Rate: Percentage of users interacting with posts through likes, comments, shares, or clicks (e.g., 2.5% engagement rate).
• Followers Gained: Number of new followers acquired within a specific timeframe (e.g., +250 new followers this month).

Find more LinkedIn KPIs to follow.

Facebook Ads KPIs:

• Impressions: Total times ads were displayed (e.g., 50,000 ad impressions).
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Percentage of users who clicked on ads after viewing (e.g., 3.2% CTR).
• Cost per Click (CPC): Average cost for each click on your ads (e.g., $0.75 CPC).
• Conversion Rate: Percentage of ad clicks resulting in a desired action, such as a purchase or signup (e.g., 4% conversion rate).

You can find more KPI to add to your dashboard in our Facebook Ads KPI blog post.

Pinterest KPIs:

• Pins: Total number of pins created or repinned by users (e.g., 1,200 pins last month).
• Engagement Rate: Interaction level with pins, including saves, clicks, or comments (e.g., 4.5% engagement rate).
• Impressions: Total number of times pins were viewed (e.g., 100,000 impressions).
• Traffic Generated: Number of visits to your website originating from Pinterest (e.g., 2,500 website visits from Pinterest).

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Or, if you are an agency, you can include specific metrics about your client 

• Client ROI: Clear reporting on the client's return on investment from social campaigns (e.g., $10,000 revenue generated from $2,000 spent on ads).
• Client Engagement Rate: Average engagement metrics to showcase campaign effectiveness to clients (e.g., a 7% engagement rate on sponsored posts).
• Follower Growth for Clients: Clearly demonstrate follower gains attributed to agency-managed campaigns (e.g., +500 new followers monthly).

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out our Social media KPIs guide.

How to Create an Effective Social Media Report

You must follow some clear steps to create a good and efficient social media report:

Define your objectives for your social media

Before starting your report, define clearly why you’re creating it:

• Purpose: Are you aiming to grow your follower count, increase engagement, or drive sales?
• Audience: Different stakeholders have varying needs and expectations; for instance, a report intended for internal team members may focus on operational metrics and strategic insights that facilitate decision-making and performance evaluation.
• Expectations and numerical goals: For instance, achieving a 10% increase in follower count on Instagram or reaching a 5% engagement rate on LinkedIn.

Consider using the SMART criteria—ensuring that your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance, rather than simply stating that you want to grow your audience, specify a target such as increasing your Instagram followers by 20% over the next quarter. By establishing well-defined objectives, you create a solid foundation for your social media report, allowing you to evaluate your performance effectively.

Choose the right KPIs to track

Clearly define and choose KPIs that directly show if you're meeting your goals:

• If your goal is to increase engagement on LinkedIn, track metrics like:
  
  • Engagement rate: Total interactions divided by impressions (e.g., achieving a 7% engagement rate).
  • Clicks: Number of clicks on your posts (e.g., 500 clicks per month).
  • Interactions: Likes, shares, and comments (e.g., 200 comments monthly).
• If your goal is to increase sales through Instagram by example, you can track:
  
  • Sales conversions: How many purchases originated from Instagram posts or ads.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): Percentage of followers who clicked links in your bio or posts (e.g., 2% CTR).
  • Average Order Value (AOV): The average value per transaction from Instagram-driven sales.

Extract your social media data

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Manually copying and pasting data or relying on periodic manual exports from platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn can be extremely time-consuming, prone to errors, and quickly outdated. Manual data extraction risks inaccuracies, delays decisions, and increases workload significantly.

Using a solution like Catchr, data extraction is automated and real-time. Catchr directly integrates with your social media accounts, automatically updating your reports. This saves time, reduces mistakes, and ensures your decisions are based on accurate, timely data.

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From there, you’ll need a dashboard. 

Create a Dashboard

A dashboard shows your data in one place. It helps you see your results quickly, and you can use it to track progress before sharing it with others. 

Tools to create a Social Media dashboard

Once you have your data, you should present it with a dashboard. Depending on your requirements and technical comfort, you can use various tools.

Google Looker Studio is intuitive and great for creating interactive dashboards that anyone in your team can use without much training. Catchr has direct integrations with Looker Studio to easily implement your data in your dashboard. 

On the other hand, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau offer deeper analytical capabilities, which are ideal if your team needs comprehensive data analysis and custom visualizations.

Power BI integrates smoothly within the Microsoft ecosystem and is especially powerful for complex data modeling and visualization. 

Tableau stands out for its rich visual storytelling capabilities, perfect for detailed, exploratory analyses. However, both require some training and are more expensive than simpler tools.

Our blog contains a complete article about five Looker Studio alternatives.

How to organize your Social Media dashboard?

You need to set up your dashboard in a way that makes sense. One way is to sort it by your goals. You can group all the numbers for each goal in one place. This helps you see if you are meeting each goal.

Another way is to sort it by each social media page. For example, you can keep Facebook numbers in one part and LinkedIn in another. 

Lastly, you can sort it by time. You can show numbers for each week, month, quarter, and year. This will give you a more detailed understanding of low engagement periods vs. high engagement periods and what was happening in terms of content during those windows.  

So, it is essential to regularly review and adjust your dashboard setup to ensure it remains aligned with your evolving objectives and strategies. Additionally, consider incorporating visual elements like graphs and charts to enhance the interpretability of the data. By doing this, you will not only track your progress more effectively but also communicate insights to your team with greater clarity.

If you want more details about organizing your dashboard, we have a complete guide on our marketing reports guide.

Social Media Report Examples

You don’t need to start from zero. Catchr gives you ready-made reports that allow you to see your data quickly. You can use Catchr to begin your analysis immediately to focus on what matters most.

Social media report - Organic performance

You can find our global social media report and specific reports.

Facebook pages report

Easily track and visualize the performance of your Facebook Pages with this clean, ready-to-use Looker Studio template. Monitor key metrics like followers, reel views, impressions, engagement, and post performance by type, weekday, and time — all in one glance.

👉 Get free Facebook Pages report template

Instagram report

Quickly analyze your Instagram performance with this dynamic Looker Studio template. Track impressions, engagement, audience demographics, media performance, and follower trends — all in a single, easy-to-read view.

👉 Try this free Instagram performance dashboard in Looker Studio to track engagement and followers.

Tiktok report

Effortlessly monitor your TikTok strategy with this detailed Looker Studio template. View your content performance at a glance — including views, likes, shares, and comments — and dig into post-level metrics like duration and engagement.

👉 Looker Studio template for TikTok analytics.

LinkedIn report

Track and showcase your LinkedIn content performance with this sleek Looker Studio template. Dive into follower trends, impressions, engagement rates, and post-type effectiveness — all presented in an easy-to-navigate layout.

👉 Looker Studio template for LinkedIn analytics.

Facebook & Instragram Public Data report

Monitor top-performing public posts across Instagram and Facebook with this powerful Looker Studio template. Instantly access post captions, media type, likes, and comments to spot trends and analyze high-impact content — ideal for brand benchmarking and competitor tracking.

👉 Looker Studio template for public Instagram and Facebook

Youtube report

Visualize your YouTube channel’s key metrics with this comprehensive Looker Studio template. From channel views, subscribers, and video engagement to device usage and subscriber gains/losses — everything you need to track success is in one place.

👉 Looker Studio template for YouTube channel analytics.

Pinterest

Easily track the growth of your Pinterest account with this insight-packed Looker Studio template. Visualize key metrics like engagement, pin clicks, saves, and outbound clicks — along with interaction rates by content type and performance trends over time.

👉 Pinterest performance dashboard.

Social media report - Ads performances

Meta Ads report

Analyze your Meta campaigns with ease using this intuitive Looker Studio template. Track acquisition, engagement, conversions, and ad spend over time with ready-to-use charts and KPIs.
Monitor impressions, clicks, CPM, CPC, CTR, and spending trends all in one place.

👉 Meta campaigns dashboard for Looker Studio.

Tiktok Ads report

Track your TikTok ads campaigns with precision using this vibrant Looker Studio template. Get instant visibility on impressions, clicks, CPC, CTR, spend, and campaign-level performance — all visualized clearly over time.

👉  TikTok campaign reporting template in Looker Studio.

Pinterest Ads report

Gain full visibility into your Pinterest campaigns with this all-in-one Looker Studio template. Track impressions, clicks, CPC, conversions, revenue, ROAS, and video performance in a clear, visual format.

👉 Looker Studio template for Pinterest Ads analytics.

LinkedIn Ads report

Effortlessly track and optimize your LinkedIn Ad campaigns with this streamlined Looker Studio template. Monitor impressions, spend, CPC, CPM, CTR, and campaign objective performance — all beautifully visualized over time.

👉 Looker Studio template for LinkedIn Ads analytics.

Snapchat Ads report

Get a full breakdown of your Snapchat ad performance with this easy-to-use Looker Studio template. Monitor spend, impressions, swipe-ups, video views, ROAS, and conversion funnel metrics — all in one place.

👉 Snapchat performance dashboard.

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