Getting Social Media Reporting Right
Follower counts make a nice slide and tell you almost nothing about whether social media is doing its job.
Most social media reports are built around whatever the platform makes easy to export: reach, impressions, follower growth, likes. Those numbers are simple to gather and satisfying to put on a slide, and they rarely tell you whether the activity is worth the budget behind it.
Measure what happens after the click
A post that gets a lot of engagement but sends nobody to the site, and a post that gets modest engagement but drives five enquiries, are not equally successful — even though the first one looks better in a simple report. Track link clicks, landing page behaviour, and where possible, which conversions actually originated on social, rather than stopping at platform-native engagement numbers.
Compare against your own baseline
Industry benchmark numbers circulating online are usually self-reported, outdated, or from a completely different type of account. A more honest comparison is your own account, three months ago, under the same posting effort. That tells you whether the channel is actually improving, which is the question that matters when deciding whether to keep investing in it.
End every report with a decision
A report that is just a table of numbers asks the reader to do the analysis themselves. A useful one ends with a specific recommendation: post more of this format, drop that platform, test paid boost on this content type. If a report does not change what happens next month, it was not worth building.
Followers are an audience size. They are not, on their own, evidence that the channel is working.
Leave a Reply