How To Automate Social Media Reporting

Ever had that dream where you are running but getting nowhere? The feeling is the same when it comes to social media reporting.

Social media managers are often seen "running" fast by manually extracting the latest social data, plugging it into countless spreadsheets, and then ensuring that the right people have access to it, only to repeat the process all over again on a regular basis. This turns out to be an exhausting and unproductive process.

The simple truth here is that nobody likes to repeat the same manual tasks over and over again. Manual social media reporting not only takes up your valuable time but hinders your growth as it is often riddled with inaccurate data and human error. That's where social media report automation comes to the rescue.

Many social media managers are aware that they need to improve their reporting process but are unsure how to go about it. This blog will give insights into how social media report automation contributes to making your task easy and how you can automate your social reports.

• Where Does Native Social Media Analytics Fall Back?
• Social Media Report Automation Tools Capability & Benefits
• How To Automate Social Media Reporting?
• Report, Review, Adjust

You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.

Where Does Native Social Media Analytics Fall Back?

Each social platform comes with its own inbuilt analytics feature. And creators can use it to measure an endless variety of outcomes and outputs. But it's important to note that only using the native analytics features will not give you a full picture of your social campaigns.

These native analytics features provide data for a specific duration only, which cannot be adjusted in most cases.

Every platform will quantify your "reach" or "impressions" differently. What Facebook defines as "impressions" is actually referred to as "reach" on Twitter. Twitter defines impressions on its platform as a time when a Twitter user sees your Tweet. Whereas Facebook impressions are the number of times your post entered a Facebook user's feed.

As a matter of fact, the number of your followers never equals the number of your reach or impressions.

The most relevant term seen in the PR industry is engagement. This comes down to how your content contributes to building meaningful relationships with your audience. Engagements can be quantified via the actions taken on your content, especially shares, and URL clicks. When you want to get details about what people are clicking on, these metrics are not provided by inbuilt analytics.

These days the most powerful content running on social platforms is video. But all kinds of video views are not rendered into inbuilt analytics. For instance, Facebook counts one view after a user has watched the video for three seconds. On the other hand, YouTube doesn't start counting views until the user watches the video for at least 30 seconds.

In such scenarios, to really determine how effective your video campaigns are, you will need to go beyond just the total number of video views and track metrics such as total minutes viewed and average watch time. Since 85% of Facebook video views are watched with the sound off, your reports should take that into consideration as well.

Not to forget, native social media analytics lacks sentiment analysis.

If you are creating lots of content on Twitter (which ideally you should be doing to gain a greater footprint in your niche), there's going to be lots and lots of data to review from the insights sections. You need a quick and straightforward way to understand what's engaging.

These and many more such factors can't be measured by native analytics alone. And then we have social media report automation tools.

Such report automation tools combine data culled from native analytics and feature like social listening to measure the effectiveness of several social campaigns. When developing a social media report this way, you don't just showcase the success of a different campaign, but you also capture its implications for future programs.

Social Media Report Automation Tools Capability & Benefits

Report automation tools can automate data extraction and update, data visualization, and report generation. They can send the report at a programmed schedule, thus freeing up an employees' time to analyze trends and predict market forecasts.

Here are some extended benefits of social media report automation.

1. No More Mundane Tasks

Preparing social media reports manually involves pulling and compiling tons of data on a regular basis, which becomes a pretty mundane and repetitive task. Report automation tools eliminate the need to gather all the relevant information required to create social media reports.

Bonus Content: Social Media Automation: What It Is & Why Do You Need It

2. Saves Time For More Value-Added Tasks

Social media report automation would allow you to save the time of your team that was previously spent on manual thoughtless data processing. Instead, you can now be involved in more analysis and decision oriented tasks.

3. Cross Network Insights

Report automation tools offer cross-network reporting features that identify your best-performing campaign to determine where your budget was the most impactful.

4. Higher Data Accuracy

The highly specialized data processing algorithm of report automation tools reduces errors to a zero rate. You can always stay confident on every single digit appearing in your reports.

5. Provides Social Listening

Report automation tools equipped with social listening features will let you know what the market says about your brand, which you won't receive from native analytics on your social pages.

You can identify people who are already advocating for your brand and form a relationship with them. Through social listening, you may pinpoint the hidden opportunities to launch new programs or new types of content.

Using specific keywords and topics, you can track how well you are doing against your competitors.

6. Multi-Faceted Use With Easy Sharing

By generating a shareable link, reports and actionable insights are no longer siloed or hard to spread around the organization. From sales, marketing to customer service, every team can reap its benefits with real-time updates.

7. Increased Collaboration

Report automation tools equipped with approval workflows eliminate the bottlenecks in getting a piece of content from ideation to execution, boost efficiency by removing back and forth conversation and improve the team's productivity.

8. On-time Reports Delivery

Automated report scheduling delivers data proactively to the right users at the right time. Report scheduling helps streamline information delivery among several networks since a scheduled report is sent out to selected emails at specified times.

9. Pick The Right Report Template That Meets Your Needs

After extracting useful data, the question remains of how to present that data thoughtfully and insightfully. Not taking this factor into account can result in crucial facts getting trapped in an endless amount of spreadsheets, ultimately rendered useless or untimely.

To efficiently and quickly analyze information, you need to display it effectively. That's where many report automation tools turn into out-of-the-box report templates. Such templates have the ability to generate immediate reports specifically tailored to different purposes.

10. Tailored Targeting Efforts

Report automation tools allow you to slice and dice deep into platform-specific data and plan strategic activities and efforts tailored to each platform rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to your social campaign efforts. With several campaigns running simultaneously, automated reporting tools will allow this targeting to be built up significantly.

11. Improved Customer Service

Customer service reports give a bird' eye view of the pertinent processes supporting the department. Such reports allow you to formulate the right strategies and achieve the top goal to delight customers. With report automation tools, you can measure overall team performance such as average response time, resolution time, number of issues resolved, and how individual support teams perform.

Know more about 15 Social Media Customer Support Metrics You Need To Track (& How To Improve Them)

How To Automate Social Media Reporting?

Deloitte found that creating manual reports churns out 76% of the reporting time, leaving only 24% of the time to analyze the reports and infer valuable insights from them. Here's a step-by-step approach to social media report automation using an automated reporting tool Statusbrew.

Step 1: The Preparation Stage

The purpose of the preparation stage is to establish the necessary foundation for using report automation tools skillfully to make the most out of it.

Delineate Your Goals & KPIs

With millions of people active on social media, your target audience is present on these platforms without a doubt. You can refine your strategy to reach your audience and convey your message by utilizing social media metrics.

Once you know your social campaign goals, it becomes easier to pinpoint exactly what metrics you should be focusing on and hone in on those details.

Social media report automation tools grant access to a mountain of data from your social accounts: audience behaviors, demographic insights, organic vs. paid performance, actual and potential reach, engagement rate … the list is long.

If you approach the data with a specific goal in mind, you can save time and reporting complexity by narrowing your search to the metrics you actually need. Here is a breakdown of where to start based on some common social media goals.

Goal: Increasing brand awareness
Metrics to measure: Followers, shares, reach

Goal: Building an online community of like-minded people
Metrics to measure: Engagement metrics such as mentions, comments, and likes

Goal: Increasing sales
Metrics to measure: Conversion drivers metrics such as website clicks and email subscribers

Goal: Improving customer retention
Metrics to measure: Customer sentiments, reviews, testimonials

This is just an exhaustive list and might not be the exact metrics to measure for your specific goal. You might identify the correct metric based on test, review, and iteration.

Assigning Roles

Social media campaigns are a combined effort, with each team member having a balanced coverage of tasks they specialize in. To create a report of an entire campaign, a social media manager would have to combine the results and outcome of every team member involved in the campaign (however small or big).

Report automation tools give you the ability to customize roles and permissions for each teammate. You can define a clear set of permissions for each report that you get to create inside automating tools.

In Statusbrew, you can create User Groups to better organize and manage a group of users with similar responsibilities, tasks, and workflows. Onboarding new users also become much more convenient as adding a new user will automatically give access to all the predefined settings for that user group.

Step 2: Connecting Your Social Profiles To Extract The Data

A social media report automation tool will require access to your social profiles in order to pick data. Report automation tools also come with several external app integrations, such as Zendesk, allowing you to create tickets and resolve customer issues from the tool itself.

When your social profiles gets in touch with report automation tools, the data from the database can be centralized in the tool and updated in real-time according to the fields.

Just after you create your Statusbrew account, you will be asked to connect the social media profiles that you wish to manage through the dashboard. Using Statusbrew's dashboard, you cannot just scrap extensive data from your social profiles, but you can also publish posts and manage conversations for the same profiles.

Statusbrew will consolidate all your social profiles into a unified dashboard. You can update the social profiles data as well from Statusbrew's dashboard. You can even add or deactivate social profiles after you are onboarded.

Step 3: Creating A New Report

Navigate to the "Try our new Reports Lab" from the top center of your Statusbrew dashboard and click on the "+" sign from the left-hand side panel to create a new report.

Once you click on the create new reports tab, you will be taken to the main screen for new reports. Here, you can choose to either create a new report from scratch using your own widgets, or you can select a pre-built template that will have a predefined set of widgets prepared for you.

Once you have selected a report type, you will have to give an appropriate name and description of a few words to your reports and click on "Create" once done. An on-screen notification will appear at the bottom right side of "New report created successfully." Then you will be taken to a blank screen where you can customize and/or filter the widgets in your report.

If You Don't Want To Reinvent The Wheel, Try Your Hands On Ready-made Reporting Templates

Statusbrew ecosystem contains hassle-free ready-to-use report templates that focus on relevant metrics and generate insights within minutes. So, you do not have to wait for choosing the right metrics while the report gets prepared. Instead, you can immediately take action, be it proactive or reactive.

Step 4: Customize Your Reports As Per Your Choice

Create fully customized reports in a report automation environment to view the most valuable data. Build reports based on your goals to display the collected data, and then add sections to your reports using widgets.

People tend to go cross-eyed when they see a complicated chart, but it doesn't always have to be that way. An effective chart can communicate data in less than 10 seconds.

Statusbrew offers a library of charts from bar graphs to pie charts to maps to choose from. You should pick a chart type that will communicate your data clearly to viewers.

Click on the "Add widgets" option besides the date range, and a widget creation window will appear. You can then give a proper name to your widget, choose the type of visualization, metrics, dimensions, and filters. A preview of your widget will also be updated on the right-hand side as and when you keep making changes in the widget.

Notes:

1. The dimensions and filters options will heavily depend on the metrics you select.

2. Statusbrew's report supports 180+ industry-rich metrics; get hold of the complete list from here.

Once your data is in place, click the "Save" button at the bottom right to create the widget. When you save the widget, it gets added to your report for real-time updates.

The intuitive drag and drop-based design of reports allow you to easily adjust the placement of different widgets in your report to appear as needed. Adjust the size of a widget by hovering over the edges, and then use the sizing handles to change the widget size.

Don't think that once a widget is up and running in your report, it is non-editable. Every widget in a report is customizable from scratch.

For any widget, you either get an option to edit by going into the widget setting, exporting it to CSV format, or completely deleting it (which is a non-reversible action). Click on the three dots menu at the top right-hand side of each widget, and you will get three options.

And all of these updates are real-time. That simply means if you have shared the report with someone not on your plan using a URL, they will view the updated report every time the URL gets opened.

If you had selected a template, widgets would have been automatically created for you. Graphs would take different forms according to your social profiles connected. If you want additional widgets in your templated reports beyond what's already there, you can create a new widget, edit or delete widgets already in place according to your requirement.

Know more about Widgets In Reports Lab

Step 5: Brand Your Report Design

Brands are the foundation of any organization, providing an identity that lets everyone know what the organization does, what they believe in, and what the company hopes to accomplish.

Branding your reports is no different than creating business collateral or creating a website for your company or: If it's going out into the world with your company's name on it, it should include all elements of your brand.

When you manually create reports in Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, extending your branding into these reports becomes relatively simple. But when you choose to automate your social media reports, you should select a tool that lets you customize and white-label reports.

Using Statusbrew, you can maintain creative control over how your reports look and apply the branding elements the way you want the reports to be presented. Just upload your Brand logo, add the Presenter's name and click on "Update." Once your Custom Branding settings are updated, all the reports exported as PDF will reflect these changes.

Step 6: Automated Distribution Of Reports - Scheduling

Transparency is a surefire way to long-lasting relationships with your clients. Using an automated reporting tool ensures that your clients are always up-to-date with their performance.

It is an excellent practice to keep your clients in the loop with report automation and scheduling. It helps to streamline information delivery without delay and optimize the delivery of updated reports over several networks.

A scheduled report gets sent out to receivers through email at specified times. When you schedule the reports, always the updated reports get delivered, which means that reporting is no more static.

With Statusbrew, you can set preferences such as who should receive the report and the reporting timeframe. Your scheduled reports will then automatically arrive in your email at regular intervals.

For members who are not covered under the Statusbrew plan, you can share the report URL. Such a URL makes the report shareable with real-time updates. You can also download the CSV of every widget and share it according to your needs. But CSV reports remain static.

Report, Review, Adjust

When it comes to reporting, the more data you have the better it is.

The social media algorithm concerning your marketing strategy changes continuously. In such a scenario, the secret to boosting your social media presence is to optimize your strategy and provide a great user experience based on the data that you catch online.

Reporting proves value. But unless that heavy lifting is automated, it’s easy to drown in data and lose track of your goals.

Statusbrew is a social media management platform that integrates all your social media efforts to help you run seamless social media campaigns, track engagement, and derive analytical reports.

Try Statusbrew

Statusbrew is an all in one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.