Social Media Analytics Social Media Strategy 10 Sprout social media reports

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You see the engagement soaring, the follower count climbing and the buzz building around your brand. But translating the growth you see on social into boardroom-ready insights remains a persistent hurdle.

The root of this challenge lies in the fragmented nature of social media data. Each platform operates in its own ecosystem, with unique metrics and reporting structures. This data overload can become overwhelming quickly, even for seasoned professionals.

Social media reporting consolidates scattered metrics into a coherent narrative. They allow you to showcase how your strategy directly impacts key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals, whether it's brand awareness, lead generation or sales growth. Sprout's social media reporting goes beyond surface-level insights to provide a detailed view of your audience, content performance and competitive landscape.

It's the need of the hour, too-according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ 60% of marketers plan to connect social to business goals by quantifying the value of social media engagement in terms of potential revenue impact.

In this article, learn which reports to track and 10 social media report examples that enable swifter, better-informed decision-making. We'll also share Sprout Social reporting examples to help you shape your data story.

Social media report examples to understand your impact

To secure continued support for your initiatives, prove the value of your work to stakeholders who may not be involved in the day-to-day of social media.

You can get most of this data natively from the social media platforms themselves. For example, you can view Facebook analytics through the Meta Business Suite. You can also set up simple spreadsheets to track your progress over time.

Here are some social media report examples to understand your impact:

1. Engagement overview report

An engagement overview report gives you a bird's-eye view of how your audience interacts with your content across platforms. It typically includes:

• Total engagements (likes, comments, shares, etc.)
• Engagement rate
• Common engagement metrics like reach and impressions
• Top-performing posts

It shows which content resonates most with your audience, allowing you to adjust the timing and targeting of your content to maximize engagement across platforms.

2. Audience growth report

Track how your follower base changes over time. Understanding your audience growth trends shows you which content and campaigns attract and retain followers.

The report can cover:

• New followers gained
• Followers lost
• Net audience growth

Audience growth identifies trends in follower acquisition, helping you pinpoint the content formats, topics and posting times that attract new followers and expand your reach.

3. Content performance report

Not sure which specific content formats work best for your audience? View the content performance report to adjust your content mix accordingly. It includes:

• Engagement rates by content type (e.g., videos, images, text posts)
• Highest and lowest-performing content
• Optimal posting times based on engagement

4. Reach and impressions report

Find out how many eyes are on your content and how it's shared. Key metrics include:

• Total reach (unique users who saw your content)
• Total impressions (number of times your content was displayed)
• Reach and impressions by post type or campaign

Get insight into the visibility of your content and how it compares to your engagement metrics.

5. Conversion tracking report

Are social media efforts translating into the actions you want your audience to take?

Conversion tracking reports give you the social media KPIs you need to prove the impact of your efforts. You can see how social media contributes to your bottom line, making it easier to justify your budget and secure additional resources. Some key metrics include:

• Click-through rates to your website
• Sign-ups or registrations from social media traffic
• Direct sales attributed to social media campaigns

6. Competitor benchmarking report

This social media analysis report compares your performance against key competitors. It covers industry benchmarks, shows how your performance stacks up and illuminates opportunities to gain an edge over your competitors.

Key metrics to track:

• Follower growth rate comparison
• Engagement rate comparison
• Share of voice in your industry

Sprout Social reporting examples

While the basic social media report examples we've covered provide a good foundation, Sprout Social offers a more sophisticated level of analysis and a fuller picture of your social media performance. Here are ten Sprout Social Reporting examples:

1. Profile Performance Report

Keeping your finger on the pulse of your brand's profiles is essential for hitting your goals and getting a clear picture of your overall social efforts. Sprout's Profile Performance Report lets your team track awareness and visibility across key platforms like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok. This high-level overview of your social performance is ideal for sharing with the broader marketing team, from your direct manager to executives.

Key metrics to track:

• Impressions
• Engagements
• Audience growth
• Message volume
• Video views

The Profile Performance Report pulls together key metrics for all your major social networks into one streamlined view. Track progress over weeks, months and year-over-year to see the long-term impact of your strategies. Plus, you can export detailed data visualizations to dig deeper into daily, network-specific or individual profile performance.

Pro tip: Use Sprout's custom date range comparison to see how your latest campaign compares to previous efforts or even to benchmark against industry events. A deeper level of analysis helps you:

• Identify if certain types of content consistently outperform others over time
• Measure the exact lift in engagement or follower growth you gained from a specific campaign or event
• Understand which time periods or promotional strategies attract your ideal audience best
• Use data to justify budget allocation for future campaigns

2. Post Performance Report

Sprout's Performance Report lets you zoom in on the metrics that matter for each piece of published content, showing everything from impressions to reach to post link clicks.

It works for any team that wants to better understand what types of content appeal to their audience or drive them to take a specific action.

For example, content teams can determine which pieces of content inspire engagement, while sales teams can identify which posts bring potential customers to the website.

The Post Performance Report takes you beyond basic metrics with lifetime performance data for each post. Identify your top-performing content by filtering by network to see trends specific to each platform (like Facebook or LinkedIn) or view all networks at once for a big-picture perspective.

Toggle between list view (sortable by any metric) and a post-focused view that mimics how your content appears on each social network. Easily filter by profile, post type (Instagram vs. YouTube), content type (e.g., video, photo) and tags* to get the precise social media analytics you need.

*This feature is only available for Premium Analytics users.

3. Case Management Report

Customer support teams need more than just anecdotal feedback-they need hard data on how their efforts impact customer satisfaction and efficiency.

Sprout's Case Management Report gives customer support teams a comprehensive view of your team's performance. Filter by date, case type and priority to focus on specific areas.

Key metrics to track:

• Case volume
• Average handle time
• Average first reply time
• First contact resolution
• Media reply times

The Case Management Report also enables you to visualize trends in case volume over time, see breakdowns by case type and priority and analyze your team's response times at a granular level.

4. Cross Network Paid Performance Report

When you're investing in social media ads, your leadership team wants proof that those dollars are well-spent.

The Cross-Network Paid Performance Report is your go-to tool for analyzing paid results across platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn. It's designed to satisfy your understanding of the next ad placement and your finance team's demand for efficient budget allocation.

Key metrics to track:

• Cost per impression (CPM)
• Cost per engagement (CPE)
• Web conversions

This Sprout report pulls together paid campaign data from all your major social networks into one easy-to-understand view. You can track spending, impressions, engagement and website conversions for all your campaigns.

This detailed analysis lets you pinpoint which campaigns, platforms and audience segments deliver the highest ROI. You can then reallocate budgets, refine targeting and adjust creative strategies to achieve specific, measurable improvements in metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion rates.

5. Facebook, Instagram and X Competitor Reports

Industry benchmarks tell you how your brand compares to competitors, offer additional context into current trends and inform your social goals. Acquisition and product teams can use social media competitive analysis reports to understand which brands stand out and which content features are leading those competitors to drive higher engagement, increase their market share and capture audience attention.

Use Sprout's network-specific Competitor Reports to benchmark your metrics against your competition and to track top-performing brands in your industry.

Key metrics to track:

• Top-performing posts
• Public engagements per post
• Audience growth

Find the sentiment around competitor brands based on comments and reactions and use the top posts metric to see what competitor content is performing well for certain profiles and inspire your own.

6. Inbox Team Report

Beyond tracking your own posts, it's equally crucial to monitor incoming messages. For customer support teams, tracking engagement with your audience measures how well you're providing service. With 23% of consumers expecting a response within an hour and 30% within 24 hours, analyzing and improving reply times is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction.

The Sprout Inbox Team Report gives you a real-time look at how your team handles incoming messages. It goes beyond basic averages to track individual team member activity to help customer support teams pinpoint bottlenecks in their workflow and measure agent productivity.

Key metrics to track:

• Average first reply time
• Unique messages replied to
• Total replies

Get specific insights on median reply times, total replies and more to gain a comprehensive understanding of your team's performance. Easily filter by team member, social profile or message type for a more focused analysis.

7. Publishing Team Report

Both customer support and marketing teams need to track metrics per user for productivity purposes. Beyond identifying top performers or productivity concerns, it's a key way to spot potential burnout within your team. Monitoring team publishing metrics helps managers manage bandwidth while also challenging their teams to grow.

Sprout's Publishing Team Report gives you a clear look at each team member's individual contributions. With this data, identify who's consistently hitting their goals and who might need additional support.

Key metrics to track:

• Daily average
• % of total posts

8. Tag Report

Outside of profile and team performance, campaign performance metrics can provide key stakeholders with the necessary information they need to make informed decisions.

Sprout's Tag Report enables you to isolate and analyze the content you've tagged, both for outbound posts and incoming messages. Track campaign performance at a granular level, measuring everything from impressions and engagement rates to video views.

With Tags, social teams can track a product launch campaign and communicate those insights back to their product teams. This insight from the Tag Report then allows product teams to quickly pivot on negatively received launches or capitalize on the most successful releases.

Key metrics to track:

• Received messages volume
• Sent messages impressions

Easily filter by social profile, specific tags or message types (posts, sent messages and received messages). See key metrics for your tagged posts, including engagement rate and impressions and quickly identify the most engaging posts within your tagged content.

9. Custom Organic vs. Paid Reports

Social media managers can customize social media reports for particular stakeholders, including year-end reports for managers and executives.

For example, analyzing your integrated paid and organic social media strategy can be difficult when all the data is on separate reports. But with a combined paid vs. organic report, you can consolidate data from multiple sources and deliver a comprehensive analysis of your social plan.

Key metrics to track:

• Organic and paid engagements by network
• Quarterly analysis
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Web conversions

Sprout's My Reports, available with the Premium Analytics solution, gives social teams the ability to combine various reports, insert text annotations and includes a Paid vs. Organic Comparison widget for Facebook and Instagram.

It's indispensable when you want to compare the side-by-side performance of paid and organic posts.

10. Custom Campaign Performance Report

Creator and content campaigns are crucial to social media success, but they're notoriously difficult to measure. With Sprout's custom reporting options, create comprehensive a Campaign Performance Report that tell a complete story about your efforts.

Analyze the performance of posts specifically tied to your campaign, identify which posts, both from your brand and creators, are driving the most engagement and conversation and measure how your campaign impacts broader conversations around your brand or industry.

Key metrics to track:

• Tag performance
• Top posts
• Video views by network
• Average impressions per post

Go beyond simple numbers by adding text annotations to summarize your campaign goals, highlight key takeaways and provide context for your results. Visualize your data with interactive charts and graphs that make complex insights easy to understand.

Start sharing your social data today

To showcase the true value of social, you need more than social data-you need to be able to present it in a way that makes sense to your colleagues. These 10 social media reports will empower you to showcase your work and its wider impact on business goals in conversations with anyone in your organization.

Ready to get even more from your social data and Sprout Social reporting? Sign up for a demo to learn how to broaden your social reporting efforts and develop a strategy that supports multiple teams and goals across your organization.

Categories

• Social Media Analytics
• Social Media Strategy

Kiran Shahid

Kiran is a content marketing specialist who creates data-driven content for B2B SaaS companies. With over nine years of content writing experience, Kiran has contributed to successful campaigns for tech companies such as Semrush and Weflow. In her spare time, you can find her trying out foods or booking her next travel adventure.

Read all articlesby Kiran Shahid