Cheat sheet for reviewing a social media report

Nov 13


When reviewing a report, it's important to make sure you understand the data and use it to make informed decisions for your future activities.

In our Measuring Success in Pharma Social Media course we give you a complete rundown on how you can establish KPIs, develop a measurement framework that shows business value, set benchmarks, and run reporting to show business value from your social media efforts. All in 50 minutes!

Here we've provided a short summary of our section on reviewing a social media report - providing you with a checklist of things to consider when you receive a social media report from your agency or in-house team.
#1 Your reporting should include a clear narrativeA report should include a narrative around the data, and it should be clear on what the next actions or recommendations are. If your agency has not answered this question, feel comfortable to go back and ask them to provide a recommendation. If the data is not conclusive, they may recommend further testing. Or, if it’s a learning about how your audience engages with you, the next action could be that this gets captured in your audience persona. 

#2 How are you performing against your KPIs?
A report should help you understand how you are tracking against KPIs. If it looks like you are not going to hit your KPIs, ask your agency why and consider if corrective action needs to be taken to achieve your targets. 

#3 Look for trends
It’s important to look at results over time and identify trends in the results. It can be normal to see small levels of fluctuation throughout a social media campaign, so you also want to look at the overall picture and trends over time. 

#4 Identify what's working
The report you receive from your agency should look to identify what aspects of the campaign are working well so you can build on these successes, and what is not working well so that you can minimise usage of those variables in the future. The report could analyse a range of variables to see what is driving the most of your desired action such as messaging, influencers, channels, scheduling, and paid media targeting.

#5 Get access to the raw data 
If you don't have direct access to the social accounts or advertising accounts, then ask your agency for access to the raw data from the social media platforms, so that your organisation can analyse further at a later date, or store to inform company performance benchmarks. If you don't have the data, this will limit the ability for further analysis. 

When your campaign isn't performing as expected, it's important to understand why.
If your report shows your campaign isn't going as well as you had hoped, there are a few questions you can ask yourself, and your agency, to help diagnose the possible cause and optimise your activities.
  1. Is your content interesting to your target audience? Are you talking about your company's interests too much? Good content addresses your audience's interests or pain points. Can you find a shared interest that meets both the company and audience needs?
  2. Are you offering something valuable in exchange for their attention and time? Was it entertaining, educational, inspirational or useful?
  3. Is your call-to-action (CTA) clear? Check your CTA hasn’t been lost and that it’s clear how people should engage with your content. It’s also important to remember that people will often only take one action, so check that you’re not expecting them to do too many things.
  4. Is your journey optimised? Make sure there aren't too many barriers to engagement, your website is user-friendly, and your content is mobile-friendly.
  5. Are you reaching the right audience? Make sure you're targeting the right people with your content.
  6. Is your asset optimised for social media? Does it stand out and get noticed on the platform or is your audience simply scrolling past? 
Remember to have fun and be creative with your social media campaigns!

Use the data to guide your decisions, but don't be afraid to try new things and experiment to see what works best for your audience.

Want to know more?

Proving the value of social media is a common challenge faced by healthcare and pharmaceutical businesses. Learn how to in this specialised mini-course on Measuring Success.

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