creating a weekly social media report: how to make an impression with your boss
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Creating a Weekly Social Media Report:How to Make an Impression WithYour BossBy Kevin Shively – March 25, 2014
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Working at Simply Measured, we interact with community and social media managers on adaily basis. A common misconception is that this role gets to play on Twitter all day, but thereality is that CMs are focused on a myriad of tasks every day: engaging their community,converting traffic, adding value, building the brand, connecting with influencers, creatingcontent…AND playing on Twitter. If you work in social media, you know as well as I do that
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the list goes on.
With such a sprawling task list and an even more diverse set of goals, it can be tough toparlay that activity into a meaningful and concise weekly summary for your team or boss.How can Community Managers summarize what our wins, losses, and lessons of the weekwere? While you may run a ton of reports and analyze a whole slew of metrics for your ownprograms, your boss doesn’t need – or want – every detail.
I sat down with our own Community Manager Jade Furubayashi, and we hashed out thesetips for creating a solid weekly summary to share with your team.
5 Tips For Creating a Meaningful Weekly Report
1. Start with a Snapshot:
Your weekly report should operate the same way a piece of content would: like a funnel.Start large, with a complete snapshot overview of your “social health” and trends fromacross all your key social channels.
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This chart, from Simply Measured’s Cross-Channel Social Performance Report, highlights keymetrics from your owned channels, highlighting audience, activity, and engagement, whileshowcasing period-over-period changes to help highlight growth or loss of traction over theprevious week.
To make your weekly summary even easier, all Simply Measured reports are directlyexportable to Powerpoint, emailable at the click of a button, or even Tweetable if you’refeeling particularly transparent about your week:
“I usually include this metric snapshot in a slide, and then below it will have 3-4 takeawaysthat set up the rest of my report,” says Furubayashi. “This lets me set the tone right off thebat, but also get any big points on my boss’s radar quickly. You don’t want to bury the lead.”
2. Focus on Goals:
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After presenting your snapshot, your next step should be to focus on your goals and the KPIssurrounding them. If you have specific metrics you’re reaching for each week, month, orquarter, hone in on those, and address the impact you made. If your goal has been to drivemore traffic to your blog from Twitter, focus on those click-thrus.
This component of your report should focus on easy-to-track numbers so that you can giveweek-over-week summaries of how well you’ve done, and what might be missing. The sampleabove
“Since we have a heavy focus on content here, I spend quite a bit of time analyzing sitetraffic” says Furubayashi, “When I’m looking at this myself, I use our blog report and GoogleAnalytics to look at specific campaign UTMs, but for this purpose, I share a chart from oursocial traffic report. It showcases trends and totals for all of our major social channels.”
3. Zero in on Key Initiatives
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If your main activity for the week was engaging with influencers, identify the progress madeto that point.
The point here is to focus. Don’t overwhelm your boss with 8,000 charts – they don’t care.The value of your data is only as strong as your ability to use it. In this context, that meansnot overwhelming with unneeded metrics. Focus on what you and your boss have decided isimportant and save the extraneous stuff for your own analysis.
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“Look, I get it. There are a lot of cool charts, and you want to share EVERYTHING you didthis week,” says Furubayashi. “But it’s important to keep it simple and focus on your mainobjectives and value-drivers. One or two slides max for this section.”
4. Identify Opportunities:
Your weekly report shouldn’t be strictly for looking back. The purpose any measurement orreporting is to understand what happened, so you can use it to plan for the future. Takesome time to analyze the data you’ve shared and speak to the opportunities to double downor correct mistakes. Without a little honest reflection, you’re wasting your boss’s time, andyour own.
“I always include a slide of Key Learnings from the week, and another one with my plan forthe coming week,” says Furubayashi. “This lets me point out areas where I missed the markin a constructive way, and showcase my plan to fix them. It also gives me an opportunity totalk about why I won in specific areas and how I plan on investing more in that area.”
5. Don’t Sugar-coat it:
The best advice I can give for your weekly report is to be honest with yourself, and honestwith your boss. We all want to position ourselves as successes, but it’s not constructive todo so without addressing our failures. This is the immense – and sometimes ignored – valueof social data; we’re able to see exactly where we went wrong, and address the issue. Don’tignore this. If a campaign failed to achieve the results you were hoping for, there is a lot youcan learn from it. Believe it or not, your boss will appreciate your ability to recognize this.
“I may geek out over data more than the average CM, but when an initiative doesn’t work
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out, I don’t consider it over,” says Furubayashi. “It means I get to dig into the data aroundthe campaign to figure out where I went wrong. It’s like a puzzle. When I’m putting my reporttogether, I always make sure to call out those things and let my boss know I’ll be doing that.”
6. Keep it Short:
You have to put this together every week. Don’t make more work for yourself. It’s alsoimportant to remember that your boss has to read it every week and he or she won’t wantto take on a novel each time.
“Your boss is probably pretty busy, so it’s best to keep it short, efficient and informative.Make sure your weekly review showcases the high level stats and plans, but hold off on thenitty-gritty details. Every boss appreciates getting quickly to the point.”
How do you develop your weekly report? What are the most important areas offocus? Let us know in the comments!
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Kevin ShivelyAs Sr. Content Marketing Manager, editor of the Simply Measured blog, cohost ofthe #SimplyMeasured podcast, and generally delightful person, my job is to tellstories to the internet...You're welcome internet.
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Anneliz Hannan • a year ago
Very helpful, I especially liked the automated export to a Powerpoint slide 2△ ▽
• Reply •
andrew everett • 3 days ago
Very useful, as you say, keep it short, keep it simple △ ▽
• Reply •
Hilary • 17 days ago
Great insights about reporting efficiently! Thank you △ ▽
• Reply •
LFMC • 2 months ago
Very informative. I was just researching something for a client and came across this. I will propose it to my client.Thanks.
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Call Center RD • 7 months ago
Excellent! △ ▽
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chill morgan • 8 months ago
Thank you for linking me to CMO.com it's a very resourceful site △ ▽
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Storewars News • a year ago
Really informative article. Read this recently: In Tokyo, Samsung Legal Loses Infringement Case against Apple,thought I’d share it. Check it here: http://goo.gl/GikYEc
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