Monitoring & Reporting for Social Media Success

• #How To
• #Journals
• #Social Media

What it’s all about and why monitoring & reporting are so important for long-term success

If you want to be successful on social media platforms, you can’t do without reporting and monitoring. This helps to recognize and optimize successes and failures and supports regular critical scrutiny of the social media strategy.

But what is behind it, what is the difference between reporting and monitoring, and how does it help us achieve long-term success in social networks?

The difference

Before we go into the relevance of these two processes it is important to know the difference.

Monitoring is to be understood as a kind of continuous observation of social media. It is used to measure key figures, the so-called KPIs (key performance indicators – key figures with which activities are presented in a comprehensible way), in order to regularly control and analyze the defined goals.
The aim of monitoring is to draw short-term conclusions and quickly optimize processes.

Reporting is about creating transparency in order to meaningfully support and define decisions for further action. Reporting provides information about forecasts, possible trends, and general explanations and correlations about, for example, all the social media channels used.
The aim of reporting is to provide an overview of the most important key figures of the social media channels within a certain period of time in order to be able to draw lessons from them.

The relevance of monitoring

As mentioned earlier, it is imperative for companies to conduct monitoring and reporting in order to achieve long-term success with their social media channels. But why is it so important for us?

The social media world is fast-moving and constantly changing. The interests of the community and the content that is present are also constantly changing. A company must therefore continuously monitor how the published content is received by followers, how many people it has reached and whether the right target group has been addressed. So this is where monitoring comes into play. By regularly checking the results of, for example, a posting, short-term changes can be incorporated into the social media strategy and there is the opportunity to test new formats and optimize existing ones before these proposed changes are processed in reporting.

It enables any problems to be found and solved promptly and influences the implementation of the objective. The insights of the individual posts and stories, for example, are ideal for carrying out monitoring. These insights are regularly created by the platforms and can be accessed at any time.

The relevance of reporting

After monitoring and analyzing the postings throughout, it is also very important for companies to make a regular analysis on all the important metrics and discuss them in detail. This is where reporting becomes an important process. So, one should look at which content, for example, did well in the last month, which content can be improved or even should be deleted from the editorial plan and what changes or news there are.

Reporting is also an excellent way to brainstorm with the relevant employees to bring new and fresh input to the social media channels. It is important that the social media goals are always present and that the forecasts and ideas are aligned with them.

In a social media reporting, the following metrics are relevant, among others:

• Number of posts and followers (as well as increase and decrease, if applicable).
• Average number of likes, comments, shares
• Average impressions
• Reach
• Number of stories
• Average story views
• Number of link clicks
• Number of sticker taps

The most important things summarized:

• Monitoring provides information on the current status of the success of the social media channels
• Reporting supports the long-term structuring of a company’s social media strategy.
• In both cases, the focus should be on the most relevant KPIs.
• With monitoring, timely solutions can be found for problems that arise

Both processes lead to the long-term success of the existing social media channels and support the achievement of the set marketing and corporate goals. An overview of all relevant information is created and helps to optimize and improve processes and to introduce new, fresh ideas into the content.

A well-executed reporting & monitoring benefits the companies for the most part, but also takes into account the interests of the followers, allowing them to enjoy the content they are most interested in.