How-To Create an Annual Report Based on Significant Key Figures

We take a look back at an eventful year 2020 and show you how to review your social media profiles. How has your growth developed? Has your reach grown? These are all questions you should ask yourself at the end of the year. We show you what is important when creating an annual report and which key figures you should definitely include in your reporting. Based on the relevant key figures, you can find out how your profiles performed in 2020. 

Key Figures and Key Performance Indicators 

The terms key figures and key performance indicators are often used as synonyms of each other. A concrete distinction can be made here:

• Key Figures: A key figure is a directly measurable value. Example: Number of Fans
• Key Performance Indicators: Combining a key figure with a specific goal makes it a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Example: I want to double my number of Fans by the end of 2020.

Key performance indicators form the basis for KPIs and the basis for a social media reporting.

Set your Goals

Your report is based on the social media goals of your company. Before deciding which key figures are relevant for you, you should ask yourself what goals you want to achieve and then decide what your KPIs are. Do you want to expand your reach, increase your link clicks or generate more leads? The SMART principle helps you define your goals and your KPIs:

1. Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.

2. Measurable: Use measurable numbers, such as follower growth, engagement, or paid and organic reach to describe your goal. To measure these metrics, social media tools like Fanpage Karma can be used.

3. Achievable: Your goal has to be achievable and realistic. Increasing the number of your followers from 100 to 100,000 followers in a month, for example, is an unrealistic goal. 

4. Relevance: A relevant social media marketing goal is in accordance with the success of your company. 

5. Time-based: If your goal isn’t time-bound, it’s hard to measure.

This helps you to specify your goals. “I want to grow a lot” becomes “I want to increase the number of followers on Instagram from 5,000 to 20,000 in one year. Clear goals make it easier for you to evaluate your performance at the end of the year.

It is also helpful to look at key figures based on the customer journey and to assign them to individual phases. Three key figures in particular can be listed along the different phases:

• Awareness: This phase is about raising awareness of your company and boosting your image. 
• Engagement: The figures show you how well you succeed in getting your fans and followers to interact with you.
• Conversion/Action: Your goal is to get users to take specific actions like clicking a link or subscribing to a newsletter. 

Think about how much internal work your team has to do. From this, you can derive appropriate key figures, which will help your team to achieve its goals. These include the post rate or the budget available for marketing.

Essential Key Figures 

Monitoring and measuring your KPIs helps you to keep track of developments on your social media profiles and make adjustments where necessary. Here’s a selection of important KPIs along the three phases of the customer journey.

Internal Metrics

Number of Posts

How many posts were published by your team per social network in a given time period, for example on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter? 

Posts per Day

How many posts were published on a platform on average per day?

Type of Post 

What is the percentage of different post formats? For example, how many posts are text, videos, images, stories, etc.?

Topics of Posts

What is the percentage share by topic of the posts? For example, special offers, product presentations or blog posts?

Budget

What is the budget available to your marketing team?

Awareness Metrics

Fans and Follower

One of the clearest metrics is the number of users who have chosen to follow you and your content on a social network. On Facebook, these are called fans, on Instagram and Twitter they are called followers. The number of followers is a public metric that can be found on a profile.

Post Reach

How many users have seen your post in a given period? Find out the range of a single post. You can be even more precise here and separate organic (unpaid), paid and viral reach.

Potential Reach

In addition to the actual reach, this key figure helps you find out how many users might have seen your post. So if a follower shares your post, other users will also see it and thus help to increase your potential reach. In this case, two to five percent of the actual reach is calculated.

Story Reach 

Stories can be found in almost every social media network. Similar to post reach, story reach shows you how many users have watched your story in a given time period.

Video Views

Since videos are becoming more and more important, you should keep an eye on them. This key figure tells you how often your video was viewed on a social network. 

Engagement Metrics

Comments

Comments are all the messages you can revive under a post on your social media profile. For example, you can receive feedback on content or products.

Interactions

How do your followers actually interact with your content? This can be easily seen in the interactions. Depending on the network, this key figure is structured differently. For Facebook, this is the number of reactions, comments and shares on posts in a certain period of time. For Instagram, it is the number of likes and comments on posts over a specific time period. 

Engagement Rate

With this key figure you can find out how often a follower has interacted with your content on average.  The score is the sum of the interactions divided by the reach of your site. By multiplying the value by hundred, you get the percentage rate. For Facebook, you can use the following calculation: 

Likes + Comments + Shares / Reach x 100 = Engagement 

The engagement rate helps you to find out which content works best with your audience and which not. Keep the individual platforms and their key figures in mind when calculating the rate. On Twitter, for example, interactions include the number of comments, retweets and likes on tweets. 

Conversion Metrics

Click Through Rate (CTR)

An important key figure for content including links. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on a link by the number of impressions of a post. 

Conversion Rate

In addition to the pure number of conversion events, the conversion rate goes into even more detail. The figure is calculated from the number of conversions divided by the total traffic over a period. Conversions can be various events, such as subscriptions to a newsletter, downloads of a template or purchases of a product. A high conversion rate is an indication of successful content.

New Visitors – Conversion 

When dealing with conversions, it is relevant to see how many converted users are new visitors. How many users who clicked a link landed on your website for the first time?

Returning Visitors – Conversion  

Accordingly, you have to ask how many users have been there before? 

Social Media Conversion

It is important to know how many conversions happened through social media campaigns. If a user subscribes to your newsletter after seeing a social media ad, that’s a social media conversion. Find out the number of social media conversions in your tracking tool or campaign manager and divide it by the total number of conversions. 

ROI (Return on Investment)

It is not only the results that are important, you also need to know how your efforts relate to your outcomes. Use the following calculation to determine the ROI: 

Profit / Investment x 100 = ROI

Let’s say you run a social media campaign to sell shoes worth 80 €. The cost of the campaign is 2000 € and you made 100 purchases at the end.

((100×80)- 2000 / 2000) x 100)=300

That makes a ROI of 300 %. You have earned far more with the campaign than you spent.

Create your Report

Pure numbers do not make a good reporting. A visual presentation of metrics and results gives your report a professional look and makes it easier to understand for colleagues and clients. Create graphics to show your results and combine them into one report. Tools like Fanpage Karma help you to work with different designs and to increase the quality of your report. You can create your own annual report and present your achievements. 

You should also compare your profiles with those of your competitors. In this way, you can put the development of individual key figures and goals into the context of your competitors and evaluate them beyond the boundaries of your company. You can ask yourself, how your profile has grown in comparison to the competition or who has achieved the best engagement in the industry.

Key Learnings and Next Steps

Once you have successfully created your report, it’s time to think about the key learnings and upcoming steps. After all, the evaluation reveals a lot about your past year and shows you which measures were successful and which were not. With the knowledge gained from the key figures, you can better decide what you can improve. If your key figures show you that videos are not well received by your target group, for example, you might decide to publish fewer videos and post more galleries. 

Conclusion

A reporting that summarizes the successes of the past year is a must in social media management. Use your reporting to reflect and to adjust your strategy for the coming year. It shows all achievements and gives your team an overview of all social media activities. Decide on metrics that match your goals so that you can successfully evaluate your actions. There is a wealth of metrics that play a role in social media marketing. Which ones you should pay attention to depends on your company’s goals. Clearly defining your objectives and keeping track of which activities help to achieve your KPIs and which do not, nothing can stop you from being successful in the year to come.