Annual reporting is an important tool for demonstrating the success of social media measures. It serves as a basis for evaluation and decision-making and enables important conclusions to be drawn for the following year. But what is important when creating it?

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The year is drawing to a close. For those responsible for social media, this means that they should now, at the latest, provide evidence of the value that social media brings to their company with their year-end reporting. The challenges for many marketers include the mass of information that has to be processed, but also the comprehensible preparation - especially as the recipients of the reporting often have little or no connection to social media.

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The social media annual report serves as an evaluation and decision-making basis for social media measures over the last 365 days and should help to set the strategic course for the coming year in terms of targeted social media marketing. At the same time, the social media annual report should be in no way inferior to the content in terms of visual presentation. In order for an annual social media report to meet this requirement, there are a few aspects that should be taken into account when creating it. We have compiled these for you in this article based on our many years of experience in the field of B2B social media.

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Alignment with the addressee of the annual social media report

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Every marketer knows how important it is to know their target group and to align the message to be placed with them. Just as you target your social media marketing campaigns to a specific audience and tailor your messaging accordingly, you should also approach your annual social media reporting in the same way. If you don't already know, find out who your annual report is for and, more importantly, with what purpose. The format of your annual report should be adapted to the addressee (e.g. CFO, Head of Marketing, Head of Sales or social media team). This is because different recipients have different reporting requirements and want to see different data.

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Corporate and marketing goals as the basis for annual social media reporting

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There are plenty of key figures and metrics for measuring social media marketing measures. In terms of annual social media reporting, they are both a curse and a blessing for those responsible for social media in the company. From the abundance of available key figures, it is now important to highlight the most relevant data and derivations. But which key figures make sense for your individual annual reporting? Ideally, your social media marketing is aligned with the overarching corporate or marketing objectives and helps to achieve these objectives. For example, an overarching corporate goal could be growth in a specific business area. This could result in the marketing objective of "marketing a specific product or service". The resulting communication goal of "increasing awareness of product xy" could then be supported by social media marketing measures. If you manage to demonstrate the positive influence on overarching corporate and marketing objectives in your annual social media reporting, experience has shown that this will help you to find more open ears, particularly at management and decision-maker level.

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Format and basic structure of an annual social media report

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As mentioned above, your annual social media reporting should be geared towards the requirements of the respective addressee. In this respect, the structure can be customized accordingly. As an example of an annual report aimed at a person with a management function, experience has shown that the following format and structure have proven successful.

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Even an annual social media report should, can and must be fun to read. Huge and confusing Excel tables that even require an explanation or introduction on how to read the data correctly should not be the format you want to use to communicate your success in social media. Experience has shown that PowerPoint is particularly well suited to reducing complexity and presenting information simply for an annual social media report. Don't bore your recipients with bare figures, but instead use storytelling and present your successes visually - especially with real examples of campaigns and their results.

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When setting up the project, first try to illuminate the big picture and then gradually go into the details. Take the strategically important bird's eye view and then follow this up with a classification and final detailed results. A management summary summarizes the most important results and findings from the last social media year on no more than one slide. It concentrates on the essential information. Details and background information are left out and can be found in the reporting if required.

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Comprehensible preparation and comparability of key figures

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Let's assume you have to report to the CFO of your company, a person with a lot of budget responsibility - including for marketing - as well as a lot of experience in finance but hardly any experience in social media marketing. The challenge now is to present the success of your social media marketing measures in the language of the CFO and to make it as easy as possible for this person to perceive the presented key figures in a positive light. Benchmarks and comparative values are required so that a CFO from outside the field can also assess the results of your work in the area of social media as good or bad.

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However, a comparison is often difficult due to the abundance of possible KPIs and the need for differentiation when interpreting these KPIs in the relevant context. This is precisely because performance indicators in social media are always directly related to the campaign setup and format. This means that you cannot directly compare the CPC of campaigns whose goal was to generate as much website traffic as possible with campaigns that were optimized for maximum reach. In the interests of good comparability, it is advisable to compare key figures that are as superordinate as possible and comparable across all channels for annual reporting. There are many sources, such as sector or industry studies, with whose key figures you can compare your own performance. However, as the collection of data is often very different and non-transparent, it is advisable to focus on your own performance as a reliable benchmark in order to continuously work on your own performance.

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Learning from the annual social media reporting and making strategic deductions

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As mentioned at the beginning, the social media annual reporting should help to set the strategic course for the coming year in terms of targeted social media marketing. So try to use the results to record what has worked better or worse over time in order to define a strategic direction that will influence individual measures in the coming year.

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In addition, keep an eye on other framework conditions and strategic influencing factors in the area of social media and categorize them for yourself. One such strategic influencing factor relating to your social media marketing performance could be the ever-decreasing organic reach in social networks. If your annual reporting for 2018 performs worse than in the previous year in terms of organic posts on social media, a strategic deduction for social media in 2019 could be to enter into social advertising (purchasing reach).

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By the way, you should compare your 2018 annual reporting with the 2019 social media trends - read our analyses, strategies and recommendations for action here

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This article appeared as a guest post on marconomy.de, the specialist portal for B2B marketing