In a nutshell: Social media reporting presents multiple challenges hindering your progress. From measuring ROI and tracking competitors to the lack of integration and customization of reports, marketers face enormous difficulties, preventing them from acting upon key decisions. However, marketing automation tools are game changers because they simplify and streamline the reporting process. They help you enhance the effectiveness of your social media strategies by reflecting on critical insights that move your business forward.
If you are creating a social media report from scratch, you already know how complex and time-consuming the process is.
You’ll invest valuable time tracking vital metrics from each social media platform. Then, you'll have to manually gather these insights in Google Sheets and perform calculations to justify the rationale behind your social media strategy formulation.
Getting this done can feel arduous. This is where you can rely on marketing automation tools to simplify and elevate your social media reporting.
Marketing automation tools eliminate the chaos by streamlining the entire social media reporting process. They help you gather relevant data, automatically track key metrics, prepare custom reports and dashboards, and present a consolidated view of your social media performance.
With that being said, we’ll explore the eight common social media reporting challenges and how marketing automation tools can be the best solution to address these issues.
Let’s get started.
Eight common social media reporting challenges
In this section, let’s assess the prevalent social media reporting challenges that greatly impact your data-driven decision-making.
1. Difficulty in measuring ROI
According to a Social Insider survey, 35% of marketers feel that ROI reporting is highly challenging. Measuring ROI is a key bottleneck with multiple social media platforms, as various factors are involved in getting the bigger picture.
For example, if a customer finds your product on Facebook, explores it on Pinterest and finally converts to your website. This attribution complexity requires advanced analytics to track the ROI, as native analytics does not offer such in-depth insights.
Since every social media platform has its own metrics and audience behavior, establishing a uniform ROI calculation becomes problematic, which might greatly affect the revenue outcome.
While these remain the subset of ROI reporting challenges, marketers often find it difficult to extract direct ROI results due to the complexity of tracking conversions from different social media platforms.
2. Tracking Competitor Performance
Tracking your competitors on social media uncovers key insights into how they engage with your target audience, helping you stay ahead. However, the challenge is that native analytics restrict access to your competitor’s data, making it difficult to track insights manually.
Without direct access to competitor analytics, your client reports will contain only surface-level metrics, missing key details that reflect your competitors’ performance. This lack of precision makes it harder for your teams to set benchmarks, develop informed strategies, and respond to ever-changing social trends.
3. Dealing with fragmented data
Imagine you manage your client’s social media campaign and juggle the following tabs: Facebook showing high engagement with low reach, Instagram indicating strong follower growth with average conversions, and Twitter with decent engagement and minimal CTR.
Consolidating these crucial insights is challenging as every social media platform incorporates a different analytical approach.
This inefficiency in bringing isolated data together complicates the ability to gauge holistic performance insights, impacting the effectiveness of your client’s campaign. Without a unified view, you miss out on critical social media metrics that could drive future success, putting your marketing efforts at stake.
4. Inconsistent metrics and KPIs
Inconsistency in analyzing social media metrics and KPIs makes it difficult to arrive at a unified solution. For example, on Facebook, engagement might include likes, comments, shares, and saves, whereas on Twitter, the engagement is counted as likes, retweets, and replies.
As a result, if your Facebook post receives 500 engagements while the same post on Twitter garners 300 engagements, you cannot conclude that your engagement on Facebook was better than Twitter without understanding how the same metric is calculated differently on both platforms.
This lack of standardization of metrics causes discrepancies in measuring the effectiveness of your social media performance across platforms. Moreover, the misalignment between KPIs causes frustration and a lack of trust in the reporting process.
5. Lack of customization in reports
By default, native analytics on social media offers limited options for customizing reports. You can export the CSV data, but you will struggle with lackluster insights. Additionally, if your business requires you to present tailored reports for different campaigns, it turns out to be a monumental task and a barrier to agile decision-making.
This inflexibility and out-of-box customization options impact existing resources, take huge amounts of time, and make it harder for you to extract meaningful insights quickly, slowing down the pace of executing your social media goals.
6. Limited access to real-time data
Change is inevitable in social media. To stay ahead, you need access to real-time data to identify key trends and transform opportunities into success. Unfortunately, due to their built-in limitations, social media platforms deliver only static insights, impacting your strategic outcome.
For example, you run a campaign on Twitter. You need to visualize real-time data to uncover key insights. However, if you view the report only after the campaign concludes, the opportunities for improvement may have already been missed. The rigidity in accessing real-time data restricts the ability to make timely adjustments, which significantly affects your conversions and ROI.
7. Multiple reporting dashboards
Managing multiple reporting dashboards poses several challenges in your reporting process. Each dashboard has its unique design, functionality, and metrics reliability, which can overwhelm your reporting insights.
This inadequacy of unified reporting can lead to misinterpretation, undermining credible insights. Consequently, it increases the complexity of decision-making, hindering the effective communication of holistic performance to stakeholders.
8. Time-consuming manual reporting
Manually preparing social media reports is tedious and time-consuming, often taking days or weeks. In addition to draining resources, this process also increases the risk of errors, affecting critical strategic decisions.
According to a study, 37% of businesses waste marketing spend due to poor data quality. The below statistics clearly explain the consequences of managing inefficient data.
Image Source: Marketing Evolution
Image Source: Marketing EvolutionThe result is quite obvious: wasted time on inaccurate data leads to misguided decisions, a possible outcome of manual reporting. This can shake up your entire business’s social media strategy and revenue.
How Marketing Automation Tools Can Help Overcome These Challenges
Marketing automation tools help you overcome social media reporting challenges by integrating data, automating report generation, standardizing KPIs, and offering centralized dashboards to enhance social media performance analysis. These features are found in most of the top marketing automation systems online.
With that said, let’s look closer at the key points that signify the value of marketing automation tools in amplifying your social media reporting game.
1. Accurate ROI tracking
Marketing automation tools deliver crystal-clear insights by breaking down complex revenue attribution and conversion paths into actionable insights. Here’s how marketing automation tools help with accurate ROI tracking:
- Multi-touch attribution models can reveal a customer’s social media journey before purchasing.
- By integrating cost-based metrics, you can visualize the ROAS for each social media campaign and effectively allocate the best resources.
- Personalized campaign tracking lets you track which campaigns generate the highest ROI, assisting in data-driven adjustments and future decisions.
- Align content-specific ROI, such as engagement metrics (shares, saves, likes, etc.), with conversions (purchases, sign-ups, etc.) to dive deep into content strategy.
From the above key points, it's evident that marketing automation tools let you garner precise ROI insights by directly linking your social media efforts to business outcomes. With built-in ROI tracking, you can make data-driven decisions that open up your path to progress.
2. Customizable reporting dashboards
Did you know it costs $18,000 to create a new dashboard report? This is a huge amount and exceeds your entire business budget. The cost and time double when personalizing insights takes a toll on your social media reporting insights.
Image Source: ThoughtSpotMarketing automation tools eliminate the above struggles of customizing social media dashboards. Through the drag-and-drop interface, you can tailor key metrics, KPIs, widgets, charts, etc. that are specifically tied to your campaign outcome, accelerating your data-driven decision-making.
The best part is that these tools integrate with multiple social media platforms, allowing you to effectively track cross-channel performance. This makes it easier to gather cohesive data and analyze which social media channels garner the most engagement and conversions, optimizing your strategy.
Overall, marketing automation tools let you create visually consistent social media dashboards that communicate compelling insights to your stakeholders. Eventually, you can transcend with trusted insights that matter.
3. Enhanced Competitor Analysis
You no longer have to manually visit every social media competitor’s profile to analyze their performance — marketing automation tools are here to transform the approach.
The marketing automation tools bring together key competitor insights under one dashboard. You can compare performance benchmarks, tap into the best and least-performing content trends, monitor the share of voice, competitor’s audience engagement, and publishing behavior, and discover new areas of opportunity to attract relevant audiences.
Thus, you can deliver actionable social media reports containing a comprehensive picture of your competitors. With these key insights, you can stay ahead in the social media landscape, connect meaningfully with your audience, outshine your competitors, and win over your customers.
4. Increased data accuracy
Through built-in data validation and seamless data flow, marketing automation tools ensure that your social media reporting is consistent across all platforms, eliminating the struggles of manual data entry.
A survey has shown that 87% of people prefer high-quality data for improved marketing performance success.
Image Source: Marketing EvolutionThis shows how enhanced data is vital in transforming your decision-making process. It ensures that the information used in the reporting process is consistent, accurate, and valuable. With marketing automation tools, you can effectively leverage reliable data at your fingertips for optimizing your social media performance.
5. Delivering real-time data and insights
Using marketing automation tools, you can set up real-time reporting dashboards that extract data from different social media platforms. They regularly aggregate and refresh key metrics like traffic, engagement, and conversions, ensuring you get updated reports for improved decision-making.
Besides tracking real-time metrics, marketing automation tools provide practical insights into your brand’s social media conversations and sentiment. By monitoring keywords, mentions, comments, and reviews, you can quickly act on key issues and address your customer’s concerns, mitigating the impact.
For example, if a customer posts a negative review about your product quality on social media, marketing automation tools enable you to instantly track and resolve the issue by responding at the right time. This proactive approach builds trust and strengthens your relationship with the customer.
Thus, a robust marketing automation tool encompasses continuous campaign analysis, tracking audience behavior, and monitoring metrics in real time to capitalize on exciting opportunities.
6. Standardization of social media KPIs
Standardization refers to consistently recording and measuring certain KPIs to achieve business excellence. Marketing automation helps you unleash this effectiveness by delivering a consistent tracking approach. For example, metrics such as “engagement rate” and “conversion rate” mean the same for all your social media campaigns.
By implementing uniform metric calculation, you can eliminate ambiguity and ensure all your team members interpret the same results. This standardization facilitates better communication with clients and stakeholders, improving transparency and collaboration to improve your decision-making.
7. Automated reporting
Marketing automation tools help you overcome the “traditional reporting” syndrome by helping you deliver automated social media reports to clients. These tools automatically collect and customize relevant social media KPIs tailored to your requirements and let you schedule reports for delivery at definite intervals.
Your entire social media reporting process is streamlined, ensuring that your data is presented in a well-structured manner. This enables you to swiftly focus on actionable strategy and execution rather than spending time gathering data and sending reports manually to every client.
Conclusion
You’ve reached the end of the article. Now, you’ll have a clear idea of how the marketing automation tools help you overcome the common social media reporting challenges. As social media constantly evolves, dealing with yesterday’s data is old news. With the help of marketing automation tools, you can act in the present by gathering real-time social media reporting insights at the right time.
The scope of marketing automation tools doesn’t rely only on tracking metrics — they enable timely actions, transforming your social media reporting into winning opportunities. They help you focus on social media insights that improve your bottom line.
