How to Build a Monthly Social Media Report to Track Your Law Firm’s Success

The best way to keep track of your social media growth and strategy – as well as report to executives or your team – is to create a monthly social media report. A monthly report will give you a complete view of your social media’s performance as well as specific insights that can help you to optimize your efforts over time. Here are our top tips for building a valuable monthly report to track your law firm’s social media success. 

3 Best Practices for Building Your Law Firm’s Social Media Report

1. Identify Your Social Media Marketing Goals

First things first, what you include in your law firm’s social media report is completely dependent on your social media goals. Are you trying to build engagement? Drive visitors to your website? Gain leads? Whatever your priorities, your social media marketing goals should always tie back to your law firm’s short- and long-term business goals.

For example, If you’re looking to build awareness (you’re a new law firm or you’re launching a new practice area), your engagement and follower metrics are the most important. Rather, if you’re trying to drive people to your website or campaign landing pages, your reports should focus on website clicks.

2. Keep It Short and Sweet

Keep your reporting short and sweet. Look at the report as a highlight reel that demonstrates the value of your day-to-day social activities, while also making sense of the data you’ve gained. In short, you want to present your social media report in a way that ties together your goals, your methods for achieving them, and your outcomes.

3. Decide on Format

Which reporting style works best for your team? The most common way to track analytics is an excel document, but you can also create a PDF or a Google Slides/PowerPoint deck. A PDF is great for sending out to others via email, while a slide deck is best for actually presenting to people. 

The 3 Main Sections of Your Law Firm’s Social Media Report

Now we’re going to dive into how you can actually create your social media report. We’ll walk you through each section of what your social media report should include.

Section 1: Monthly Overview

Begin with a snapshot of your overall efforts. Start with a wider view and then hone in on specific key performance indicators (KPIs). You can use a third-party tool like HubSpot to pull this data. It’s also a smart idea to include a place for copy-and-pasting your most successful posts for the month. 

Section 2: Platform Breakdowns

Next, you’ll dive into each specific platform, and each will have its own metrics for measuring success. For instance, on YouTube, the success metric you may look to measure is video views while on LinkedIn it might be website traffic or follower growth. We suggest having a section for each platform, where each section includes: 

1. Strategy:

A brief overview of what you did this month to achieve your goals (new campaigns, etc). 

2. Month-over-month growth:

Include monthly metrics as well as the growth from the previous month. To obtain this number, subtract the metric from the previous month from the current month. Then divide the result by the previous month’s metric and multiply by 100. We suggest calculating in Excel and then transferring the data to your preferred report format. 

3. Growth and wins:

Track growth by looking back at previous monthly reports. Also look at small wins that can help better guide your strategy over time. 

4. Insights:

Here is where you make sense of what the metrics you’ve shown actually mean. You want to dig into the “why” of the numbers. Maybe you discovered a specific type of content that resonates well with your firm’s target audience? Or a thought leader in your industry gave you a shoutout? Also, if you tried something new and it didn’t work, that’s still an insight you can use for the future!

Section 3: Key Learnings and Takeaways for the Month

In the last section of your law firm’s social media report, wrap up the conclusive information you have while also addressing the big picture. Is there something that worked really well? Perhaps you discovered video content performs exceptionally well on Instagram, and you want to create more videos. Or maybe content surrounding a specific practice area is bringing a ton of traffic to your website, so you suggest ramping up those efforts.

Ask yourself the following: 

1. What worked?

You can look to your “growth and wins” section for this information. Remember to include numerical “proof”. 

2. What didn’t work?

Don’t be afraid to mention any flops in your law firm’s social media report. Be transparent and explain what you’ll do about it. 

3. Did you discover new opportunities?

Social media platforms are constantly changing and evolving. While it’s likely your team or stakeholders aren’t aware of all the changes, your law firm’s monthly social media report is a great place to make them known.

Think of your “opportunities” as a section for updates. For instance, if LinkedIn has launched a feature, let them know you’ll be testing it out and how you plan to use it to your advantage. Or if you’re planning to ramp up your LinkedIn or Instagram Stories, pitch a few ideas you have to grab your audience’s attention.

It’s important to make sure you have access to all of the appropriate data in order to build your report. There are plenty of third-parties tools that will help you capture and interpret data (we recommend HubSpot), or you can use social media’s specific platform analytics.

[Related] 10 of the Best Social Media Analytics Tools for Law Firm Marketers

Takeaway

Building your law firm’s social media report involves a lot more than simply pulling numbers. Social analytics provide the data, but thorough reporting will help legal marketers to test and tweak content strategy in order to better meet firm goals.

Do you need help measuring and analyzing social media data in order to make the most of your law firm’s campaigns? We can help! We can train your team on how to measure and optimize campaigns or we can manage your social media accounts for you. Contact us today if you’d like to discuss how we can help you meet your unique goals.