Social Media Analytics and Reporting in Alexandria

Report the enquiries, not the audience

Followers, reach and impressions describe the account. Enquiries received, questions answered and orders that followed describe the business, and those are two different reports that frequently point in opposite directions. Where the inbox is the sales channel, a report that does not count what arrived there has measured the wrong thing.

The numbers that only ever rise are the least useful

Follower counts almost never go down, which makes them comfortable and nearly worthless as a management tool, since a number that cannot deliver bad news cannot tell you to change anything. The figures worth reporting are the ones capable of falling. Anything that only improves is decoration on a report rather than information in it.

What Wink reports

Reporting is built around decisions rather than around available data:

• Enquiries received through messages and comments, counted properly
• Response times, since that is the metric this account is judged on
• Which content produced conversations rather than which got applause
• What people kept asking, as a direct instruction for next month
• Where the account lost people, including the questions never answered
• A short read of what will change as a result
• The same small set of figures each month so trends are visible

Counting enquiries is harder than it sounds and worth doing

Message threads do not arrive labelled, so somebody has to decide what counts as a genuine enquiry rather than a greeting, a complaint or a job request. Agreeing that definition once, then applying it consistently, produces a number a business can plan on. Reporting message volume without that distinction inflates the picture and helps nobody.

Content is judged on conversations, not applause

The post that collected the most reactions and the post that generated the most enquiries are frequently different posts, and businesses that optimize for the first one drift steadily away from the second. Reporting connects content to what arrived afterwards. That is what allows the calendar to be built from evidence rather than from taste.

The report should say what is not working

A report that has never delivered bad news is not a report, it is reassurance with charts. Some months are worse, some content did nothing, some experiments failed, and saying so early is the entire practical value of measuring anything. A business that only ever hears encouraging numbers cannot correct anything.

Seasonal accounts need seasonal comparisons

Comparing August to February for a business on the coast produces a conclusion that means nothing, and comparing it to last August means a great deal. Reporting is set up against the same period in the previous year wherever the history exists. Otherwise a normal seasonal decline reads as a failure and a normal seasonal rise reads as a triumph.

Few enough figures to act on

A report nobody reads is worse than no report, and length is usually why. The monthly report is short, uses the same figures every time so movement is visible, and states plainly what will change next month. Everything else remains available to anyone who asks for it.

Judging content performance over months, not weeks

A single post tells you very little, and a month of posts tells you something only if it is compared with the months around it. Content performance is read as a trend across a reasonable period rather than as a verdict on last Tuesday. Businesses that change direction every month on thin evidence never accumulate enough of it to learn anything.

Reporting should survive the person who wrote it

A report that only makes sense with somebody talking over it is not a report. Each figure is labelled with what it counts and how, so the document is still readable in six months, by somebody who was not in the meeting. That also makes it possible to compare honestly against a year that nobody present remembers.

Related work

Reporting closes the loop on the whole account. Content strategy uses it to decide what to make next, and social media moderation produces most of what it counts. Both sit under social media management in Alexandria.