What is a follower tracking report?
A follower tracking report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., follower growth, engagement rate, reach), enabling teams and agencies to monitor social media performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Follower tracking reports are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a follower tracking report?
An actionable follower tracking report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive follower tracking reports
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show social media's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Follower growth analysis: by platform, using trends and patterns for large audiences.
- Engagement analysis: likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement rate.
- Demographic analysis: audience demographics and interests.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Social media manager reports
Manager reports have cross-platform views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-platform reporting: overall performance, audience insights, and engagement across platforms.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for platform and content mapping.
- Content and audience research
Operational Follower Tracking Reports
Operational reports for analysts and social media managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Engagement: post metrics, follower growth, engaging topics/hashtags.
- Content performance: reach, impressions, and engagement by post.
- Audience insights: demographics, interests, and behavior.
Operational follower tracking reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a follower tracking report?
To build a follower tracking report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for social media analytics.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of follower tracking report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like engagement monitoring, audience insights, and content performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom engagement metrics, audience data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "engagement" and "reach".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your follower tracking reporting use cases, such as engagement monitoring, audience insights, and content performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Followers, engagement rate, reach, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, platform, post type, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your follower tracking reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your follower tracking reports:
Share
Share your follower tracking reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a follower tracking report?
Follower tracking reports should include a mix of visibility, engagement, and audience metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of social media efforts towards business goals. They include:
Follower tracking KPIs measure the social media process, regardless of the platform:
- Visibility metrics: reach, impressions, follower count
- Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, engagement rate
- Audience metrics: demographics, interests, behavior
Efficiency KPIs compare your social media outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: cost per impression
- Engagement: cost per engagement
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Visibility: frequency
- Engagement: engagement rate
To analyze these follower tracking KPIs, segment them by:
- Platform: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Content: post type, topic, hashtag
- Audience: geo, demographics, interests, behavior
