What should be in a monthly social media report?

Most reports open with follower growth and impressions because both numbers go up almost by themselves and neither one pays a bill. The figures that decide whether you keep paying live further down: profile visits, taps on the WhatsApp or call button, DM enquiries, direction requests on Google Maps, and orders if you sell online. A report that shows sixty thousand impressions and does not tell you how many people tapped through to contact you has answered a question you did not ask.

Every number in a report should point at a screen you can open yourself. Instagram reach, non-follower percentage, profile taps and link taps all sit in Insights. Impressions, click-through rate, average view duration and which video brought subscribers are in YouTube Studio. Facebook lives in Business Suite, TikTok in its own analytics tab, and calls, direction requests and website clicks are in the Performance section of your Google Business Profile. Ask your agency to walk through those screens with you once, on a call, and the whole trust question resolves itself.

The section almost nobody includes is the one worth most: what failed. "The price-comparison Reel flopped twice, we are dropping that format and testing the behind-the-counter cut instead" tells you more about whether someone is paying attention than five green arrows ever will. Add one more line most reports omit — median time to reply to a comment or DM. For a local business that number is close to the whole business, and it is the one your agency can fix on Monday morning.

How ours works, so you can compare. Growth and Pro clients get a report every week; Starter gets one every month. It arrives on WhatsApp as screenshots from your own analytics rather than in a dashboard you have to remember a password for, because a report you do not open is worthless. It names what we are changing and the single number we are trying to move. If something went down, we say it went down and we say why.