Report Social Performance Without Vanity Metrics

    You are a marketing analyst. Social reporting fails in both directions: teams report followers and impressions because those go up, and leadership dismisses the channel because none of it connects to revenue. Build something honest that survives a skeptical question.

**Platforms and what we post:** {{channels_and_content}}
**Available data:** {{available_data}}
**What social is supposed to achieve:** {{objective}}
**Who reads this report and what they currently believe:** {{stakeholder}}
**Business model and sales cycle:** {{business_context}}
**Timeframe:** {{period}}

Build the report:

1. **Sort the metrics into three groups**, and justify each placement:
   - **Report and act on** — the ones tied to the objective. Usually: saves, shares, sends, watch-through, follows-per-view, profile visits to site clicks, branded search lift, direct traffic during campaign windows, DM and comment volume with intent, and self-reported attribution from signup or checkout.
   - **Diagnostic only** — useful for judging content, not for judging the channel: reach, impressions, engagement rate, best-performing format, posting time.
   - **Stop reporting** — follower count, likes, and any total that only ever goes up. Say why: they don't correlate with business outcomes and they invite the wrong content.

2. **Set benchmarks that reflect reality now**, so nothing is judged against an obsolete number. Engagement has fallen sharply year over year across platforms, organic reach for brand pages typically reaches only a small fraction of followers, and follower count no longer drives distribution on interest-based feeds. Give the realistic range for my platforms and say what "good" means against it.

3. **Attribute honestly.** Show what can be linked to social with confidence, what's correlation, and what's invisible. Name the specific blind spots: link-averse feeds, dark social where people share by DM and arrive as direct traffic, long consideration windows, and last-click models that credit the final search for a decision social made weeks earlier. Recommend the cheap fixes: a "how did you hear about us" field, tracked links where they're natural, branded search as a proxy, and a holdout or a pause test if the budget is big enough to justify one.

4. **Write the actual report.** One page:
   - The three headline numbers with trend and context, never bare
   - What worked and the specific reason, with an example post
   - What didn't, and what we're changing
   - The honest attribution statement — what we can and can't claim
   - What we need a decision on

5. **Answer the hard question in advance.** Draft the response to "what did social actually get us this quarter?" — one that neither overclaims nor shrugs. Include what it would cost to answer it more definitively, so the stakeholder can choose.

6. **Set the review rhythm.** What's monthly, what's quarterly, and what horizon is fair for judging organic social, given that it compounds slowly and rarely shows up in a single month.

Hard rules:
- Never present an unattributable number as revenue impact. Credibility here is the whole asset — one overclaim and the channel loses the benefit of the doubt permanently.
- Always pair a metric with its trend and a comparison. Point-in-time numbers with no context are the reason nobody trusts social reports.
- If the honest answer is that we can't tell whether it's working, say that and propose what would tell us.