What a Monthly Social Media Report Should Show (Free Template)

What a monthly report is for

A report is not a scoreboard. It is the meeting before next month: the brand sees what it paid for, the team sees what to change, and both look at the same figures. If nothing in it changes what happens next month, it is a summary, not a report.

That gives every line one test: does it help decide something? A total of likes rarely does. The share of your audience that does not follow you yet usually does.

The report on one page

Eight parts, in this order:

1. What went out, against the plan

Start with the work, before the numbers: how many posts, Reels and stories were planned, how many went out, and what moved. A launch that slipped or a shoot day that moved explains a quiet week better than any chart.

Kyatic's first month came to 15+ posts, 8 Reels and 30 stories, built from a full month plan with a calendar.

2. Four figures, not forty

Instagram Insights offers dozens of numbers. The monthly report needs four, each next to the same figure for the month before:

• Views: how many times your content was played or displayed. One person can watch a Reel three times, so views usually run higher than reach. Instagram now uses views as its main figure for Reels, posts and stories, in place of the impressions and plays that older reports show.
• Accounts reached, which Insights now calls viewers: how many accounts saw your content on screen at least once. Instagram estimates this one.
• Interactions: the actions people take on your content, such as likes, comments, saves, shares and story replies.
• Share from non-followers: the part of your views, or of the accounts reached, that came from people who do not follow you. Insights shows the split between followers and non-followers; take the same one every month. It says whether the account is reaching new people at all, which is where growth starts.

Views and reach say how far the month travelled, interactions say whether anyone cared, and the non-follower share says whether the account is growing beyond the people it already has. Here are Kyatic's, as the case study reports them:

Only one figure has a before, so it is the only one the case compares. The template also works out an interaction rate, interactions divided by accounts reached: 242 from 791 is 30.6%.

3. Where the views came from

Split the views by format: posts, Reels and stories. Insights shows the split. In Kyatic's month, 63.7% of the views came from feed posts, 21.7% from Reels and 14.5% from stories.

Without the split, views went up says nothing about what to make more of. With it, next month can put more into the format that is carrying the account, or test the one that is not. Shares of views move in percentage points, so the template shows their change that way.

4. Followers, as a line

Followers belong in the report: the count at the end of the month and the change on the month before. They do not belong at the top. A follower count moves slowly, can be bought, and says nothing about whether this month's content reached anyone. The four figures above do.

5. What it did for the business

Views do not pay the rent. The report should count what the account sent to the business: messages and enquiries, visits to your website from Instagram, and the bookings or orders that can be traced back to it. Some of this only the brand can count, so agree in advance who counts what. Three habits make it easier:

• Tag the link in your bio with UTM parameters, so Google Analytics can tell which visits, and which sales if your shop reports them, came from Instagram.
• Prefill the WhatsApp message. A wa.me link can carry ready-made text, so a chat that starts from your bio usually says so in its first line.
• Ask new customers where they found you, and write the answer down when they book.

6. Paid, kept apart

If posts were boosted or ads ran, the paid side gets its own section: what was promoted, the spend in AED and what it brought, from Ads Manager. Keep it apart because Instagram's own figures mix the two: Meta counts views of ads in views, accounts reached through ads in reach, and interactions on boosted content in interactions. A boosted month looks better than it was, and the month after looks like a drop when the budget stops.

7. The best and the weakest posts

Name the best and the weakest posts of the month, up to three of each, with their figures, and one line on why. Compare posts with posts and Reels with Reels: a Reel and a story are seen in different places by different people.

The why is a guess, so call it one, and make it next month's test. Opened on the product in the first second is a guess you can check. The audience loved it is not.

8. What changes next month

This part is the reason for the report: three changes at most, each tied to a figure above, and one test with a way to tell whether it worked. If reach from non-followers fell in a month with half the usual Reels, the change is to put the Reels back. A test might be two Reels that open on the product rather than a face, compared on views and saves with two that do not.

If last month's report listed changes, this month's should say what happened to them.

Compare like with like

A percentage is only as good as what it compares. Three rules keep the comparisons honest:

• The same figure on both sides. Accounts engaged one month against accounts reached the next can produce growth in the thousands of per cent that means nothing.
• The same kind of period. A 28-day February is not a 31-day March. A Ramadan or Dubai Shopping Festival month is worth comparing with the same season last year as well as with the month before, but the seasons move: Ramadan starts about eleven days earlier each year, and DSF runs from December into January. Note each season's dates and figures when it ends, because Insights only covers the last 90 days. Our Ramadan calendar and DSF content plan show how differently those months run.
• The same definitions. When a platform changes a metric, as Instagram did when views replaced impressions and plays, and viewers replaced accounts reached, say so in the report and start a new baseline rather than comparing across the change.

The free template

We put this structure into a spreadsheet you can copy: download the social media monthly report template. It is an Excel file, and Google Sheets opens it through File, Import. It has four sheets:

• Report: the page you send. Pick a month and it takes that month and the one before from the tracker and works out the change, in per cent for counts and in percentage points for shares. Apart from the ad spend, which comes from the tracker, the last three sections are yours to write: paid, the best and weakest posts, and next month.
• Monthly tracker: one row per month for the plan, the four figures, the format split, followers, business results and ad spend. Keep one file per platform.
• Content log: one row per post, Reel or story, with the interactions and the rate worked out, so you can filter by format and sort the month.
• How to use: which cells to fill in, what each figure means, and the two rules, like with like and paid apart.

The example rows are Kyatic's first month from our case study. Where the case study gives no figure, the cell is empty, so the example shows the one change it can: reach from non-followers, up 15.6 percentage points.

Filling it in

1. In the Instagram app, go to your profile and tap Insights, then set a custom time frame from the first to the last day of last month. Insights only covers the last 90 days, so fill each month in soon after it ends.
2. Copy the views, viewers, interactions and the share from non-followers into the month's row of the tracker, then the share of views by format and the follower count at the end of the month.
3. Add the counts that live elsewhere: messages, website visits from Google Analytics, bookings or orders, and the ad spend from Ads Manager.
4. Log the month's posts in the content log, filter by format and sort by interaction rate.
5. Pick the month in the report and write the last three sections. They take the longest, and they are the part anyone acts on.

Where we come in

Our social media management in Dubai includes a monthly report on these lines: what went out, the four figures and what we would change next month. The Instagram account management page shows what else a month covers.

If you want to know where your account stands before anything changes, send us your handle for a free Instagram audit. The Instagram audit checklist covers the 25 checks behind it, and if you are comparing agencies, the report is question 4 in our guide to choosing a social media agency in Dubai.