Welcome to December, the time of year we’re all making plans for next year and we’re all saying, “let’s circle back to this in January.” BUT let’s hold up a second. Don’t back-burner something on the “circle back” stove without first analyzing how things went this year.
We have several clients in 2026 planning meetings, determining their overall business goals for 2026. The next step (for our team, anyway) will be to determine how to implement social to achieve those goals. But before we can do that, we need to look at how 2025 went.
Here’s a checklist you can use to make these assessments now:
- Go back to your business objectives. What is your why?
- What were your goals in using social media to achieve those objectives?
- Pull your insights and analytics from every platform you used this year.
- How did your impressions compare to 2024? While impressions are not a hard number to base your business on, they do allow for tracking trends, so it’s good to note them.
- How did your reach compare to 2024? Did you run any paid ads? Did they affect your reach?
- How was your engagement? Specifically, what was the ROI on those engagements? If you sell products directly on social how were the sales from those posts? Look at your website analytics – did you send traffic from social to your site? If you have the capability to dig deeper into your website analytics, do.
- Take a look at the types of content you shared this year – photos, carousels, videos, blogposts… how was the engagement or the link clicks on those? Are they worth the investment of time to do them again next year?
- What kinds of content resonated most with your audience – your people? Your products and services? Testimonials? Storytelling?
- Once you’ve taken some notes on how you did, evaluate your time spent. Are you planning to change anything in your social for 2026? Do you have the people power to keep this in-house or do you need to hire or outsource it?
- What kind of content do you want to add in for 2026?
This is a great place to start. If you are having trouble or want some help to accomplish this, reach out. We are always happy to pull a report for you (but please note I’m on vacation starting December 23rd and I am definitely out of the office and off the grid).
by 
