Best Social Media Management Tools for Monitoring & Reporting

Social media management is the name of the game for brands looking to develop a closer relationship with their users online. The most clever and up-to-date brands utilize the different functions of social media management tools to best get their message out to prospective customers. By keeping their brand relevant at each customer touchpoint, they can increase their overall traction with both their current audience and potential new audiences.

But the function and execution aspects are only half the story when it comes to proper social media management. If you want to develop a more efficient and effective social media strategy, you’ll need a social media management tool that has ample monitoring and reporting capabilities to keep you up with how your content is doing online and to manage your team.

What Makes a Social Media Management Tool the Best for Monitoring & Reporting

Social media has long gone past the early days of mindless posting, with each platform having its own set of norms and strategies on how best to get your content in front of your customer’s eyes. But to truly understand whether your content is doing well, you’ll need data to properly measure its performance. Even rich and ample data can be confusing if not represented in the right way, with insights largely limited by how well the data is reported.

But there is more to it.

Many social media professionals and agencies are not working alone, so the factor of using software together as a team becomes absolutely crucial. The best social media management tools hone in on their monitoring and reporting capabilities through the features we’ve outlined below.

No. of Users

The first thing we look at when it comes to a social media management tool’s monitoring and reporting capabilities is how many people from a team can access the software. When working for larger or multiple brands, it’s unlikely you’ll be the only one that needs to access the tool to review data, create posts, and so forth.

Good social media management tools allow a set number of users to control social media accounts so that everyone can be better informed about what is going on and perform work on their own.

Inbox

As part of the platform’s ability to develop better monitoring and reporting capabilities, some tools make it possible to collect messages from users directly. This feature allows you to manage the messages received across different platforms so that your team can address these all from the interface of your software alone.

Analytics

Data can be incredibly powerful when utilized properly for its insights, but not every piece of data can be a clear picture on its own. That’s why analytics, especially analytics presented well, can be the difference between a good social media strategy and a bad one. Analysis of content can be done on a per-post basis but becomes much more insightful when done on a complete overview basis.

Analytics for social media usually takes the form of metrics such as reach, engagement, impressions, shares, and more. For brands with advertisements, analytics can also come in the form of how much you’re spending versus the performance of the content itself.

Review Management

User feedback is always helpful for your business as it showcases to others that your product or service is not only readily available but people have been using it. Another upside is that you can take critical feedback as something to improve and make your product or service better. Social media management tools can help better manage user reviews by receiving them all in your tool, where you can also reply to comments from people. Replying to feedback is super important. It shows that you care and gives you the chance to soften even the most critical voices.

Audience Analysis

Digging deeper into marketing analytics, social media management tools can also help with your audience analysis, which is essentially made up of the different demographics and subsequent behaviors that people have with their online profiles.

Audience analysis can come in different forms, but some of the best social media management tools can automatically bucket certain users in regard to specific factors. This can be especially beneficial when curating specific content posts for targeted ads to a specific audience group.

Roles & Permissions

It’s likely that you’ll be managing your brand’s social media accounts alongside a team of other managers and marketers that each bring something to the table. As such, it’s going to be important that each of your team members have access to the same platform to exercise their own tasks.

Setting roles and permissions allows you to properly manage your internal team to give certain administrative functions to specific individuals without necessarily providing everyone with access to the other features they don’t need. This keeps responsibilities separate as well as mitigates the chances of anyone affecting a particular social media profile by accident.

Mobile App

As handheld devices continue to grow in power and advance through different feature iterations, it becomes more and more important that tools are manageable through a mobile app. An app allows you to work on the go and check areas that need to be monitored. You can also use the mobile app to quickly distribute something you want to share at the immediate moment across all your social media channels.

Special Features

As the market for social media management tools continues to grow, an overlap of features is a likely scenario, as only so much can be done in terms of the management of different platforms. That’s why specific social media management tools have created special features that integrate deeper with a social media channel’s unique capabilities. For example, custom browser extensions, machine learning insights to know when, what and how often to post, automation for recurring tasks, and a lot more that is highly individual for each software tool.

We evaluate the special features by capturing them all, including the number and the level of helpfulness that each additional feature brings to users, and then merge both into one score.

Campaign Management

With the amount of content that gets pushed out nowadays, it’s important for a business manager to understand how specific content might feed into an overarching campaign. Hence a social media management tool can have the feature to organize content into specific campaigns so that you can see which content contributes the most to a specific marketing goal and which ones can be optimized better.

10 Best Social Media Management Tools for Monitoring & Reporting

How to Choose a Great Tool for Monitoring & Reporting

Choosing the best social media management tool can be highly dependent on its ability to monitor and report specific aspects of your content performance and team management. That’s why these features also rate highly for the overall best picks of social media management tools we’ve reviewed.

If you are working in a team and the mentioned features are important to you, then you want to look into the providers at the top in more detail. However, don’t forget about other criteria, such as the posting & scheduling features, supported social media channels, and pricing, to make sure the tool you pick also matches the bigger picture.

If you’re still a bit lost in searching for the right social media management tool, you can see our overall Best Picks to see which providers perform best in the whole market. You can also use our Comparison Tool to compare different platforms against each other, while our Finder Tool can help you find the software you’re looking for by answering a few short questions.