Data Reporting Tools

In the context of social media, data reporting tools are what collect and present the data related to a brand's or individual's social media performance. They put it into a nice, direct, visual package that has some semblance of order to it so that whoever it is that you're serving can look at it and understand what it means. Of course, the appearance isn't everything. 'Actionable' is the keyword here. And the key part of that is what performance means in this context: the performance of certain metrics, which these tools give you in a nice side-by-side fashion (or even a top vs. bottom fashion if you want to consider the old-school as well as the new in this new visual world). These tools range from simple (but not necessarily stupid) services like Google Analytics to more complex dashboards available through programs like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social. Some of these services perform neat tricks for you, like showing you engagement rates (which are, nerdily, not exactly the same thing as performance). Others, of course, are quite integrated with social platforms themselves and might give you a fair amount of demographic data as well. And, of course, using these tools allows you to mostly avoid the kind of Herculean labor one would need to go through to perform a full-on social media audit.