The social media analytic tools marketplace is not only full of free and reasonable prices, but it’s also clogged with a big mess of information and options. Choosing the one that fits your needs isn’t an easy task – there are so many good ones.
Today we’re talking social media analytics tools. The main question here is whether you should use free or paid tools? If you are a beginner in this sphere, the answer is simple – use free social media analytics tools First of all, they are attractive enough and will be helpful to you. Secondly, these analytics tools can help you learn more about what your audience really like. If you’re just starting out with your own business, it’s better to keep costs minimal as possible. These social media analytics tools come for free and there is no need to invest money until you have done substantial research.
Social media analytics tools help you to manage online presence more efficiently. If you own a blog, social media website, or any other web-based property, then it is important to use right tools to analyze your activity. Social networks are the most popular platforms for sharing and promoting information or products, which ultimately leads to generating traffic for websites like yours.
Over the past decade content marketing has been one of the most effective strategies for reaching out to customers marketing experts have utilized in order to grow their businesses. Nevertheless, even though social media dominates content marketing, businesses might not be aware that there are some free tools available on the market which can be used for social media analytics.
How We Picked Tools for Social Media Managers
Below are the criteria we maintained when making our selection.
Features
The most important part of our benchmark is the features. As we explained in the previous section, social media analytics is an important tool for determining the ROI of marketing campaigns on social networks.
Therefore, we see the measurement of key metrics — such as reach, impressions, clicks and conversions — as an important part in determining the best social media analytics tools.
Another interesting aspect for us is the number of channels and platforms the tool can handle. This means that a platform scores big points if it can cover more than just Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
This is important because most of us use more than one social media channel, and a good social media analytics tool should be able to track cross-channel behavior.
In addition to evaluating marketing campaigns and capturing relevant information on marketing metrics, the platform should also let you analyze audiences.
The modern social media marketer needs to know when somebody clicks on the “read more” button and what that person looks like demographically. This is because it allows them to better understand their own target group or even tap into a new target group that was previously off the radar for them.
Last but not least, every platform should also have features that make it possible to spy on the competition.
Price
The second criterion in our detailed benchmark is pricing. We looked at the different plans of each provider and compared them in terms of duration and price options. We were also interested in the features you get per plan and how much the plans differ from each other. Free trials and money-back guarantees are also things that we factored into our rating.
Ease of Use
Last but not least is the ease of use. In this section, we tested the platforms in terms of usability and effectiveness. Because social media analytics is about processing data, and data is often displayed in dashboards, visuals are part of the rating.
We have chosen this criterion because if you use a social media analytics platform, it should simplify your work and not complicate things due to a bad user interface.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter provides a 28-day summary of your profile and show you how it has performed in terms of profile visits, follower growth, tweet impressions and mentions. It also gives you an analysis of the impressions your tweets are getting, as well as details on engagement, i.e. retweets, mentions, favorites, and clicks. You can export all the data and run some pretty neat reports for yourself.
How to access: Log in to your Twitter account and go to analytics.twitter.com.
Quick tip: Clicking on the bar chart icon of any of your tweets will show a complete breakdown of the engagement on the tweet, including clicks on URLs, clicks on your username, clicks on images, and expanded details.
Pinterest Analytics
One of the best sources for Pinterest analytics resides on Pinterest itself. The dashboard shows growth in impressions and followers, audience stats, and website engagement. You can click into more in-depth reports for each of these and see which posts and boards have performed the best.
How to access: Pinterest analytics is available only for business accounts. So, first convert your personal account to a business account (for free). Then make sure you’re logged in to Pinterest and go to analytics.pinterest.com.
Quick tip: There’s a new Audience Insights report, which shows a breakdown of your audience’s interests and demographic.
LinkedIn Analytics
For a Page belonging to your company or organization, you can track engagement with your updates as well as see various metrics about your followers and visitors. If you’ve enhanced your Page with LinkedIn Career Pages, you also have access to Talent Brand stats.
How to access: To access LinkedIn Page analytics, sign in to your Page admin center, click the Analytics tab in the menu and select Updates, Followers, or Visitors from the dropdown.
Quick tip: The Visitor metrics section for your Company Page shows a blue line representing desktop views and an orange line representing mobile views. Toggle the Aggregate mobile and desktop metrics option at the top right to see the combined results.
YouTube Analytics
YouTube Analytics is a comprehensive system for tracking the performance of your videos and channels. It reports on a plethora of metrics including estimated traffic sources, watch time, views, earnings, ad performance, audience retention, and subscribers.
How to access: Sign in to YouTube and go to youtube.com/analytics
Quick tip: Click SEE MORE below the main dashboard and you’ll be taken to the detailed channel analytics page. Once there, click More > Playback location to see where people are watching your video – on your YouTube channel page, its regular YouTube URL (watch page), or embedded in another website or app.
BrandMentions
BrandMentions is another powerful tool for measuring your social media marketing impact.
From brand monitoring, reputation management, business intelligence to competitor spying, the tool provides you with the relevant information about the success of your brand awareness campaigns.
BrandMentions also provides real-time notifications; you get notified once your site gets a new backlink or is mentioned in places that matter across the web.
Pro: BrandMentions is a great option even for small businesses and is easy to use even for a novice.
Con: Be sure to include/exclude mentions based on keywords otherwise you’ll get results that include spamming sites or results that are too generic.
Price: $99 – $499 USD per month.
Meltwater
Meltwater is the go-to social media tool if you want to focus on brand engagement, while also monitoring what is being said about you and your industry online.
This social media analytics tool can also help you connect with influencers and quantify your PR impact.
One of the best ways to drive engagement is by using influencers. Meltwater makes it easy to connect with and vet influencers for your brand. You can also use the tool to manage influencer relationships and measure their ROI.
And like most other social media analytics tools, Meltwater provides email alerts that matter and reporting capabilities.
Pro: The site has over 1 million influencer accounts that you can easily filter and sort. This makes prospecting new high-profile accounts that are relevant to your brand easy.
Con: Meltwater offers a limited number of users and you have to pay more for more users. Additionally, the price can increase easily for basic functions such as reporting.
Price: Contact Meltwater for pricing.
Reputology
A single customer can make a review on your product that impacts several other customers. Reputology helps you monitor and analyze your reviews online so you get to monitor, catch and handle bad customer reviews before it spreads like wildfire.
This social media analytics tool is particularly great for companies that have multiple reviews across multiple platforms because it lets you view all your reviews in one dashboard.
Pro: You can respond to the reviews straight from your dashboard without having to visit every review source; which saves you a whole lot of time, and ensures you respond to all reviews – or complaints – in a timely fashion.
Con: At the moment you can’t reply to Yelp reviews within the software, which is unfortunate because Yelp is one of the most popular review sites.
Price: $180 – $2500 per month.
TapInfluence
Without a doubt, influencer marketing has become one of the most effective ways to reach today’s audiences.
But before spending a dime on any influencer, you want to measure the impact they actually have on your audience.
That’s where TapInfluence comes in; it helps you find the right influencers (who have a real impact) for your business.
It can be difficult to determine what to pay your influencers or even what they should be doing for your brand. From intelligence about an influencer’s reach and impact to their potential rates, TapInfluence can provide you with all this information.
Pro: TapInfluence allows you to create campaigns, schedule, manage, and track influencer deliverables. Also, you can monitor engagement analytics on your campaigns from the platform.
Con: There’s still a lot of work needed to set everything up as the process is not fully automated. Also, Tapinfluence caters to enterprises, so the price is inaccessible for most agencies.
Price: Contact TapInfluence for pricing.
SocialPilot
$50for 3 users
SocialPilot has emerged as one of the most straightforward social media marketing and analytics tools to use. This tool lets you post on multiple social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business, Pinterest, Tumblr, and VK. SocialPilot makes it quite simple to track metrics for social media campaigns for each of your profiles separately. You can track content engagement, audience growth, demographics, and influencers.
Users can plan, publish, promote, and create reports under social media banners through SocialPilot.. SocialPilot keeps your content, scheduling calendar, and social media analytics in one place so you can effectively consolidate your digital campaigns. When you add an account to SocialPilot, it pulls in analytics data eliminating the need for a manual setup. This is a big plus if you’re a busy social media marketer.
SocialPilot’s social media analytics and reporting features
- Analyze your best-performing content that engages your audience the most.
- In-depth audience insights to analyze growth patterns.
- Influencers analytics to find out top influencers that can help you drive engagement.
- Find the best time to post by analyzing when your fans are most active.
- Analyze every bit of your social account with comprehensive social media analytics.
- Download graphical PDF social media analytics reports anytime.
- Directly email social media reports to your clients from the SocialPilot dashboard.
From novices, intermediate experts to advanced users, SocialPilot fits a diverse range of users, making it a highly versatile tool for social media analytics and reporting besides scheduling and publishing. You can also analyze your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Businesses accounts with SocialPilot.
Agorapulse
$199for 4 users
Agorapulse schedules posts, analyzes performance, and monitors hashtags and keywords. Though it doesn’t really qualify as a social media analytics tool per se, its analytics and reporting feature makes it an excellent tool for beginners to get a clear picture of overall social media performance.
Agorapulse also has an asset library, so you can reuse the same assets for multiple posts. It also has team collaboration features for regulating workflows.
Pros
- It provides great social media competitor analytics.
- It provides insightful community management reports such as response and conversation rates to show how well your customer/community interaction is.
- The topic-wise labeling feature allows you to track the analytics of your post and generate reports quickly.
Verified Agorapulse User
The inboxing feature is something our team enjoys the most.
Cons
- It does not give Pinterest publishing, analytics, and reporting features.
- Agorapulse provides basic reports making them less useful for agencies.
- For the features it offers, Agorapulse is priced quite high.
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the practice of tracking and analyzing data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The key metrics you choose to focus on will depend on your goal. For example, if it’s brand awareness, prioritize impressions and reach. Whereas for engagement, look at KPIs such as likes, shares, and comments.
As social media marketers, it’s important—nay, vital—to track these data points daily.
Social analytics indicate whether you’re heading in the right direction in your social media strategy. You’ll know which specific social media campaigns are performing, and how it fits in a marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Social Media is a huge Social Network that is ever-growing. It has become a major platform for businesses both new and established to connect, share, and market their products and services to the world. Having a social media presence is crucial whether you have an online business or brick and mortar.
Social media has become an indispensable part of our lives and with the advent of social media, brands now have a better opportunity to reach more target audiences. But analyzing user-generated data, deciphering insights and formulating strategies based on the results can be a tough job. Tools are definitely required to carry out such functions with ease.