Social media analytics has emerged in the recent years as a crucial part of social media marketing. It is the process of collecting and analyzing data that helps in determining the future course of action. Analytics tools provide deep insights about various aspects of social media marketing, and are considered to be essential for all marketers.
What is social media analytics all about? What metrics should you be looking for when setting up your business’s analytics? These all depend on the overall goals of your social media campaign. The ultimate goal with analytics is to increase conversions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a sale. It can mean getting in touch with more customers or even driving brand awareness.
Social media analytics can be defined as the use of web analytics regarding social media. Social networks are not significantly different from websites and intranets, therefore many of the principles used in online marketing and analysis can also be applied to them. In this article we provide different strategies for using analytics to check social media SEO, and build effective metrics in a descriptive and non-technical manner.
Social Media Analytics is the new set of tools and platforms that help you track your ROI on social media business page. These platforms use advanced analytics to measure results, reach and engagement which usually let you know the impact of your business on those social networks.
Choose a Social Media Analytics Tool
Ultimately, choosing the right social media analytics tools for your business shouldn’t be a stressful process. The tools should align with your business goals and deliver the metrics you need to be successful. So review the options below and choose the right one for your business.
Mentionlytics
Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.
Want to get a big picture view of what’s being said about your brand on the internet? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the world of social media monitoring — especially if you run a global business in more than one language.
Other things you can do with Mentionlytics:
- Sentiment analysis
- Find top influencers that follow you
- Filter results by keywords
- Reply to mentions directly
Panoramiq Insights
Key benefit: tracks Instagram analytics, including Instagram Story analytics
Free or paid: Paid (or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: All skill levels
Best for: Instagram marketers
Alert all the Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite free users or pro users who want to get deeper insights on their Stories in particular. (Just download the app from our App Library).
Among other things, Panoramiq Insights lets you:
- Analyze follower demographics, including age, gender, country, city and language
- Monitor Instagram account activity (for up to two accounts), including views and new followers
- Find your best posts with view and engagement analytics
- Measure Story views and interactions
Likealyzer
Likealyzer is a Facebook Page analyzer tool by media intelligence firm Meltwater. It audits your Facebook Page and returns metrics such as posts per day, engagement per post, timing, and length of posts. Likealyzer also grades the Page’s performance based on more than 70 different data points, and offers recommendations for improvement based on the results.
3 cool features:
- Benchmark your Facebook Page against a million others to know how you are performing.
- Get recommendations based on how your content is performing.
- Export your chosen metrics and insights in the form of easy-to-understand reports.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Analysis of your Facebook Page’s front page, about page, activities, response, and engagement
Cyfe
Cyfe is a custom dashboard tool that you can fill up with integrated metrics from dozens of marketing tools. Its social media section allows you to sync up all the major networks and pull overview reports for the accounts you manage and those you want to track. It offers 50 widgets for Facebook alone, for tracking reach, impressions, clicks, check-ins, and posts.
3 cool features:
- A fully customizable dashboard
- Set up email and SMS alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are crossed.
- Monitor your brand mentions and competitors’ activity using the Twitter search widget.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Five widgets
- A fixed view of the trailing 30 days of data
Paid options: $29 per month
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a social intelligence tool suite that has acquired TweetReach, which provides a free snapshot of your Twitter analytics. Type in any keyword, hashtag, or username, and you get useful charts and graphs for reach, exposure, activity, and contributors. It’s quite valuable for checking in on mentions, tracking branded hashtags, and analyzing industry keywords.
3 cool features:
- Measure the potential reach for any hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.
- Look at your competitors’ activity and measure their share of voice.
- Know what sort of content works in your industry by analyzing conversations in real-time.
Social networks analyzed:
What analytics you get for free:
- Twitter assistant
- Twitter analytics report
- Instagram account checkup
Paid options: $49, $99, $199 per month
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the best social media monitoring and analytics tool out there.
It collects online mentions from all over the Web: social media, discussion forums, blogs, news sites and other publicly available sources. Also, it has plenty of features that allow in-depth analytics of your online mentions. Some of the features include:
- Demographics: Data about authors of mentions, including gender, interests, profession or location
- Image analysis: Detect images that contain your company logo
- Influencers: Find top influencers mentioning your keywords
- Locations: Discover where do your mentions come from
- Automated reports: Get your data directly to your inbox in HTML or PDF formats
- +more!
Pros
- Provides valuable marketing data and custom reports.
- Great tool to collect brand mentions.
Cons
- Pricey
- Offers too much data for just a social media marketer. It’d be wise to use it for more than just social media analysis.
Audiense
Audiense is one of the best Twitter analytics tools. What’s cool is that it’s free if you have less than 5k followers.
It gives you a unique insight into your followers:
- Interests
- Location
- Languages
- Influence
- Best time to tweet
Pros
- Dedicated to Twitter analytics – great tool if your brand is focused on this social media channel.
- Allows to identify nano influencers and micro influencers.
Cons
- Very simple tool with limited possibilities.
HeyOrca
HeyOrca is a social media planner designed for quick and easy collaboration with clients. It offers not only publishing, management, collaboration, but also analytics of social media content across various platforms.
It’s a great choice for agencies that cooperate a lot with customers and present them with social media content for approval.
Some of the features HeyOrca offers include:
- Accounts Organization
- Social Media Planning
- Internal Collaboration
- Client Approvals
- Direct Publishing
- Performance Analytics
Pros
- Important social media analytics tool that allows advanced collaborations for agencies.
- Tracking social media campaigns made easy.
Cons
- Doesn’t provide in-depth media analytics.
- Limited capabilities in terms of integration.
Quintly
Quintly is an enterprise-level analytics tool that monitors your engagement on all major social networks. You can mix and match dozens of customizable metrics and automate the deployment of flexible, shareable dashboards. By adding multiple pages belonging to you or your competitors, you can compare them against pre-set benchmarks or each other.
3 cool features:
- Choose from 350+ metrics to effectively set up and measure social KPIs.
- Export data in a variety of formats including CSV, XLSX, PDF, and PPTX and send automated reports.
- Use Quintly’s API to extract data into custom dashboards and integrate it with a BI solution.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Advanced analytics
- Reporting
- Customizable dashboard
Paid options: $100, $255, $480 per month, and custom pricing
Followerwonk
One of our favorite Twitter tools, Followerwonk shows you detailed breakdowns of your followers and activity. Click on the Analytics tab, enter a Twitter username (either yours or someone else’s), and view information on followers and following. See stats like when your followers are online, when you typically post, and how your followers fall into categories like social authority, activity, total tweets, and follower count.
3 cool features:
- Find targeted users by keywords used in their profiles or bios.
- Sort users or followers of an account by insightful factors such as influence or activity.
- Compare your stats to those of competitors or peers with the help of a visual graph.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Search up to 50 profiles per day
- Analyze accounts with up to 25,000 followers
- 20 comparisons per day
Paid options: $29 and $79 per month
SparkToro
SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool-in-the-making, founded by former Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin. It will eventually be a search engine that helps you identify the websites, publications, podcasts, and social profiles that appeal to your audience. At the moment, it is a collection of nifty tools that evaluate your Twitter handle and followers, and give an objective assessment of your brand influence and authority on Twitter.
3 cool features:
- Audit your followers and know what percent of them are fake.
- See the specific topics that marketers are talking about on Twitter.
- Get a ‘SparkScore’ of your influence, based on the performance of your tweets.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Fake follower audit
- SparkScore
Understanding the need for Social Media Analytics Tools
Here are some of the reasons that make Social Media Analytics Tools a must for marketers:
- Understanding Audience: Social Media Analytics Tools provide marketers with a holistic view of their audience. It allows them to draw crucial insights about various aspects such as the kind of content that attracts more audience, the time when a large number of people are online, etc. allowing marketers to refine their Marketing strategies and attain a better reach.
- Analyzing Competitors: Social Media Analytics Tools lets marketers analyze the competition. Using these tools, marketers can understand the kind of content the competitors are pushing, the response from the audience, etc. Marketers can then devise better strategies that bring out more positive results and hence prevent themselves from making the mistakes their competitors made while interacting with customers.
- Better Content: With Social Media Analytics Tools in place, you can figure out the right kind of content you must create to attract more customers. You can analyze various factors such as the number of shares, likes, the type of media, visits, conversions, etc. to understand the kind of blogs or posts, that bring in the customers in large numbers and generate maximum revenue across platforms. This allows marketers to optimize their content for attaining success in the market.
- Campaign & Platform Performance: Social Media Analytics tools help marketers gain a clear picture of the performance of their social media campaigns, allowing them to analyze whether the campaigns are producing a positive or negative impact on their products and services. Marketers can use various techniques such as sentiment analysis, to truly understand what is going on in the customers’ minds. It also helps marketers identify the right channel and social media platform, that generates maximum engagement for them and how they can optimize it further to improve their performance.
Conclusion
With millions of online users, social media has become an important source of information. Social media analytics is the process of analyzing data we generate when interacting with others through different social networking sites such as blogs, forums, podcasts, and video sharing websites such as YouTube.
How do organizations make sense of the tools and metrics that social media analytics offer? This book helps operationalize social media metrics across marketing, customer service, public relations, product development, research and analytics, sales, and other departments. It provides a framework for organizations to understand which metrics they should be measuring and how to interpret them.