The world of social media is ever changing. Which means you need to stay one step ahead if you want to succeed with your social media strategy. So how do you do this? One option is to use social media analytics tools open source. These are free open source digital marketing tools that allow me to be more efficient and effective with my social media marketing channels. But there are also lots of other free resources available to help you out in terms of managing your social media efforts.
Social media analytics tools open source are steadily growing in popularity among small and large business marketers interfacing with social media. In this article, I will show several examples of social media analytics tools. I also explain how these tools can be used by marketer as part of an approach to understand the social media marketing strategy for a particular company.
Monitoring social media platforms is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. With the number of different tools available, it can be confusing to figure out which ones you should use for tracking and analyzing social media websites.
Today social media is one of the most popular types of internet marketing. People are constantly looking at their profiles in order to increase their popularity and fame on different social media networks. Even small companies are interested in becoming famous in this way and showing themselves to a larger audience.
What is Social Media Management Software?
Social media management software (SMMS) is an application or software module that is designed to integrate the activities on various social media networking sites so as to help the brands in managing and analyzing their social media presence and interactions. Primarily used for increasing brand awareness, this software can also help in managing social profiles for distinguished personalities. SMMS integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and other popular social media platforms to provide the social media managers insights about customer’s perception of their brand on these platforms.
Talkwalker
Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers
Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:
- Mentions
- Brand sentiment
- Important influencers
- Author lists
You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.
Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.
Hootsuite Impact
Key benefits: Track how organic and paid social impact real business goals and get recommendations for how to improve
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advertising teams
Hootsuite Impact provides an in-depth look at the performance of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that performance to specific business goals, like sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to improve your results.
Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture of your post and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don’t have to gather data from separate tools to create a social media analytics report.
Instead, you see exactly how much revenue all your social efforts generate, so you can prove your social ROI. Keep in mind that ROI is not only about sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula developed specifically for your business. Seeing which of your efforts have paid off has never been easier.
You’ll also get a clear breakdown that shows you exactly how to replicate your successes and improve in the areas where you’re falling short.
Then there’s the competitive benchmarks. To get the best insights from social analytics, you need to understand how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Impact shows how your results stack up against your competitors, so you can spot opportunities to improve.
Channelview Insights
Key benefits: Analyze the YouTube performance of multiple channels
Free or paid: Paid tool (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels
The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.
With this integration, you can analyze your YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.
Easily see the following metrics in one place:
- Views, engagement, subscription activity
- Video traffic sources
- Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more
Social Report
Social Report provides an overview of your activity on multiple social networks as well as blogs. You can track new topics, measure ROI, and export the data into a handy report layout. Social Report makes it easy for you to monitor your social profiles as well as those of your competitors. It includes useful options to structure and manage your customer data.
3 cool features:
- Enable notifications to receive in-depth reports daily or weekly.
- List insights on different social profiles side by side to find correlations and contrasts in your overall marketing strategy.
- Create and share white label reports with your clients.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 30 days
- Analytics for social media, business reviews, and website performance
- Competitor tracking
- Unlimited PDF and Excel exports
Paid options: $49, $99, and $199 per month
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is a collection of analytics tools that includes all the fundamental resources you might need—tracking of multiple profiles, key performance indicators, competitive intelligence, and automated reports. Beside analytics tools, Socialbakers also offers tools for publishing and optimizing your content, identifying influencers, digital persona mapping, and customer care on social media.
3 cool features:
- Analyze audience sentiment towards your campaigns from their reactions and interactions.
- Decide whether to boost Facebook posts or not based on predictive analysis.
- See how your performance compares to that of your competitors in the last 90 days on Instagram and Facebook.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Social media analytics
- Automated sentiment analysis
- Smart benchmarks
- Omnichannel paid analytics
- Facebook and Instagram performance report
- Facebook benchmarking tool
- Instagram analytics tool
Paid options: $200 per month and custom pricing
Iconosquare
Iconosquare helps you track, grow, and report your Facebook and Instagram accounts’ performance. Agencies can manage multiple brands from a single dashboard and schedule reports to be sent directly to clients. The competitor tracking and benchmarking features help you compare your performance with other brands in your industry.
3 cool features:
- Discover photos, captions, and comments that tag or mention your brand.
- Track engagement on competitors’ profiles.
- Learn when your followers are online and engage them live.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Advanced analytics
- Competitor and hashtag tracking
- Industry benchmark
- Facebook account audit
- Instagram account audit
Paid options: $29, $59 per month, and custom pricing
CoSchedule
At Brand24, we use CoSchedule as our editorial calendar – it never let us down and we can surely recommend it to all small, medium and large businesses.
The cool thing about CoSchedule is that it analyzes the performance of your social media posts and, on this basis, suggests improvements and recommends particular actions across all your social media channels, for example:
- Best day to post
- Best time to post
- Best type of content to post
What’s more, CoSchedule provides analytics of your social media posts, including:
- Social engagement analytics: Analytics of interaction your social media posts receive
- Social campaign report: Tracking across multiple platforms the performance of a campaign
- Audience insights: In-depth reports about performance of your social media channels
- Social message analytics: Tracking engagement for particular posts
- Social share analytics: How many times your link has been shared across social media
- Top projects reports: Analysis of top 100 posts
Pros:
- Great for scheduling social media campaigns.
- Creates social media reports.
- Good for task tracking.
Cons
- Can be a bit pricey for smaller companies.
- The UI can be difficult to use for some people.
Sprout Social
Another all time best social media analytics tool is Sprout Social. It’s comprehensive social media management tool you can use to track your performance in social media.
The platform offers plenty of features to analyze social media performance, engagement, post social media messages or listen to social media conversations about your company. Sprout Social has a plenty of features. To make users’ lives easier, they offer solutions:
- By business type:
- For enterprise
- For agencies
- For small businesses
- By need:
- For social management
- For social marketing
- For customer care
- For employee advocacy
- By network:
- Google+
Pros
- Great social media reporting tool.
- Good solution for social media marketers – includes advanced social media management and analysis options.
- You can track social media campaigns inside the tool.
Cons
- Can cause problems with Instagram posting.
- No integration with YouTube or TikTok.
- Expensive.
Keyhole
If you’re interested in the hashtag game, Keyhole is a nice tool to learn a bit about the hashtags you use. Keyhole supports also account, keyword and URL tracking on the Web. What’s more, you can use Keyhole to track mentions about social media profiles, keywords and URLs.
Importantly, you can request historical data from Twitter and Instagram including information about the number of posts, users, engagement and influencers. There are 5 pricing plans and the highest one includes:
- Historical data
- PDF reports
- Real time data
- Twitter analytics
- Instagram analytics
- Facebook analytics
- Youtube analytics
- Sentiment analysis
- API access
- +more!
Pros
- Ability to measure influencer impact & ROI.
- Tracking and analysing competitors in social networks.
- Hashtag tracker.
Cons
- Hidden pricing. Might be too expensive for some companies.
- Not easy for first-time users.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a Pinterest and Instagram marketing solution that helps you schedule content, monitor conversations, and analyze performance. For Pinterest, its analytics gives you insights such as the number of pins with your domain, the potential impressions, and the number of followers for your boards. For Instagram, it shows basic metrics such as followers, posts, comments, and likes.
3 cool features:
- Identify the best hashtags on Instagram with the Hashtag Finder.
- Use the browser extension to create multiple posts from any site.
- Upload images in bulk using a drag-and-drop calendar to save time.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Basic profile performance
- Basic metrics for individual posts
- Board and website insights
Paid options: $9.99, $799.99 per month, and custom pricing
Why is social media management so important for businesses?
- Providing customer care services through social media:
Customers appreciate when brands reply to their grievances on social media platforms; it makes them feel more connected to the brand.
- Increasing your credibility:
Brands that have a presence on social media platforms are seen as more trustworthy by customers than those who are not. When customers see other buyers actively participating in discussions involving the review, feedback, or after-sales service of a brand, they become sure of the brands’ authenticity.
- Creating a story around your brand:
Your brand should not only satisfy your customer but should also create the emotional connect by inspiring them. No other avenue provides the ease of spreading a story around your brand as social media does. Sharing Instagram stories Facebook live, sharing videos of other happy customers and other engaging content helps you to communicate the story or the idea behind your brand.
- Disseminating information in a creative way:
The growing popularity of social media can be attributed to its creative potential. Brands that use social media for disseminating information regarding new product releases, company news, promotional news, research, or any other expansion plans are likely to get more traction than any other medium.
- Two-way communication:
When businesses use social media for reaching their customers, it allows them to get the customers feedback, views, or opinion about their action, which is not possible with most of the traditional modes. Social media ensures the willing participation of your customers in the business process. Social media has become a two-way information process.
It is very clear that social media management is an important factor to retain existing customers and add new ones. Social media management requires skilled people who can handle multiple tasks and social networks at the same time. These people are called as Social Media Managers.
Conclusion
Social media has become an integral part of marketing. Every business owner needs a lot of resources to manage the various kinds of social media. That’s why you need social media analytics tools open source & free social media management tools that help your full-time employees and your remote employees, who work for you from different countries, to share content on social platforms and participate in different discussion groups. In addition, with this content management software, you can easily take care of all the aspects of your content whether it is marketing or educational…
Social media analytics tools open source are all the rage these days. More and more businesses are turning to digital analytics tools to get a sense of how they’re doing online. A quick google search will show you that, with multiple websites offering their own take on the best social media analytic tools available right now.