Social media has been regarded as the top marketing priority for the year 2021. Social media analytics tools are gaining popularity to analyze consumer emotions, trends and behaviors on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The importance of social media analytics tools is very vital in boosting revenue generation online.
Social Media Analytics Tools That Can Be Deployed to Understand Consumer Behavior and Trends Are you looking for best Social Media Analytics tools that can analyze your social media data and available free of cost? Here we are sharing a huge list of free social media analytics tools that can help you understand consumer behavior and trends.
Traditional social media monitoring tools and free online services. They are not as powerful as professional, premium-based social media monitoring tools. Official Support: We may have come across social media analytics tools that have a poor user interface or they do not look professional enough to justify their price tag. Or the features they display are limited and you don’t find them helpful enough to justify their price tag.
This presentation reveals a number of social media analytics tools that can be deployed to better understand consumer behavior and trends. Social media listening, sentiment analysis and competitive benchmarking are all important aspects to consider when you launch a social campaign or brand awareness initiative. While there are many free tools in the marketplace we take a look at a few leading tools that are available for free or low cost. This presentation covers the major platforms like Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Insight Tag, Twitter Analytics and more.
How to Track Social Media Analytics
Here are the steps involved in tracking social media analytics
- Identify which social media platforms you’ll be measuring impact on (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram).
- Determine which metrics you’re doing to track (e.g. clicks, impressions, likes, shares).
- Choose a time period to analyze (e.g. last quarter, last month, last week, duration of your campaign).
- Determine which tools you’ll use to track and measure success (we’ll cover your options in the next section).
- Review and analyze your data (depending on your tool of choice, there may be internal features to help you understand and analyze your data — such as this one with HubSpot).
- Apply your findings and conclusions to improve growth in the future.
Iconosquare (Instagram and Facebook)
With Iconosquare, you can measure the impressions and reach of your Facebook and Instagram posts and stories.
You also get to see when your customers are mostly online, so you can put out content only when they are most likely to engage with it. Making it a competitive social media analytics tool option.
Iconosquare also lets you monitor comments and respond to them, after which you can tick them as read so everything remains organized.
Pro: Iconosquare features are beautifully designed and easy to use. You’ll love its advanced scheduling feature, customized Instagram feeds, and comment tracking ability.
Con: The software does not separate paid and organic posts analytics.
Price: $29/mo — custom pricing.
Audiense Connect (Twitter)
Audiense Connect is a great tool from Audiense that helps you uncover details about your audience, discover relevant macro and micro-influencers, and call the best social media marketing shots.
Brands like DHL, Carlsberg, Puma, and Fox Sports use Audiense to discover audience segments relevant to their businesses and make smarter social marketing decisions — especially on Twitter.
Pro: Audiense Connect has brilliant social listening features that help you to understand what audiences are doing on Twitter. Advanced reporting is also really useful for creating events, hashtags, and industry reports.
Con: Audiense Connect offers limited features for lower-tier users, and pricing errs on the higher side for access to more features.
Price: From $948 – $25,000 per year.
Tailwind (Pinterest and Instagram)
Tailwind lets you manage and analyze your Pinterest and Instagram efforts at scale.
You can discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify reach, and analyze your social media performance on Pinterest and Instagram all with one tool.
Trusted by over 2000 brands and agencies, including Walmart, eBay, and Unilever, Tailwind uploads your images in bulk and automatically optimizes your posts to be published at your users’ most engaging times. Also, it uncovers information about your audience, which ultimately improves and measures results.
Pro: Tailwind’s analytics are quite impressive. You get to see how many follow, re-pins, likes, etc., your page has gotten. You also get to see stats for individual pins so you can see what’s getting the most love from your audience.
Con: Tailwind has many capabilities making the dashboard a bit overwhelming for some users. Also, it is extremely affordable
Price: $9.99 – $799.99per month.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch breaks social media analysis into six areas. And that’s what makes this a stand-out tool. It can be used for
- Competitor analysis
- Brand management
- Content strategy
- Customer experience
- Influencer marketing
- Crisis management
While these may seem like grey areas when trying to understand how to derive meaningful insights, Brandwatch does all the heavy lifting in each scenario. The result is a more informed social media strategy based on real-time data about how your content and brand is doing out in the world.
Mention
When it comes to social media management, listening is likely one of the most critical tasks any social media manager can perform. And access to a tool like Mention helps get the job done. It’s robust and capable of tracking keywords, providing alerts, identifying sentiment, and more.
But what makes Mention a notable addition to our list is the intricate set of features. You can conduct competitor analysis, track conversations about competitors and identify trending niches your audience is paying attention to.
BrandMentions
As social media analytics tools go, access to business intelligence isn’t exactly something most promote. BrandMentions, on the other hand, does. Its approach to providing holistic intelligence makes it capable of turning insights from your audience, influencers research and customer care interactions into information you can use to build a strong social presence and brand. Use cases include competitor analysis, or as BrandMentions calls it “competitor spying”, media monitoring, reputation management (including sentiment analysis) and brand monitoring.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a full-service marketing platform that offers analytics for social media ads. It’s easy to use for small marketing teams and requires little time to pour over the accompanying analytics.
With Mailchimp, you’ll have an audience dashboard, which is a page dedicated to understanding audience behavior. Additionally, the software offers tools to look into smart targeting and mobile integrations. These tools can diversify a social strategy and deliver higher engagement numbers by helping you create content that specific audiences will respond to.
Databox
Databox is an expansive analytics platform that lets you set and track social media campaign goals. It’s a good choice for businesses that have many contacts, social accounts, campaign goals, and target audiences.
Customize metrics that matter most to your campaign or social channels for your reports. Any integration you have, such as HubSpot, will be visible from your dashboard as well.
Grow
Grow users gain full visibility into engagement on all of the social accounts. The tool integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook, Marketo, and Microsoft Office so you can view all data in one place.
Grow breaks down complex data into graphs and visuals, and your social reports are easily sharable which is helpful if multiple people are working on the same project. Grow’s reports are built with metrics chosen by the user — meaning, you can customize reports in a way that works for your needs.
Meltwater
Meltwater calls itself a solution for every department. And that’s crucial in today’s marketing environment. It does a great job of drawing lines between the four core departments (PR an Communications, Marketing, Executives, and Enterprise). This approach makes for a more holistic understanding of a brand’s impact on social media and the latter’s influence on business growth.
Meltwater enables you to track conversations about your brand and product, keep an eye on the competition, find the best influencers to raise your flag and measure the impact of your social efforts through reporting and valuable insights.
Followerwonk (Twitter Only)
Followerwonk is a Twitter-specific tool. It makes it possible to gather data on influencers, compare accounts to identify audience commonalities, analyse followers by location, bio, who they follow and connections they have. It also allows you to contrast your brand’s connections with those of your competition to derive insights on how to generate more reach.
TapInfluence
TapInfluence is an influencer marketing platform. It’s designed to help you find the right influencers, generate audience insights, and create lists of potential influencers to work with. It also allows you to take this information, use it and then discover how effective your efforts are. This includes click tracking, campaign and project performance tracking, and the option of exporting your results for further investigation.
NetBase
NetBase is a social analytics solution that leverages AI. It’s able to listen to conversations and provide more than common sentiment analysis. It pulls social conversations apart and can identify consumer preferences, competitive insights, brand passion sentiment, trending topics, sentiment behaviour and consumer behaviour. This level of insight helps busy social media professionals quickly unpack the most important insights to help define a more informed social strategy.
Beyond these capabilities, you’re can compare owned vs earned media content performance. You can also see how your brand is performing using NetBase’s propriety image analytics solution, an image recognition and machine learning tool used to spot brand logos from online content.
Oktopost
While most social media analytics tools cater to B2B and B2C brands, Oktopost is strictly for B2B companies. It helps B2B firms manage, monitor and measure their social media efforts. Oktopost enables brands to keep an eye on their performance by offering lead attribution and post-level analytics on top-performing assets, links, keywords and hashtags. It also strengthens B2B social media activities by roping-in employees for advocacy and provides insights on how effective each participating employee is on social media.
Why do you need Social Media Analytics?
Social media analysis goes beyond counting likes and shares. Even counting replies, comments and link clicks isn’t enough. Although these are important KPIs, deep social media analysis shows you why certain Facebook posts get a lot of engagement, or what people keep Tweeting at you about. It tells you which products are pictured on Instagram more often than others.
It is a glimpse into how your customers actually feel about your company, products, and services. Analyzing social media data can provide insights into product strategy, the customer journey, and brand reputation online. It is not just about the numbers, but rather what’s driving those numbers.
And, because social channels are increasingly being used for customer service, social media analytics has become vital for measuring how well you are serving your customers (social customer service). You can examine response times, first contact resolution times, how well bots are resolving concerns, the average handle time, and team performance on KPIs for your customer care agents’ interactions with customers over social media and messaging. With more social media users now than ever – more than half the world – using social media to understand your customers’ relationship with your brands is vital.
This information allows you to spot trends and make predictions that inform your overall strategy for customer experience and business outcomes. And given that only 43% of businesses have centralized cross-platform analytics, it’s something that can help put you ahead of your competitors.
Other benefits include:
- Proven ROI for your brand strategy: Analyzing all social media data – plus add-ons like review monitoring or digital customer care data – helps you understand your customers’ needs and preferences so you can build an effective brand strategy.
- Make more strategic business decisions: You can see clearer paths to success when you’ve got in-depth analysis of how your customers view your brand and interact with your platforms.
It should be noted that “social listening” often encompasses “social media analytics” within the social media management market.
Conclusion
Social Media Analytics tools are essential for analyzing the collected data generated by Social Media. Since these tools are cloud-based, there is no need to install any software or hardware. The tool can be accessed through a web browser and can be used by several users at the same time. The goal of these tools is to provide accurate social media insights to help organizations make informed decisions based on consumer behavior, preferences, and trends.
Social media analytics tools are complex technologies used by businesses to generate reports on consumer behavior and trends they serve as the most important sources to gain information about consumer preferences in a highly targeted manner.