What is social media analytics? Social media analytics allows you to understand user feedback to different types of content, how users engage with content, how many users view or share the content across all social media platforms.
If you are managing social media profiles for your business, you probably want to get a big picture of your followers as well as some key metrics. There are tools that help you collect social media analytics and present you with data under one roof so you can make more informed decisions about future posts. These tools also assist you to make the most of social media channels.
Social media is ever-changing and these tools are helping to shape the future of social media analytics. In this article I’ve reviewed the best social media analytics & research tools and social media analytics companies so you don’t have to! Check out these free & premium social media data analytic tools including free social analytics software, free social media benchmarking software and useful information on best analytical tools in 2021.
Social media analytics tools are used for businesses to measure their social media performance, gain valuable insights about the target users and find their competitors on various social media platforms. These tools can enable businesses to examine the data from a large set of users and collect it in a dashboard to help make marketing decisions.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Analytics Tool?
As a marketer, you constantly juggle between software tools such as marketing automation platforms, CRMs, social media automation tools, and web analytics tools. This means you need a good reason to add another tool into your martech stack. Here are five significant reasons why you need to invest in a social media analytics tool.
1. To Measure Your Content Performance
Social media analytics tools give you a deeper understanding of your content performance. It automates the process of tracking content interaction on various social media platforms, sharing data points that assess the content performance based on content type, topic, or design. For example, your social analytics software can help you understand that your video content may drive engagement on your Instagram channel but does not work on your LinkedIn profile. Such minute but critical observations automated by social analytics tools can significantly impact your social media campaign performance.
2. To Analyze Your Competitors
One of the basic principles of succeeding on social media is to keep a close watch on your competitors. Social media analytics tools are an extremely useful medium to keep track of your competitors’ social media activities, as well as keeping in check of current trends in your industry. These tools can automate the process of analyzing the content engagement and performance of your competitors on multiple platforms, providing valuable insights on what works and what doesn’t in your domain. This will help you avoid the mistakes your competitors have made, and focus on techniques that are working well for them.
3. To Understand Your Audience
Social media analytics tools are excellent sources of information when it comes to understanding your audience. From simple observations to detailed sentiment analysis, social analytics software tools offer features that can help you plan your content, strategy, and campaigns based on the behavior of your target audience. For example, analytics tools can identify time intervals when your audience is highly active, what content is more engaging for your audience, and what other content and pages your audience shows interest in. Aligning your social strategy based on audience behavior can do wonders for your social media campaign.
4. To Analyze Your Social Ad Spending
Social media advertising likely contributes to one of the significant expenses in social media budgets. This is why it is imperative to measure and analyze the performance of social advertising campaigns. This analysis helps justify the total ad spend by measuring the ROI from social ads. It also answers other important questions such as what is the ad content performance, what social media network works best for social advertising, and how much budget should be allocated for each social channel.
5. To Plan Your Social Media Strategy
Planning your social media strategy includes building a social media calendar, prioritizing social media channels, allocating social advertising budgets, partnering with social influencers, and measuring the ROI on your social media efforts. Social media analytics tools are an ideal source of data to plan every action in your social media strategy for 2020. From content and social channels to competitors and social trends, analytics tools can provide you with meaningful data that you use to improvise your social media marketing plans.
Viralwoot (Pinterest)
Is Pinterest a part of your brand’s social media strategy?
Viralwoot is one of the most complete tools for managing your Pinterest marketing. It provides post scheduling, social media promotion, content management, and even influencer management.
Also, Viralwoot’s analytics tool allows you to learn what works and what doesn’t – providing guidance on how to improve your metrics.
This social media analytics tool boasts an impressive client list including, Shopify, Alibaba, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.
Pro: Viralwoot’s calendar view makes scheduling pins and re-pins for Pinterest a breeze. Also, the dashboard and analytics are very helpful in tracking and measuring campaign performance.
Con: The basic plan does not provide the analytics features and only allows you to track one domain.
Pricing starts at $10 – $49+ USD per month.
Tailwind
Pinterest and Instagram, while important, aren’t the first two platforms marketers focus on when digging deep to uncover insights about audiences. This is where Tailwind comes to the rescue. It’s dedicated to helping brands analyse their social media efforts on these picture-first platforms. And its feature set is rather impressive. On Pinterest, you can track followers and engagement trends, repins and comments at profile board and individual pin level, analyse virality and fan engagement levels, and access historical data to see progress over time.
SproutSocial
SproutSocial provides social media management software to assist businesses to implement their social media goals and strategies. This includes a dedicated social media management tool incorporating detailed social analytics.
You can access all of the analytics relating to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts from a single, centralized platform.
SproutSocial produces multiple reports relating to your use of your social accounts. This includes everything from an Engagement Report to a Facebook Pages report, to a review of your Task Performance.
For example, SproutSocial gives you a quick feel for your Facebook Page impressions, fan growth, and an indication of how your Facebook content performs. You can compare your performance with industry averages, and even directly compare your data with that of your competitors.
In the case of Twitter, you can view your aggregate post stats, by Twitter profile, including engagement details, such as clicks, reach, and engagement. It provides you with Twitter keywords, trends, and hashtag reports.
It offers a similar level of social analytics for the other social networks.
You can experiment with SproutSocial for a 30-day trial. Plans then begin at $99 per user/month, although many of the analytics reports don’t become available until you purchase a Corporate membership, at $149 per user/month.
Snaplytics
Snaplytics is a Snapchat and Instagram social media management tool. It helps brands create stories for both platforms and track and measure the impact of their content. You’re able to track opens and completion rates, total views and story items, total followers and open rates, and more. You’re also able to dig deeper and see engagement stats on a story level, track the number of followers and which acquisition method helps pull the largest crowd to your Snapchat accounts.
ActiveCampaign
Source
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software with social media features including reporting. You can connect Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other platforms to gather insights related to performance.
Since you’ll have both social media and email metrics in one place, this is a good option for businesses with a heavy email marketing focus. Additionally, ActiveCampaign’s reports track what contacts do after they click through to your site. Further, if you’re a HubSpot customer, the software integrates with your CRM.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule gathers social network, campaign, and engagement data for your profiles and compiles that real-time data into reports.
On your dashboard, compare multiple campaigns to determine the evolving ecosystem of audiences. You’ll also be able to see the top fans of your social accounts, making it easier to create targeted content for them (and followers like them).
Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an analytics, management, and scheduling platform. Our reviewer found that Iconsquare delivers some of the most in-depth analytics we have ever seen and does so in a beautiful way.
Iconsquare presents you with a range of easy-to-read graphs that display your brand’s social performance in virtually every way imaginable. You can even track the success of Instagram Stories, their completion rate by story type and establish the best time to post Stories.
You can customize your dashboard, building one that captures insights important to your brand and campaigns for each social profile you manage.
In addition to its in-depth analytics, Iconsquare lets you schedule posts and monitor conversations about your brand and products. It also provides a media library where you can upload images for your posts. You can use Iconosquare to make driven decisions for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Unbox Social
Unbox Social offers an extensive social media analysis solution for brands that gives in-depth social media insights. The tool helps you analyse your brand across various social media platforms namely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Here are the platform-wise features offered by the tool.
- Get an overview of your brand’s presence on social media platforms
The tool gives you an overview of your brand with all the crucial social media data. Check your brand’s page reach, page fans, page views, page impressions, follower growth, impressions, engagement rate, interactions, number of retweets, average views, and other metrics depending on the platform you opt for
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social media analytics and monitoring tool that enables you to track your social media campaigns. The tool lets you find out trending topics across social media channels which help you curate powerful content for your audience.
The social media analytics tool gives you insights into consumer sentiment and website traffic.
Moreover, you can also measure your brand’s Share of Voice and measure your campaign’s real-time performance.
Awario
More of a social listening tool, Awario also offers monitoring and social media analytics solutions. The tool gives you timely insights on brand mentions and industry conversations.
Check the social media presence of your industry competitors and learn from their mistakes! Moreover, the tool also enables you to track the audience reaction to your marketing campaigns.
The social media analysis on Awario also gives you social media insights on your brand’s online reputation.
Squarelovin
Focused more on Instagram insights, Squarelovin is one of the reliable social media analytics tools that helps you get the most out of your Instagram marketing campaigns. The tool lets you track your account growth, helps you review post performance, and gives you social media data to help you optimize content for Instagram.
The insights from this tool can help you frame effective content strategies for your brand’s Instagram presence. Moreover, it also makes you aware of what your Insta audience likes.
What are Social Media Analytics Tools?
Social media analytics platforms collect data provided by social media platforms to create meaningful insights to improve social media marketing campaigns. Data analysis is critical for creating a successful social media strategy. So, agencies and SMBs need to get help from the best social media analytics tools.
Social media platforms are a great place for consumers to meet brands that help connect with their audience, increase sales and drive traffic. The success of businesses depends on tracking audience insights regularly and accurately. Simply, social media analytics covers the elements of data analysis, social listening and sentiment analysis. Businesses of all sizes need social media analytics software while they measure their social media performance.
On the agencies side, they use social network analytics software to track each client’s social media channels’ performance and make data-driven decisions. On the other hand, social media analytics tools for eCommerce inform businesses mentions, conversations and feedback about their brand or product. The social listening feature can help understand better and answer fully your social network needs.
Conclusion
Social media has already been there for a long time, and it has become very important and leading marketing strategy. People are starting to know what they can do with social media marketing tools and how companies utilize these tools to help them achieve their objective.
Social media is becoming a fundamental part of how we interact with each other. Social media analytics has even become an important part of marketing communications and public relations, too. That’s why managing and gaining insight into social media analytics is so key to any businesses success. There are numerous tools available today. Some free (even free social media analytics tools) while others paid.