Social media is a paradise of marketers. If you are using social media analytics tools in your social media marketing, then you need to read this article. In this article, I will tell you the best social media analytics tools. But before that let me explain why you should use social media analytics and how it benefits for your business etc…
The social media analytics tools unlock the metrics in the social networks. They give an insight into the performance of campaigns, follower growth and reach. It is difficult to choose the right tool for your business or brand but, one thing is sure: You don’t want to miss this opportunity to measure and analyze your social media performance.
If you’re an authority on social media analytics, maybe you can share your insights. However, for those of us who don’t have that kind of knowledge and experience, it can be difficult to figure out the best social media analytics tools. I know we always look for the most cost-effective and time-efficient social media analytics tools that we can use to help us in our business.
To help you out, we’ve put together a list of the best social media analytics tools that allow you to measure your performance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other popular social networks. These tools are free and easy to set up, so feel free to try them out.
What are social media analytics tools?
Social media analytics tools are tools that help you to view and track what’s going on on your social accounts. You can track the number of likes, followers and views. They can also be used to gain insights about your audience, such as what they’re saying about your brand, and how they’re finding and interacting with your content.
Social media analytics tools make it easy to analyze data by presenting it in graph formats, and many also have other useful functions too, like reporting and more.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers lets you measure your social media performance, benchmark your results against industry players and report your entire social media activities.
Additionally, you can use this tool to publish, create personas, manage your communities, and generate analytics to help you create and optimize social content.
This social media analytics tool uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to find your target audience on social, the content they’re most interested in and the influencers they love. All of these make social media marketing and management easier and more effective for your business.
Pros: Socialbakers makes automating your social media management easy by enabling you to know your popular content, the best times to post, discover new content, and even targeting and recruiting influencers.
Cons: Lower-tier plans offer just a few months of history, which can be limiting if you’re more interested in analytics.
Price: Starts at $200 USD per month.
Brand24
Brand24 collects all the mentions about a keyword, product, or brand name on the web and provides you with a comprehensive analysis of it.
It shows you where your keyword has been mentioned, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments about it, top sources and users of the keyword, and related terms around it.
Pro: Brand24 has an attractive user interface that is very user-friendly and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge to use it.
Con: The costs tend to add up when data quotas are exceeded.
Price: $49 – $399 USD per month.
Mention
Used by brands like Asos, Microsoft, and Ogilvy, Mention is widely known, and as its name implies, as a tool for tracking the mentions of specific terms online.
This social media analytics tool picks up mentions of the names of your competitors or their products, your brand or product name, relevant hashtags, and many more.
Mention also provides a feature that helps to see the different languages through which consumers talk about you or your competitors, including relevant time frames and locations.
Plus, you also get to identify top-performing topics in your niche and repurpose it for your business.
Pro: Most platforms only engage with customers, but Mention engages with both customers and employees. This gives you more data to work with.
Con: Mention only shows data collected after setting it up. It doesn’t collect sentiment from past activity, and there is no historical data available.
Price: $29 – $450+ USD per month.
Keyhole
Keyhole is built to help marketers measure the impact of their social media and influencer campaigns. It does this by providing users with a host of valuable features. From within your account, you can:
- Monitor campaigns
- Monitor your brand
- Manage influencer marketing campaigns
- Monitor events
- Conduct market research
Monitoring is coupled with the ability to drill-down by platform and access analytics for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. And the extent of the data you can gather is impressive. For example, using Twitter hashtags, you can derive insights on mentions along with metrics for your brand for as far back as five years ago.
Viralwoot
Viralwoot is a social media scheduler and analytics platform for Pinterest. As with most such tools, you can create content, and automatically schedule it, without having to open your social accounts. It also helps you develop relationships and engage with influencers.
It includes an analytics section that indicates clearly the success of your Pinterest posting. This includes giving you an Influencer Score, with clear suggestions of what you can do to boost your Pinterest presence.
Viralwoot tracks the underlying data for all of your boards, including group boards. You can monitor your number of followers, pins, repins, and likes. Viralwoot provides you with the data in a spreadsheet-type format, making for easy sorting.
You can use your analytics to discover the best days and times for you to pin – even the colors that work best for you.
It also tracks your boards’ SEO level, improving your boards’ search rankings.
Viralwoot even gives you trending keywords on Pinterest so you can take advantage, should any of the trending terms be relevant to your Pinterest account.
You can also use Viralwoot to analyze some of the content on your website, for example, which content is pinned most.
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.
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).
Followerwonk (Twitter)
Followerwonk specializes in Twitter analytics.
It helps you search Twitter followers with the highest follower numbers, compare Twitter accounts, analyze any Twitter user’s profile, and track changes in follower numbers — whether for your brand or a competitor’s.
Pro: The Search Bio function allows you to search for influencers and potential clients within your industry and rank them by the number of tweets, followers, followed users, account age, and social authority.
Con: The free plan only allows you to analyze accounts with less than 25,000 followers and you can only perform 50 searches, 20 analyses, and 20 comparisons per day and receive 100 results only per search.
Price: Free — $79 per month.
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.
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.
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.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a social media management tool with built-in social media analytics and reporting features. It allows you to track the performance of your social media campaigns across channels for multiple profiles and pages. Interestingly, you can also track your competitors’ social media activity.
Equipped with data from NapoleonCat, you’ll easily spot tendencies and craft social media content that resonates with your company’s target audience and brings the best results. Here’s what NapoleonCat can help you with:
- Viewing what content types work best and when and how often you should post to achieve the highest engagement
- Monitoring your team’s activity to keep your social customer service major-league
- Comparing audience insights and post engagement of multiple social media profiles, including your competitors
- Scheduling weekly, monthly, or quarterly social media analytics reports that will be automatically sent out to your boss, your client, or whoever else needs them
Pros:
- Allows you to benchmark your results against your competition
- Automatically generates customizable social media analytics reports
- Tracks social media key metrics in real-time
Cyfe
One of the best social media analytics tools is Cyfe – a business dashboard tool.
It syncs up data from many, many, many marketing tools in one place.
The number of available integrations and dashboards is astonishing and makes Cyfe a powerful tool – it covers not only social media analytics tools but also advertising, email, monitoring, sales, SEO and web analytics tools!!!!
However, let’s focus on the social media part.
In Cyfe, you can build your social media dashboard including following apps and data:
- AddThis
- Bitly
- Facebook Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, actions
- Facebook Pages: Likes, clicks, active users, page views
- Flickr: Top photos, slideshows
- Google+: Plus ones, circled by
- Google+ Search: Posts
- Instagram: Photos, followers, following
- LinkedIn Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, conversions
- LinkedIn Company: Followers, impressions, engagement
- Pinterest: Boards, pins, likes, followers, following
- Publisher: Schedule social media posts
- Reviews: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google, YP
- SlideShare: Views, favorites, comments, downloads
- Twitter: Tweets, followers, listed, mentions, influencers
- Twitter Ads: Cost, impression, engagement, follows
- Twitter Search: Tweets, mentions, hashtags
- Vimeo: My feed, top videos
- YouTube
You can try it out for free.
Pros:
- Create reports with in-depth social analytics.
- Easy set up.
- Pre-built widgets for services like Google or Saleforce.
Cons:
- UI can be unintuitive.
- No custom reports with social data.
Why use social media analytics tools?
If you’re looking to grow your following on social media, a social media analytics tool is a must-have. It will help you to work out what your followers want to see and what they don’t which will help you to plan content that has good reach and interaction which aids social growth.
Not only that, but many social media analytics tools have content planning and scheduling features that can help you ensure that your content output is consistent and well organized.
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools are like x-ray glasses for digital marketers – they help you see your brand through the eyes of customers. Fortunately, there are many free social media analytics tools that make this much easier.
The best social media analytics tools are those that allow you to measure and monitor your social media marketing efforts. Without effective analysis, even the most popular brands on social media struggle to understand their follower and engagement growth.