Social Media Audits are a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of your or your competitors’ social media presence. They provide valuable insights into the setup, content focus and target audience of your brand’s pages.
Here are best tools for social audits.
ContentCal
As part of its standard features, ContentCal includes an analyze feature that lets you see what is working across different channels with the help of visual and easy-to-understand charts. The visual nature of these charts and graphs make it a lot easier to analyze your performance and progress.
For an extra level of detail, it also offers advanced analytics that are available on request and can be added to its Essential plan at a cost. These include the ability to track your growth across organic and paid channels and follower demographics. Unlike many of the other tools that offer you access to only the last 30 days, ContentCal lets you analyze data over a period of up to 12 months.
Another key feature that deserves an honourable mention is its customizable, branded reports. If you’re completing your social media audit to demonstrate your effectiveness to other team members, these reports will come in handy as you can automate it to be delivered straight to your inbox every month.
Key features:
- Advanced analytics
- Intuitive dashboard
- Competitor analysis
- Organic data for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
- Detailed follower analytics
- Paid media analytics
- Instagram Story analytics
- Top-performing post analysis
- Hashtag analysis
Pricing: ContentCal recently launched new packages and, sadly, retired its Free plan. Its cheapest plan starts at $37 per month and includes a free 14-day trial.
HypeAuditor
If you’re a regular reader of our content, you would’ve noticed that HypeAuditor is one of our go-to tools for creating listicles. While it was specifically created for fraud detection and determining audience quality, it can also be useful for keeping tabs on your own Instagram account.
By just including your own handle in the “My Report” section of its dashboard, you’ll also be able to track your own Instagram account to get a better idea of your social presence. Plus, it will send you an email update that summarizes your activity every week that you can then use when you compile your monthly social media review.
Just like with many of the social media tools that offer a free plan, HypeAuditor’s free plan is very limited and actually only meant to give you insight into how its software can help meet your requirements. However, the jump between its Free plan and cheapest plan is quite drastic – $399 to be exact. So, it’s not the most cost-effective solution for small businesses.
Key features:
- Engagement rate
- Audience quality score
- Growth rate
- Team access to reports
Pricing: In addition to its Free plan, it also offers a Basic plan ($399 per month). Add-ons for the Basic plan are also available.
Sotrender
Sotrender is a social media analytics tool that provides you with social media insights that help you improve your social media activities. The reports from this tool give you real-time updates on how your content is performing on different social media platforms.
Sotrender also gives data on sentiment analysis by monitoring the comments on your brand content! That’s not all, the tool also allows you to keep a watch on your competitors. This data will surely scale up your marketing strategies.
NetBase Quid
NetBase Quid is a marketing intelligence platform that also has social media analytics solutions. The platform stresses much on listening to what the audience is saying about your brand on different social media channels. NetBase helps you discover audience behaviour and preferences.
The platform also has solutions for analysing the audience. Get data on your social media audience and create effective marketing strategies!
Keyhole
Social media campaigns are increasingly used by companies as a great way to not only get their name out, but also improve their image. Successful examples include Apple’s Shot on iPhone challenge for iPhone photographers to share their best work shot on their iPhones and Starbucks #whatsyourname campaign to advocate inclusivity of people of all genders.
Dedicated solely to social media campaigns, Keyhole specialises in hashtag tracking and influencer campaign metrics to help marketers keep a close eye on real-time metrics and measure the impact of their social media campaigns.
Pricing: Packages start at USD 49 per month.
Rival IQ
In an ever-changing social media landscape, there’s one that remains constant – competition. So, it’s important to not only look at how your own social platforms are performing, but also to compare and see how you stack up against your competitors.
In come Rival IQ. Focused on delivering competitive insights and comparative analysis, Rival IQ alerts users of every single move of their competitors, enables digital marketers to continuously gather and monitor social performance data of their competitors, and identify new opportunities.
Pricing: Packages start at USD 199 per month with a 14-day free trial.
Later
If you mainly use Instagram, Later’s free plan could help you with your social media audit. While it doesn’t include the Standard Instagram analytics in its free plan, you do get access to Later’s Lite Instagram analytics that lets you track the performance of your last 30 posts and find out which type of content generates the most engagement.
For a more comprehensive overview of how your Instagram account is performing, you’ll need to sign up for its Growth plan that offers the Standard analytics. These will include details about your audience engagement, follower growth, and the number of clicks and visits to your Linkin.bio page.
Not only will you be able to unlock much more detailed Instagram analytics with its Growth plan, but you’ll also get access to Pinterest analytics and click tracking as well as Twitter analytics and click tracking. With this extra data, you’ll get a better picture of how your pins and tweets are performing too.
Key features:
- Visual Instagram planner
- Hashtag suggestions
- Performance report
Analisa
Founded in 2019, Analisa is one of the newer kids on the block. It’s an AI-powered Instagram and TikTok analytics platform that gives you access to raw data like follower count, number of comments or likes a particular post received, and engagement rate. The value of this tool is that it also takes it one step further to analyze these numbers.
Though for analysis of posting activity and information about when followers and viewers engage with the posts, you’ll need to sign up for one of its subscription plans. Also, sadly no TikTok analytics are included in its free plan.
Key features:
- Customized reports
- Hashtag analytics
- Follower demographics
Pricing: In addition to its Free plan, it also offers three subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at $69 per month.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is completely dedicated to Twitter analytics. This social media analytics tool will give you all the social media data for Twitter. Right from comparing Twitter accounts to target new influencers to analysing your audience on Twitter, this tool helps with everything Twitter-related.
Google Analytics
While Google Analytics is built for analyzing website traffic down to the last detail, it is very useful for analyzing the impact of social media as a marketing channel and source of traffic. Click through to Acquisition > Social > Overview, and you can check out how many visits your site receives from each of the major social networks. You can tie this back to your bottom line using goals and conversions.
3 cool features:
- Find social networks and communities where people are interacting with your content.
- Measure the value of social media as a channel by analyzing conversions and ecommerce transactions.
- See how users who come from social media navigate through your site.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
and all other social networks
What analytics you get for free:
- Social referral traffic
- Social traffic flow
- Social conversions
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.
- Get social media insights on your brand’s audience
The success of any social media campaign depends on whether it has reached the intended audience. Unbox Social’s social media analytics solution gives you in-depth social media data on your audience.
Check the age, gender, location, and language of your audience.
Know when your followers are the most active on the platform. Track the audience sentiment and audience feedback for your brand content across platforms.
- Track your competitors on social media platforms
Unbox Social also allows you to track your competitors on various social media platforms. Get social media insights on how your industry competitors have fared in their campaigns. Know the kind of content they are opting for.
See what’s getting them a high engagement rate. Track how the audience is responding to your competitor’s content on social media and gauge the audience sentiment for competing brands. Moreover, you can also track what your competitors are posting for trending keywords and hashtags!
Grow your brand on Social Media with data-driven insights from Unbox Social.Understand how users are interacting and engaging on Social Media using Unbox Social’s Analytics Tool. Easy to Use, Save Time, Create Reports, Free Demo.
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2. 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.
Pinterest Analytics
One of the best sources for Pinterest analytics resides on Pinterest itself. The dashboard shows growth in impressions and followers, audience stats, and website engagement. You can click into more in-depth reports for each of these and see which posts and boards have performed the best.
How to access: Pinterest analytics is available only for business accounts. So, first convert your personal account to a business account (for free). Then make sure you’re logged in to Pinterest and go to analytics.pinterest.com.
Quick tip: There’s a new Audience Insights report, which shows a breakdown of your audience’s interests and demographic.
5. LinkedIn Analytics
For a Page belonging to your company or organization, you can track engagement with your updates as well as see various metrics about your followers and visitors. If you’ve enhanced your Page with LinkedIn Career Pages, you also have access to Talent Brand stats.
How to access: To access LinkedIn Page analytics, sign in to your Page admin center, click the Analytics tab in the menu and select Updates, Followers, or Visitors from the dropdown.
Quick tip: The Visitor metrics section for your Company Page shows a blue line representing desktop views and an orange line representing mobile views. Toggle the Aggregate mobile and desktop metrics option at the top right to see the combined results.
6. YouTube Analytics
YouTube Analytics is a comprehensive system for tracking the performance of your videos and channels. It reports on a plethora of metrics including estimated traffic sources, watch time, views, earnings, ad performance, audience retention, and subscribers.
How to access: Sign in to YouTube and go to youtube.com/analytics
Quick tip: Click SEE MORE below the main dashboard and you’ll be taken to the detailed channel analytics page. Once there, click More > Playback location to see where people are watching your video – on your YouTube channel page, its regular YouTube URL (watch page), or embedded in another website or app.
Conclusion
There has been a great deal of talk on social media marketing these last years. With Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest being the most popular platforms used by marketers today, a proper social media audit is a critical step before developing a strategy.