Finding the best social media analytics tools can be a daunting task. In fact, at one point or another, you might have lost hope that there was an entire piece of software just waiting for you to stumble upon it. The best social media analytics tools can certainly ease the pain of having to figure out your metrics and ROI from manually handling your own time-consuming, in-depth spreadsheets.
There are a lot of social media analytics tools available. But how do you know which one to choose?
Sprout Social
The need for cross-channel social media analytics makes Sprout Social an easy choice for No. 1 on our list.
Whether you want to dive deep into your performance on a single network, or quickly compare results across multiple networks at once, Sprout has you covered.
Track Facebook Page impressions, tally up Twitter link clicks, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement, asses content performance on Pinterest and much more, all from the same location.
Then quickly organize and share your data with easy-to-understand, presentation-ready reports. Or take it a step further with Premium Analytics and create your own custom report, tailored to your organization’s KPIs.
Sprout comes complete with both templated and customizable reporting options, meaning you have multiple ways to not only gather essential social metrics, but truly understand what they mean and present them to others including only the metrics you care about most and reducing the noise.
From tags to trends and everything in between, Sprout puts powerful analytics at your fingertips. You can even access data related to internal team performance and competitor activity to help you improve customer care or benchmark your brand against others in your industry.
But that’s only scratching the surface.
Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data related to audience demographics, industry influencers, campaign performance, share of voice and consumer sentiment.
No matter your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout has been built from the ground up to give you a fast, user-friendly way to discover and display social insights.
TapInfluence
The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.
Enter TapInfluence, an analytics platform which removes many of the “what-ifs” related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.
In short, TapInfluence highlights relevant influencer metrics in black and white so brands can better understand whether or not a potential relationship makes sense prior to outreach.
Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be a black hole of ROI. In addition to individual influencer metrics, the platform also measures the performance of overall campaigns against industry benchmarks.
Snaplytics
The popularity of ephemeral content on social media speaks for itself.
Snaplytics focuses solely on analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The platform looks at metrics such as open and completion rate, allowing brands to see where story engagement peaks and likewise at what point viewers drop off.
The need to optimize story-based content is something that modern brands should overlook at their own peril.
Although Snapchat might have fallen out of favor for some brands, bear in mind that the network still boasts hundreds of million active users among millennials and Gen Z.
Meanwhile, Stories represent one of the most-engaged methods of Instagram promotion. Going beyond native analytics is a smart move for brands who want to craft more compelling Stories or eventually run story-based ads.
Buffer Analyze
Buffer Analyze is our social media analytics tool for online brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling overwhelmed.
3 cool features:
- Instagram Stories analytics
- Posting strategy recommendations
- Create professional reports in as few as two clicks
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Overview and charts for key metrics
- Posts and Stories analytics
- Audience insights
- Answers
- Easy-to-use report builder
Pricing options: $35 and $50 per month
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great combination of social media management, listening, publishing and analytics tools. It helps you ascertain what kind of content is working for you, increase the reach of your posts, improve the effectiveness of your ads, and get your whole social media team working in tandem. It has in-depth analytics features that give you a clear understanding of your performance across all social platforms.
3 cool features:
- Customize reports by choosing from over 200 metrics and export them in PDF, Excel, or PowerPoint formats.
- Measure your customer care team’s response and resolution time on Facebook and Twitter.
- Track brand mentions better by integrating with specialized tools like Brandwatch and Talkwalker.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 30 days
- Overview of key metrics
- Unlimited real-time reports
- Team performance measurement
Pricing options: $19, $99, $599 per month, and enterprise pricing
Keyhole
Keyhole excels at four key things:
- Getting you inside the minds of your customers.
- Simplifying your reporting — so you can easily share results with your team.
- Showing you what attracts your consumers’ attention.
- Saving you a huge amount of time — as you don’t have to crawl different social platforms looking for and reporting your social analytics.
These are critical features to look out for when making social media analytics software comparisons.
As Neil Patel says, “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”
The tool shows you when your users are most active, so you get to see your audience’s best engagement days and times.
Using Keyhole, you can find, identify, track, and reach out to your influencers:
You can also conduct a detailed and in-depth sentiment analysis of social media posts over time:
With Keyhole, you get to see the number of impressions, reach, posts, and engagements that certain accounts or hashtags are getting. You are also able to identify key influencers who get the highest engagement rates and the number of followers in specific industries and reach out to them right from the tool.
And if you ever want to know the demographics of your hashtag users or account interactors or followers, Keyhole shows you those as well — including the percentage of positive and negative sentiments of your followers.
Also, Keyhole customers can publish and schedule unlimited posts each month from all the accounts included in their plan. Managing anywhere from 3 accounts to unlimited accounts depending on your needs.
Suite pricing begins at $79 per month- free trial available
Oktopost
Oktopost is focused on helping B2B brands manage, monitor, and measure all of their social media activities from a single platform.
Do you have global social media teams? Manage social media teams in more than one country all from one platform.
Social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions are some of Oktopost’s best features.
You can measure your social media marketing performance and optimize your efforts accordingly.
Pro: One huge Oktopost plus is that you can integrate other applications such as Google Analytics to access even more detailed social media marketing insights.
Also, did you know Oktopost has recently partnered up with Keyhole? Powered by Keyhole, Oktopost now offers advanced social listening capabilities as well as in-depth research and analytics required to remain competitive.
Con: Unfortunately, the platform does not have the ability to cross-post between networks.
Price: Contact Oktopost for pricing.
Conclusion
Social media analytics enables you to measure and track how your users interact on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Data collected by the tool can be used to guide decision-making at multiple levels of your organization. You’ll also want to choose a platform that provides insights on social media that’s specific to the way your company uses it. The best Social Media Analytics Tools are made by companies that have deep experience in event tracking, campaign management, traffic generation, digital advertising, data collection, and user engagement.