Since social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn have established themselves as the dominant ways for companies to connect with their customers, it’s imperative that brands monitor their social media accounts for analytics. This is where social listening analytics tools come in.
Social media analytics tools, also known as social media measurement tools or social media monitoring tools, are web-based software programs that help online businesses and individual users to analyze and understand the performance of their social marketing activities, strategy, and campaigns.
Social Media Analytics Tools used for reporting about social media performance. Social media analytics tools are becoming a must-have in every business which uses social media as a marketing tool. Some of the most popular social media analytics tools are:
Google Analytics
One, seemingly unrelated social media analytics tool is Google Analytics.
Even though Google Analytics has been mainly designed to analyze the web performance of your website, it also offers plenty of insights about social media channels, for example:
- Sources of social media traffic to your website: Discover what social media platforms bring the traffic
- Goals completions for your social media posts: Assign goals and analyze their completion
- Conversions from social media posts: Assign revenue to conversions in social media
- Assisted social media conversions: See if any of your social media platform contributed to a conversion
Pros:
- Google Analytics is free.
- Good chances are your site already has it implemented.
- Provides valuable insights about your audience.
- One of the most popular analytics platform – lot’s of tutorials available online.
Cons:
- Takes time and skills to properly set it up to track your social media strategy.
- It’s not designed for managing social media, requires some advanced knowledge about the tool.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the best social media monitoring and analytics tool out there.
It collects online mentions from all over the Web: social media, discussion forums, blogs, news sites, and other publicly available sources. Also, it has plenty of features that allow in-depth analytics of your online mentions. Some of the features include:
- Demographics: Data about authors of mentions, including gender, interests, profession or location
- Image analysis: Detect images that contain your company logo
- Influencers: Find top influencers mentioning your keywords
- Locations: Discover where do your mentions come from
- Automated reports: Get your data directly to your inbox in HTML or PDF formats
- +more!
Pros
- Provides valuable marketing data and custom reports.
- Great tool to collect brand mentions.
Cons
- Pricey
- Offers too much data for just a social media marketer. It’d be wise to use it for more than just social media analysis.
Quintly
Quintly can help you with social media analytics including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and blogs. There are plenty of features for each platform but the most important features include:
- Competitive benchmarking: Find benchmarks for your social media channels and discover what content works best for you
- Centralized analytics: Discover over 250 social media metrics and track your performance
- Smart reporting: Get reports based on your custom dashboards and pick any parameters you want
- Custom dashboards: Create custom dashboards including metrics of your choice
- Overall metrics: Track specific KPI’s and measure social media performance across all major networks
- Key influencers: Get data about the most influential social media profiles
- Data exporting: Export your data to CSV or Excel and download any metric as JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX
- Customer care: Monitor Facebook and Twitter to track customer queries
- + more!
Pros
- You can track your social media efforts with automated reports and customized dashboards.
- Easy to track social analytics.
Cons
- Too expensive for smaller brands, custom plans start from $300 a month.
- The gathered data is too general, nod good for in-depth social analytics.
BrandMentions
BrandMentions is another powerful tool for measuring your social media marketing impact.
From brand monitoring, reputation management, business intelligence to competitor spying, the tool provides you with the relevant information about the success of your brand awareness campaigns.
BrandMentions also provides real-time notifications; you get notified once your site gets a new backlink or is mentioned in places that matter across the web.
Pro: BrandMentions is a great option even for small businesses and is easy to use even for a novice.
Con: Be sure to include/exclude mentions based on keywords otherwise you’ll get results that include spamming sites or results that are too generic.
Meltwater
Meltwater is the go-to social media tool if you want to focus on brand engagement, while also monitoring what is being said about you and your industry online.
This social media analytics tool can also help you connect with influencers and quantify your PR impact.
One of the best ways to drive engagement is by using influencers. Meltwater makes it easy to connect with and vet influencers for your brand. You can also use the tool to manage influencer relationships and measure their ROI.
And like most other social media analytics tools, Meltwater provides email alerts that matter and reporting capabilities.
Pro: The site has over 1 million influencer accounts that you can easily filter and sort. This makes prospecting new high-profile accounts that are relevant to your brand easy.
Con: Meltwater offers a limited number of users and you have to pay more for more users. Additionally, the price can increase easily for basic functions such as reporting.
Reputology
A single customer can make a review on your product that impacts several other customers. Reputology helps you monitor and analyze your reviews online so you get to monitor, catch and handle bad customer reviews before it spreads like wildfire.
This social media analytics tool is particularly great for companies that have multiple reviews across multiple platforms because it lets you view all your reviews in one dashboard.
Pro: You can respond to the reviews straight from your dashboard without having to visit every review source; which saves you a whole lot of time, and ensures you respond to all reviews – or complaints – in a timely fashion.
Con: At the moment you can’t reply to Yelp reviews within the software, which is unfortunate because Yelp is one of the most popular review sites.
TapInfluence
The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.
Enter TapInfluence, an analytics platform that 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.
Curalate
More and more brands are trying their hands at direct social selling. Platforms such as Curalate serve as a hybrid storefront and analytics tool for companies looking to maximize their sales from Instagram
Chances are you’ve seen a branded or unbranded “Like2Buy” link in the wild. Major brands like Bose take advantage of Curalate for social sales – take a peek at their Instagram bio.
Upon clicking through, we’re led to a social storefront where users can shop directly.
Curalate’s platform empowers businesses to understand which products score the most clicks and sales. This can directly inform your future campaigns and product strategy as you learn which sort of posts click with customers.
Additionally, Curalate tracks product tags and mentions, making it a cinch to spot and analyze the performance of user-generated content campaigns.
Why is social media analytics important?
1. Understanding your audience:
Social media is one of the best places you can observe your target audience.
This is where they speak their mind, react in real-time, and freely express their emotions about something – a product, brand, or service.
Social media are a gold mine of audience insights. By tracking social media metrics and analyzing social platforms, you can get to know your audience, for example:
- Who they are?
- What their needs are?
- What they think about your business?
- What types of content resonates with them?
- What time do they hang out on social networks?
And much more!
Social media analytics helps track various rates connected to the exposure of the brand in social media. These parameters illustrate some sort of awareness, at least online. On this basis, you can track how the online exposure of your branded content changes.
Some of the brand metrics in social media analytics include:
2. Brand awareness:
- Social media reach – shows how many social media profiles come across branded content
- Influence score of social media profiles – shows influential profiles that talk about business
- Sentiment analysis – shows happy and unhappy customers and media talking about your business and products
- Volume of mentions – shows how the number of online mentions of branded content changes
- Engagement – shows engagement of branded content changes
Some tools, for example, Brand24, have their own brand metrics.
Some of them are the Presence Score and Reputation score. They help to measure the online popularity of branded content. Use Brand24 to increase your brand awareness!
3. Competitor analysis:
Social media analytics allows not only understanding social media performance of your channels but also your competitors’.
This way you can track their activities, marketing campaigns, what their customers think about them, and much more. It’s a great source of business intelligence.
Conclusion
Don’t aspire to be great at social media analytics. Be the best by adopting these tools wisely. If you aren’t already, you likely know the need for your business to be on social media. But in order to truly excel on social—and ultimately generate conversions and revenue—you need a solid set of metrics to measure your performance and ROI.