We found that it can be difficult to find the right social media analytics tool, plus there are so many out there. We compiled a list of free tools that we use and recommend to start analyzing your social media presence.
These free tools will allow you to analyze content for any social media platform, giving you a complete breakdown of your message’s reach, engagement, and organic reach with ranking details by keyword.
Ubersuggest
Chirag Kulkarni, partner and CMO, Medly Pharmacy
Ubersuggest is a tool I love using for anything content, analytics, or SEO. One of my favorite features is the keyword ideas tab. After typing in a particular keyword, you immediately get access to data like the total search volume, pages that rank for that keyword, the estimated number of visits that the page gets, along with PPC numbers, all for free. It’s been extremely valuable for doing an analysis before pulling the trigger on optimization.
Twitter Polls
Nadya Khoja, CMO, Venngage
“I’ve found a lot of great value recently in conducting Twitter Polls as a way to pre-validate insights in order to guide new data-driven content ideas. In a recent benchmark study, we conducted on data storytelling, one major learning was that 42% of marketers are looking to report on market research data through visual content formats. But knowing what type of market research to conduct in itself is hard to decide. With Twitter Polls, you can get a strong idea of what direction to go into by asking simple questions to your audience. The ones that tend to perform better organically can be an indicator of what might also perform well through promoted channels as well. Besides, the data that you collect from those mini-surveys can make great social charts or social infographics to drive engagement from your target market!”
Blog
Heidi Cohen, chief content officer, Actionable Marketing Guide
“My favorite social media tool isn’t a tool. It’s a form of social media: a blog. Your blog is owned media you support with quality content. Done well, you can optimize your blog for social media, search, influencers, and your business. On that front, two tools stand out. My favorite blog plugin is Yoast for SEO. And I love Feedburner because it distributes posts via email when they’re published. Like I’ve said before: ‘Hands down, email is the king of social media.’”
ShareThis
When you want to get your content in front of a larger audience and make it easy for your readers to share it on their favorite social media sites with social sharing buttons, you should also consider ShareThis. They’re easy to install in just minutes, and when installed, it takes just a single click for visitors to share your content with all the popular social media networks.
Choose the type of buttons you want to use, easily customize the design so they perfectly complement your site, and then add the code to your website. It’s that simple! Prefer to design your own? You can even create your own fully customized buttons from scratch.
With ShareThis, you can install share buttons from 40 of the most widely used social channels, including the usual suspects like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and WhatsApp, along with popular channels like Pocket, Evernote, Instapaper, HackerNews, and many more. With seamless WordPress integration, they’re a fast, easy, and totally free way to scale your website traffic.
Design Wizard
Design Wizard is another tool that’s good for making visual content, with a reasonably simple and intuitive interface.
Like Biteable, it has a host of features available with the free plan and some good premium content if you can spare a couple of dollars to upgrade.
With over 10,000 free design templates pre-optimized for platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and over 1.2 million stock images, Design Wizard is great for lazy marketers who want most of the work to already be done.
Social Status
Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics and reporting tool that provides multi-channel dashboards and helps automate your social media reports.
While the social channels themselves provide some analytics, Social Status goes much more in-depth and provides full-funnel metrics for all the main social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You can access live dashboards and see individual metric performance for all your paid and organic content, including audience demographics breakdowns, competitor analysis, full ad campaign performance metrics, and the ability to track your influencer marketing campaigns.
Social Status can export your reports to CSV, PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides formats and reports can be completely customized and white-labeled.
Buffer Reply
Website: https://buffer.com/reply/
Pricing: Plans start at $50/month
Details:
This next tool is one of our very own at Buffer: Reply. I think we’ve mentioned it a few times on the show but we’ve never gone too deep.
Buffer Reply makes social media engagement easy for marketing and support teams who need to respond to social conversations. It’s all in one inbox.
What’s great is that through Reply you can see social conversations across social networks:
- On Twitter, you can see public tweets that @ mention your handle, direct messages, and any searches you have set up for keywords or hashtags.
- On Facebook, you can see comments on your Facebook Page posts and ads, visitor posts, private messages, and reviews.
- And for Instagram business profiles, you can see comments on your posts and ads as well.
It’s a single inbox where you can see all of these conversations happening. It’s a huge time saver. In our case, our customer support team and social media manager, Bonnie, spend a lot of time in Reply every day, and we know that when someone reaches out, they would be getting an answer from us.
Conclusion
If you’re responsible for using social media to communicate with your customers, you have probably encountered the problem of not knowing what kind of engagement your messages are generating. You may run across difficulties in trying to interpret data about the performance of your brand’s social media activities and also making sense out of results from social listening tools.