Social media analytics tools is one of the most important issues of the digital marketing discipline. Let’s imagine that some issue cannot be addressed without help of new and qualitative social media analytics tools. The avowed purpose of this article is to rank and assess some best free social media analytics tools which can provide significant support for enhancing your social media presence.
The top social networks offer analytics baked in. If your social presence is limited to these avenues, the free analytics tools they provide are an excellent starting point toward understanding your audience.
FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
There’s a lot on offer here, including a look at organic versus paid reach and engagement, which helps you decide whether spending on ads is worthwhile. Look back as far as 28 days, and export data to compare over time. Review page views, previews, and actions taken, and see age, gender, and geographic demographics of your audience. You can even do some competitive intelligence using Pages to Watch, which lets you see which posts are succeeding for your competitors. After all, if it’s working for them… The biggest downside is the lack of sentiment analysis – which is what tells you why your audience is invested in your brand and content. But if you’re just looking for a social media and analytics comparison tool, that tells you when this specific audience is most active and engaged with your data.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter’s built-in analytics tell you a lot about which tweets are succeeding and to what degree – even if they don’t tell you why. An audience tab displays a breakdown by gender, and also by interests. It also lets you compare against a comparison audience – like “all of Twitter.” The events tab clues you into which current events – like Valentine’s Day, Coachella, and the Met Gala – have everyone abuzz. Video view insights and conversion tracking are great analytic additions to this social media channel. Missing is the ability to target individual audience segments with messaging just for them. But you at least have an idea of where to aim to please the majority of your audience.
PINTEREST ANALYTICS
Pinterest business accounts – which you can easily switch to – come with access to Pinterest Social Media Analytics. Its analytics measure the traffic your site gets, as well as traffic from other channels, the content people save from your social channels, and audience insights. These reveal key social analytics intel about your followers, including demographics and topics that interest them. And you can compare your audience against the overall Pinterest audience to see where they fall. Sentiment is, once again, lacking – as it often is with free social media analytics tools – but for this specific channel you can learn plenty with the analytics on offer.
INSTAGRAM INSIGHTS
As with Pinterest, you need to convert your profile to a free business or creator profile before you can use Instagram Insights. Once you do, you have access to a host of social analytics data that is ever evolving, including: Activity, Content and Audience insights – like interactions (profile visits and website clicks), discovery (reach and impressions), post, Story, and promotion analytics, and location, age, and gender info for your followers. And you can also see which days and times they are most active on Instagram. Missing is the key social marketing analytics capability to analyze images for sentiment, logos, location, etc.
YOUTUBE ANALYTICS
Videos are one of the most engaging and social analytics rich types of social content out there, so it’s great that YouTube now offers analytics of their own. Grow your channel and maximize revenue with social analytics on earnings, engagement, and traffic sources with filters for sorting by content, geography, and date to see if a video is popular in a certain location, or over a specific date range. Earnings reports let you track earnings and total views, as well as which ad formats were most successful for driving revenue. Audience retention reports shows you how style, length, and promotion efforts affect your videos. Pro tip: Use Average Watch Time data as a guide for front-loading key information in your videos. 6. LINKEDIN ANALYTICSLinkedIn offers distinct, and basic analytics about visitors, page updates and followers. On the Visitor view, brands see page views from desktop or mobile, or combined. As well as Visitor demographics that revolve around job functions. The Updates view shows post impressions and a list of previous posts ripe for creating an ad around (they’re all listed, it doesn’t show you top contenders for your ad spend). And then Followers shows you the change in follower count, where in the world they’re from and gives a super handy list of companies you may want to consider reaching out to, as they’re watching you!
HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is a social media management and scheduling tool. It helps teams work together when it comes to keeping social postings organized and moving forward. Beyond its free offering, it also has plans for individuals, SMBs and the enterprise. With sentiment-driven insights, conversation maps, customizable dashboards, and reports, it’s a solid choice for brands who need a place to start and a play to grow when they can afford more. Price: Reach out for a custom quote
BOARDREADER
Boardreader uses search bar simplicity to put you in touch with reviews and forum posts – which are an oft-forgotten part of social media analytics data. See consumer posts or threads within the past day, or as far back as a year. Advanced search features let you filter results to get a better sense of things. The “Trendy” graphs let you compare conversation volume against other brands – though you won’t know what is actually being said, or whether it’s good or bad. Still, it’s a starting point that could work with other free web and social analytics tools. Price: Free
FOLLOWERWONK
If your need for social data is limited to Twitter, you can connect a single profile with Followerwonk for free and track and sort your followers to see how many new followers you’ve gained, and how many followers you’ve lost over the past day to 120 days. This is great social analytics data to have, but can be distracting from more worthwhile pursuits. Search competitor handles for insights on their followers or choose three handles to compare users they follow, or their followers. You can also search Twitter profiles, as well as search bios for keywords – which is a great way to gather insights about how certain audience segments see themselves You get more if you subscribe, but if you need somewhere to start, this is bare bones and simple. It offers a solid social media analytics starting point. Price: Subscriptions start at $29/month, billed annually
Conclusion
This list is proof that there are numerous options for tracking consumer attitudes, opinions, sentiment and behaviors online, with the best among them offering both web and social media analytics options. You have to track all of that and more to stay ahead of savvy competitors – so having the right analytics tools, capable of providing real-time actionable insight is a must. Which platform is the right one? That’s up to you. There’s something to be said for the idea that you get what you pay for . . . and sometimes you get a lot more. You can get by – at least for a time – with something completely free. But after a while, you’ll likely need state-of-the-art Next Generation AI-powered analytics tools to truly compete. Each of the platforms listed here offers a portion of what’s needed to gain a dimensional picture of your audience – but few of them “have it all.” In those cases, what you save in cost might be lost in efforts to cobble together insights from multiple sources. The time saved on such efforts makes the investment in a program that does it all well worth it. Not to mention, cobbled insights offer less than accurate results, and take much longer than the snazzy all-in-one tools your competitors may be using! But if you’re not there yet, applying some type of social media analytics tool to your process is a step in the right direction for all forward-thinking brands – and any of the above would be a good place to start.