Free social media analytics tools 2021, although powerful and effective, can eat a significant portion of your time—they are not the best option for all users. There are paid social media analytics tools 2021 that also provide detailed data reports and give more comprehensive insights into the workings of your content across multiple social media platforms.
No matter what business, you are in a digital world where the need for visual content is increasing. Without the proper social media analytics tools, you might lose your potential customers and fans. These tools may be essential and help you gather sufficient data to establish key performance indicators (KPI) and measure their effectiveness.
Social media analytics tools are powerful tools that allow you to monitor, report and analyze your social media platforms. You might be wondering, how can I do social media analytics? How do I track social media analytics on my own? We will answer these questions in this article.
We have gone through a large number of free and paid social media analytics tools to prepare this list. We used a number of data points including customer satisfaction, popularity, pricing, and more to decide on the top ten best social media analytics tools in 2021.
Uses of Social Media Analytics
- Competitor analysis: the feature helps social media managers track the performance of their social media campaigns as well as for those of their competitors. By doing so, the managers are able to benchmark with their competitors as they strive to improve the overall performance of their campaign. It is also a great way of improving interactions and increasing on their followers.
- Follower analysis: apart from learning about how your followers are interacting with your posts, you also need to learn more about their demographic and location. This gives an insight into how a certain demographic is interacting with your post. Having such information helps social media managers personalize their content with aim of boosting interaction with the targeted audience.
- Content engagement analysis: this is similar to follower analysis in that it gives insight into how followers are engaging with various contents posted. Social media analytics software makes use of this feature to analyze the contents that attract most engagements, followers, and likes. With this, social media managers are able to personalize content so as to increase on followers. It also helps to determine the most appropriate socio adverts to invest in.
- Influencer identification: the software is able to identify the followers with the largest networks. These followers can be contracted by the managers to act as brand ambassadors due to their large followers. Making use of the follower’s network is one of the strategies used by organizations to boosts their followings and audience.
- Reporting: the social media analytic tools provides an advanced reporting tool as opposed to using the traditional spreadsheet. This improves the reporting process as data can be easily exported in an organized and easy to understand fashion.
Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that helps you monitor and analyze data found across all your online services, including Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, WordPress, Zendesk, and Twitter from one single location in real time. No more wasting countless hours tracking down your data from all over the Web every day!
Keyhole
Keyhole provides real-time social conversation tracking for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It helps you measure and amplify conversations around your brand and campaigns, enables you identify prospective clients and influencers talking about (or looking for) your services, and aids in driving engagement by finding and re-sharing relevant content.
Keyhole offers various trackers that help you monitor your events, campaigns, influencer activity, brand mentions, and industry-specific social conversations. It lets you track hashtags, keywords, and accounts, for which it provides a wealth of information such as reach, top posts, share of voice, and more for your brand or competitors’.
3 cool features:
- Predict your campaign’s performance with machine learning and make changes accordingly.
- Analyze people’s sentiments when they engage with your posts.
- Manage influencers’ accounts and permissions, and track their performance from one place.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for seven days
- Audience insights
- Sentiment analysis
- Compare brands
- Trends identification
Paid options: $49, $99, $199 per month, and custom pricing
Rival IQ
Rival IQ lets you track a number of different companies and compare their performance across not only social media platforms but also SEO. It also analyzes Facebook and Instagram ads, and features historical data up to 24 months. This way, you can pinpoint the overall digital strategies that are working for your competitors and learn from their tactics.
3 cool features:
- Compare your profiles to others in your industry in terms of social metrics, hashtags, and content quality.
- Integrate Google Analytics to get a complete understanding of your customers’ journey.
- Improve your Facebook and Instagram ad performance with automated insights.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Facebook ads reports and alerting
- Facebook and Instagram insights reporting
- Facebook boosted post analytics
- LinkedIn and Google analytics
Paid options: $199, $349, and $499 per month
Klout
Klout measures influence based on your ability to drive action across the social Web. When you connect your social media accounts, it generates a score on a scale of 1-100 that represents your ability to engage other people and inspire social actions. The platform helps you gain insights that allow you better understand how you influence others.
ViralWoot
ViralWoot enables you to get more exposure for your Pinterest profile and your pins. You earn “seeds” (points) by following other users and re-pinning. It also helps with scheduling so your visibility is increased, and you can create alerts that let you know when other users are pinning your content.
Social Report
Social Report provides an overview of your activity on multiple social networks as well as blogs. You can track new topics, measure ROI, and export the data into a handy report layout. Social Report makes it easy for you to monitor your social profiles as well as those of your competitors. It includes useful options to structure and manage your customer data.
3 cool features:
- Enable notifications to receive in-depth reports daily or weekly.
- List insights on different social profiles side by side to find correlations and contrasts in your overall marketing strategy.
- Create and share white label reports with your clients.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 30 days
- Analytics for social media, business reviews, and website performance
- Competitor tracking
- Unlimited PDF and Excel exports
Paid options: $49, $99, and $199 per month
Talkwalker
Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers
Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:
- Mentions
- Brand sentiment
- Important influencers
- Author lists
You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.
Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.
Hootsuite Impact
Key benefits: Track how organic and paid social impact real business goals and get recommendations for how to improve
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advertising teams
Hootsuite Impact provides an in-depth look at the performance of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that performance to specific business goals, like sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to improve your results.
Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture of your post and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don’t have to gather data from separate tools to create a social media analytics report.
Instead, you see exactly how much revenue all your social efforts generate, so you can prove your social ROI. Keep in mind that ROI is not only about sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula developed specifically for your business. Seeing which of your efforts have paid off has never been easier.
You’ll also get a clear breakdown that shows you exactly how to replicate your successes and improve in the areas where you’re falling short.
Then there’s the competitive benchmarks. To get the best insights from social analytics, you need to understand how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Impact shows how your results stack up against your competitors, so you can spot opportunities to improve.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is a collection of analytics tools that includes all the fundamental resources you might need—tracking of multiple profiles, key performance indicators, competitive intelligence, and automated reports. Beside analytics tools, Socialbakers also offers tools for publishing and optimizing your content, identifying influencers, digital persona mapping, and customer care on social media.
3 cool features:
- Analyze audience sentiment towards your campaigns from their reactions and interactions.
- Decide whether to boost Facebook posts or not based on predictive analysis.
- See how your performance compares to that of your competitors in the last 90 days on Instagram and Facebook.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Social media analytics
- Automated sentiment analysis
- Smart benchmarks
- Omnichannel paid analytics
- Facebook and Instagram performance report
- Facebook benchmarking tool
- Instagram analytics tool
Paid options: $200 per month and custom pricing
Iconosquare
Iconosquare helps you track, grow, and report your Facebook and Instagram accounts’ performance. Agencies can manage multiple brands from a single dashboard and schedule reports to be sent directly to clients. The competitor tracking and benchmarking features help you compare your performance with other brands in your industry.
3 cool features:
- Discover photos, captions, and comments that tag or mention your brand.
- Track engagement on competitors’ profiles.
- Learn when your followers are online and engage them live.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Advanced analytics
- Competitor and hashtag tracking
- Industry benchmark
- Facebook account audit
- Instagram account audit
Paid options: $29, $59 per month, and custom pricing
Tailwind
Tailwind is a Pinterest and Instagram marketing solution that helps you schedule content, monitor conversations, and analyze performance. For Pinterest, its analytics gives you insights such as the number of pins with your domain, the potential impressions, and the number of followers for your boards. For Instagram, it shows basic metrics such as followers, posts, comments, and likes.
3 cool features:
- Identify the best hashtags on Instagram with the Hashtag Finder.
- Use the browser extension to create multiple posts from any site.
- Upload images in bulk using a drag-and-drop calendar to save time.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Basic profile performance
- Basic metrics for individual posts
- Board and website insights
Paid options: $9.99, $799.99 per month, and custom pricing
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is also a social media marketing management tool, which enables you to, for example:
- Schedule content publishing
- Uncover trends, and actionable data for marketing ideas
- Improve social monitoring, and with a unified inbox, you can stay ahead of social engagements
- Track the performance with Sprout Social analytics.
Sprout Social offers an all-in-one product for social media, and it’s built for better management of social media teams and coordinating larger campaigns.
You can try Sprout Social for free 30-days, but there are no free accounts available, and it starts at $99 per month.
Oktopost
Similarly to the last two, Oktopost is a social media management tool but geared towards B2B enterprises.
It offers more opportunities to deepen your analytics for more data-driven decisions via business intelligence integrations. You can also use the data within your marketing automation or CRM platforms.
Other key features include:
- Monitoring: mentions, keywords, competitors
- Collaboration within larger teams
- Scalability of customer support
- Auditing and improving workflows
Unfortunately, pricing isn’t available for Oktopost on their websites, and you need to book a call to learn more.
Brand24
While you can monitor how your brand is trending on Google Trends, Brand24 offers a more robust solution to track and monitor brand mentions across social media.
With Brand24, you will discover the persons who mention your brand across different social platforms and have an opportunity to respond accordingly.
Brand24 is an excellent tool for expanding your customer support on social media.
Brand24 starts at $49 per month with a 14-day free trial but doesn’t offer a free version.
Affable
Affable is a social media marketing tool for finding the right influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns.
Through Affable, you can search through over a million influencers to match your target audiences’ different criteria. The tool helps you also determine potential influencers’ reach and eliminate influencers with a fake following.
Affable lets you contact influencers at scale and helps you track and manage relationships with influencers.
As of now, Affable won’t disclose how much its tools cost on their website.
Meetedgar
Meetedgar is a tool for social media scheduling and automation that enables you to effectively and efficiently recycle old social posts.
Using the tool, you can save time with the content creation itself, as it automatically reshares old content with variations.
Building a large backlog of content in their unlimited content library enables you to have a regularly updated social channel. And utilizing the RSS feed feature lets you automatically import your newest blogs into social posts.
Meetedgar comes in two plans: Lite ($19) and Edgar ($49) per month with a 7-day free trial.
What are Social Media Analytics Software?
Social Media Analytics Software helps companies with multiple social accounts, channels to compile data and analyze campaign performance in a single view. This helps to optimize campaigns and maximize ROI in near real-time. This helps to conduct ad-hoc analysis to share meaningful insights and visualizations across your organization.
Social Media Analytics Software extracts valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision making. Social media analytics can also be referred as social media listening, social media monitoring or social media intelligence. There are three main steps in analyzing the social media: data identification, data analysis, and information interpretation.
This tool has been designed to assist social media managers to analyze data from the social media campaigns. It is used to gather data, analyze as well as report on what is happening in your social media accounts. The tool can also be used to collect information about the most successful practices, demographics as well as consumer behaviors.
Gathering such information helps social media managers determine the most appropriate form to reach their customers. More so, it is a tool that provides insights on most appropriate strategies to employ in order to grow business. The tool is not a preserve for social media managers only; it is also used by other employees such as marketing officers to measure the success of their engagements with consumers.
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools are handy for analysing the performance of social media marketing campaigns and for continuously monitoring the traffic that goes to your website from social sites. The best social media analytics tools are a boon for business owners as it enables them to make well-informed decisions about their online presence.
Whether you’re a social media beginner or an expert, there are some essential tools that we all need to have at our disposal. Social media analytics tools are a must have when you own your own business, blog, or website and want to get more out of it. If you’re looking for the best social media analytics tools to help you boost your business and your website, look no further than the following five.