Data is power, so why don’t more people know about the best free social media analytics tools 2022? If you operate a business, you need to be aware of the fact that social media plays a big role in your marketing strategy. Analytics are an essential part of this strategy.
It’s becoming more and more important to analyze which social media platforms and digital channels are generating the most engagement and new customers. Which social media analytics tools are trending in 2022? Read this list of top best free social media analytics tools in 2022. You need to know the right questions to ask when considering social media analytics software or analytics tools.
Social media analytics tools 2022. Welcome to the definitive list of social media analytics tools for free. Social media analytics tools help businesses to collect and monitor user conversations, measure traffic alongside the performance of your social media posts or campaigns. Social media analytics tools allow businesses to see what users are saying about them online and make it easy to identify trends in activity and sentiment. Some go beyond simple text analysis and can also detect emotion and tone. This guide will cover the top best social media analytics tools you can use to grow your business in 2022.
The ever increasing number of social media apps in the market and their continued rise in popularity has made it necessary for businesses to make use of this powerful marketing tool. The best way to do this is through analytics. In order to get the best results, one needs to know what the people want and how they can help them achieve it. This is where free social media analytics tools come into play.
What Is Social Media Analytics?
A social media analytics tool is the ideal companion for measuring your brand’s performance on various social media channels. It also supports you on planning further campaigns
Social media analytics tools are often used to measure the return on investment (ROI) of a company’s social media channels. In most cases, campaigns are the basis of measurement, mostly because it allows you to more easily understand the impact of each campaign on the overall marketing success.
Another interesting area of social media analytics is the segmentation of visitors and customers to get a better understanding of the target group.
Hootsuite
There’s hardly any social media marketer who doesn’t know Hootsuite.
Use Hootsuite to publish and schedule your social media posts. You can also generate powerful social media analytics so you can see which content performs best or worst and make smarter decisions.
The tool integrates with all social media platforms so your social media analytics and management are done from one platform.
Pro: Compared to other similar tools, Hootsuite’s primary advantage is that it connects to more social networks.
Con: On the downside, having so many social networks and profiles on one dashboard can get confusing and feel cluttered. Also, some integrations are less functional than others.
Price: $29 – $599 USD per month + custom pricing.
NetBase Quid
Want to know how people feel about your brand? Try NetBase Quid.
NetBase provides social analytics for brands.
Global brands like Taco Bell, Coca-Cola, and Yum! use this tool to track conversations around their brands on social and make important marketing decisions.
The tool analyzes consumer sentiment around your brand from social platforms, websites, forums, comment data, blogs, news, and review sites.
It also allows you to conduct social listening to understand your competitor’s audience. Also, you can monitor your brand to know when certain key actions occur. It also provides you with customer experience analytics.
Pro: With these three functionalities, you can know exactly where your brand is getting love from, why customers are dissatisfied, and how you can intervene to get more people to love and trust your brand.
Con: Netbase Quid takes some time to grow on you as the various dashboard templates available are not as intuitive. Also, there is some limitation to the sentiment analysis tool.
Price: Contact NetBase for a demo.
quintly
Do you want to know how your brand stacks up against competitors on social media?
Then quintly might just be right for you. Not only will you get a peek of your brand’s social media marketing performance, but also see how it’s performing against competitors.
Agencies can use this tool as well; they use it for client management, reporting, centralized analytics, and influencer ranking. Media houses can also use quintly for managing their social media platforms as well as tracking relevant conversations and campaigns.
Pro: The tool is simple to set up and has a minimalist user interface, which makes it easy for even the least tech-savvy users to learn how to use it.
Con: The data insights provided can be a little ambiguous, so you may not be able to link ROI or see attribution from individual posts.
Price: Starts at €300 per month.
Rival IQ
Similar to many other social media analytics tools, Rival IQ helps you track your social media performance.
Rival IQ will send you alerts whenever your competitors post high-performing content, such as boosting social media posts. This gives you the chance to quickly respond before you start losing a chunk of your market share.
Rival IQ also lets you see what content your audience prefers to see, and helps you discover fresh and relevant content ideas.
Pro: Easy to conduct competitor analysis because of the alerts and the tracking you can implement with this platform.
Con: Rival IQ is competitively priced on a tiered structure which can get expensive if you want additional data.
Price: $199 – $499 USD per month.
Social Status
$29
Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics tool perfect for agencies and digital marketers who need multi-channel reporting and the ability to white label and customize their reports to suit different clients. The dashboard contains all the metrics you need in real-time.
Reports can be exported to CSV, PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides.
Social Status also tracks Facebook Ad Accounts for reporting on paid campaigns. You can also benchmark performance against influencers and measure your influencer marketing campaigns too.
Pros
- There is a free plan.
- You get in-depth stats and metrics for all the main social media channels.
- It is simple to use and has an intuitive design.
Cons
- It only focuses on analytics and reporting, with no publishing or management features.
- Higher plans can be expensive.
Google Analytics
Free
Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track social media campaigns and even helps you measure social ROI. Google Analytics is one of the most valuable social media reporting tools for analyzing the trend of social media traffic.
You can also find out the most effective network that’s yielding you the best results for your campaigns. There are also several custom filter options for diversified reporting.
Pros
- It’s completely free.
- It’s compatible with multiple digital environments like websites, mobile applications, etc., including Google Ads accounts.
- It collects data from multiple sources, creates goals, and tracks them thoroughly.
- It gives you customized reports for better decision-making capabilities.
Cons
- There’s a lot of learning involved to understand the tool.
- It has multiple dashboards, which can be overwhelming if you are not sure what you are doing.
- If you want to upgrade your free plan, it will cost you a whopping $150K a year.
ShortStack
$99
If hosting contests on social media platforms is your thing, then ShortStack is the best social media metrics tool for you. It lets you manage everything, starting with entry data to long-term campaign performance.
It allows visitors to fill in their details on the page and unlock special offers, including e-books, discount codes, or giveaways. It also has customizable features like landing page templates in various colors and eye-catching fonts, widgets for forms, polls, and galleries.
Pros
- It’s effortless to design, launch, and monitor, even for beginners.
- It has a drag and drop interface to customize colors, fonts, widgets, etc., to give your visitors an elevated experience.
- It gives you the ability to embed any analytics tag for tracking conversions or retargeting.
Cons
- ShortStack is a contest platform, so it might not be the best fit if you are looking to manage social media and get analytics.
- The tool offers comprehensive contest analytics but doesn’t consider entry-fee processing.
- ShortStack doesn’t necessarily increase your profile views or followers.
Keyhole
$199
Keyhole can provide real-time performance analysis of the industry. It helps brands understand which hashtags are trending among followers.
Businesses can leverage Keyhole’s social listening and monitoring features and even track campaign-specific analytics on Twitter and Instagram. You can also use social media reporting tools like this to keep an eye on your competitors.
Pros
- Keyhole produces valuable reports to keep clients well-informed. You can even download them in PDF format.
- Historical data and influencer management features are available.
- Track conversations about your brand across blogs, forums, and news websites.
Cons
- Free and paid versions differ dramatically.
- You may have to set up trackers beforehand.
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.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media solution from the Zoho suite. The platform comes with different plans starting at $10 per month and ending at just over $300 per month.
A rough distinction is made between business and agency rates. The price also changes depending on the number of brands you want to track and the number of team members you let on the platform.
Each plan comes with a free trial that, unlike on some platforms (looking at you, Hootsuite), does not become a paid subscription. When the free trial ends, it is downgraded to a free plan. This, among other reasons, makes Zoho Social the best free social media analytics tool available.
After registering with Zoho Social, you will be taken directly to the overview page.
Here you will find the most important information at a glance, such as the “brand health” and “recent posts.” At this point, we would have liked to see the graphs and charts like what Keynote offers on its overview dashboard.
The navigation bar is easy to use, but the menu descriptions are a bit confusing and many of the tabs show empty dashboards.
Under “report,” we finally found the analytics reports we were looking for. We are a bit disappointed, though, because the KPIs and dashboards are somehow too basic and there are no settings or customization options either.
Other Reasons We Like Zoho Social
Zoho is a solid solution, especially for smaller companies that don’t want to invest much time and money in social media. The platform is easy to use, not very expensive and is a solid solution for beginners. If you need more advanced features, Zoho is out of place.
All in all, Zoho Social is like Zoho Books (read our Zoho Books Review): It’s decent software, but nothing special.
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Free trial and free plan available
- Content-planning functions
Cons:
- Very few reporting options
- Very limited range of functions
- Not many trackers for different social media channels
Why Should You Use Social Media Monitoring?
Some of the most common use cases for social media monitoring are:
- Track everything that is being said about a brand, a product, or a competitor online, and understand the feeling of these conversations through Sentiment Analysis.
- Maximise your ROI (stands for “Return on Investment”) on marketing campaigns
- Improve your customer service experience
- Spot an upcoming social media crisis and act on time saving your brand’s name
- Identify brand ambassadors and potential influencers for influencer marketing campaigns
- Generate more leads
- Analyse your competitors’ brand image and market share through Share of Voice
- Identify trending topics and popular hashtags that can contribute to designing the next marketing strategy
But, the most important benefit of social media monitoring is that it makes your audience feel you’re here to hear and support them. Monitoring helps your brand stay informed about messages that might gain popularity for the wrong reasons. On that same note, monitoring tools help you preserve a positive image and single out potential influencers.
So, choosing the right monitoring tool for social media management should be a priority of your marketing strategy, as it provides you with business real-time insights and gives you the possibility to lead conversations on where the business is going.
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools free 2022 are needed to satisfy the increasing needs of social media managers and marketers to know more about their follower’s behavior, engagement, and demographics in order to create effective strategies that can help them reap good benefits from social media.
Social media analytics tools 2022 play a critical role in making out the overall picture of performance and efficiency relating to your website’s social media activity. It is a broad term used to track and report the growth of any brand/business as well as individual pages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.