There’s a load of social media analytics tools available out there to help you analyse your data. You can track your presence, follow customers and understand what they are saying about your brand. But which social media analytics tools should you choose?
This post provides a short list of free and premium social media analytics tools every marketer should know about.
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.
BuzzSumo
Another, this time paid, social media analytics tool I personally really, really, really like is BuzzSumo.
What is BuzzSummo? It’s a content analytics tool – among many features such as brand monitoring, social listening or competitor research, it also provides social media analytics:
- Content discovery: Find most shared content in social media networks. It’s a powerful feature for content writers!
- Content analysis: Find social media data about particular topic of interest: content type, top shared domains, top social media platforms, etc.
- Influencer marketing: Find top influencers in a niche or industry based on social media reach or engagement.
Pros:
- Offers free trial
- Presents up-to-date popular content. Allows to find trending topics to share on social media.
- Easy to use.
Cons:
- Bit pricey if you want the full version.
- Not a social media management tool. You will need additional tools if you need that feature.
Brand24
Correct, that’s us – one of the best social media monitoring tools. Says who? Says Buffer!
Brand24 is a social media analytics tool starting at $49 a month and offers a free, 2-week trial (no card required).
The tool does web and social media monitoring and analytics across multiple channels. You can monitor keywords related to your company, for example company name, website address, company hashtag, marketing campaign name or hashtag and discover how they perform in social media channels in terms of social media reach, engagement, volume of mentions, influential sources mentioning them, etc.
- Social media analytics: Analyze the performance of your keywords on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, including volume of mentions, social media reach, sentiment analysis of your keywords.
- Metrics of engagement: Track the engagement the social media posts, marketing campaigns and content generate
- Metrics of influence: They’re great for influencer marketing as you can discover the influence of social media authors talking about your company or any topic
- Trending hashtags: Find trending hashtags on Instagram for any keyword
- Hashtag analytics: See how many times a hashtag was used on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Pros:
- Allows tracking brand mentions across all social media platforms.
- It’s possible to generate social media analytics report.
- Ability to check positive and negative sentiments with your tracked keywords.
Cons:
- Doesn’t provide social media management platform.
Brand24 is a tool that monitors online mentions about your company.Try free!
Cyfe
One of the best social media analytics tools is Cyfe – a business dashboard tool.
It syncs up data from many, many, many marketing tools in one place.
The number of available integrations and dashboards is astonishing and makes Cyfe a powerful tool – it covers not only social media analytics tools but also advertising, email, monitoring, sales, SEO and web analytics tools!!!!
However, let’s focus on the social media part.
In Cyfe, you can build your social media dashboard including following apps and data:
- AddThis
- Bitly
- Facebook Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, actions
- Facebook Pages: Likes, clicks, active users, page views
- Flickr: Top photos, slideshows
- Google+: Plus ones, circled by
- Google+ Search: Posts
- Instagram: Photos, followers, following
- LinkedIn Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, conversions
- LinkedIn Company: Followers, impressions, engagement
- Pinterest: Boards, pins, likes, followers, following
- Publisher: Schedule social media posts
- Reviews: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google, YP
- SlideShare: Views, favorites, comments, downloads
- Twitter: Tweets, followers, listed, mentions, influencers
- Twitter Ads: Cost, impression, engagement, follows
- Twitter Search: Tweets, mentions, hashtags
- Vimeo: My feed, top videos
- YouTube
You can try it out for free.
Pros:
- Create reports with in-depth social analytics.
- Easy set up.
- Pre-built widgets for services like Google or Saleforce.
Cons:
- UI can be unintuitive.
- No custom reports with social data.
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.
The analytics other tools had just didn’t have the power. We needed the best analytics we could get. Layne Pfliiger
Social Media Manager
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.
Google Analytics
While it’s not solely a social media analytics tool, Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track social media campaigns and even help you measure social ROI.
You likely already have an account set up on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic right now. But did you know you can access and create reports specifically for social media tracking, too?
For instance, you can see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network, or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns.
ShortStack
Typically, running a social media contest requires a surprising amount of legwork.
From the process of picking a winner to analyzing engagement from a giveaway campaign, ShortStack can pick up the slack.
For brands running frequent contests or giveaways, a dedicated contest analytics tool ensures that you aren’t just giving away freebies for no reason. ShortStack looks at everything from entry data to long-term campaign performance to do just that.
By analyzing your contest’s performance with a social analytics tool like ShortStack, you’ll be able to see engagement metrics and identify which types of contests work best with your audience.
SHIELD App
As the source of 80% of B2B social leads, B2B brands are paying more and more attention to LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the increasing need for employee advocacy means that brands should be tracking the LinkedIn presence of individual salespeople in addition to their company page.
Up-and-coming social media analytics tools like SHIELD are helping bridge that gap. For example, SHIELD examines the performance of individual employee profiles and their posts. Content analytics including average likes, comments and hashtags can help employees optimize their posts prior to sharing to maximize their reach.
Additionally, SHIELD’s team report allows businesses to showcase side-by-side the engagement and growth of individual employee profiles over time.
HubSpot
With HubSpot’s analytics tools you can tie social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, or publishing using other tools or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. You can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.
HubSpot’s social analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths, and impressions.
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What’s important to highlight is that HubSpot’s social analytics tools is part of HubSpot’s Marking Hub, their all-in-one inbound marketing software. This means that using the platform you’ll have insight into the entire customer journey, not only social media-specific metrics. You’ll be able to see which marketing tactics are working best for your business, how are they impacting your bottom line, and learn about your social media campaigns ROI.
That makes HubSpot an excellent choice for businesses whose marketing teams want to keep all campaign functions in one place.
Conclusion
There are many free and paid social media analytics tools, but you should be able to find a tool that meets all of your needs. Just remember to pay attention to the features you want or need along with the cost when deciding which tool is the best for your organization. Don’t be afraid to test multiple ones out before making a final choice, and then have fun learning from all of the information each analytics tool provides!