A social media tool or better said a social media analytics tool is software that allows the marketing and advertising department to see how many people are following their social media profiles, what kind of content they are posting, which posts are getting the most attention and messages, etc. Social media analytics tools help you to achieve your social media objectives faster.
Social media analytics tools are very important in social media marketing. Marketing and business is all about data and numbers, and after you invest all your money in social media, you need to measure it’s effectiveness with the help of social media analytics tools. Social media analytics tools will give you all kinds of statistics about how many users are there on your social platform and what kind of engagement is coming from them etc. This will help you determine where you need to put your focus more as well as which platform is more effective. Social media is a waste of money if you don’t know how to measure it’s effectiveness with the help of social media analytics tools.
The Best Social Media Analytics Tools for 2021 – While it may seem like a lot of work, you’ll be able to use your analytic results to better serve your audience, increase engagement, and grow your business. The following 10 brands create the best social media analytics tools for SMBs
Social media analytics is the field of studying, analyzing and reporting social media’s economic, social and marketing value. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are now becoming the medium to promote products and services. Business marketing on social media has helped the businesses to grow their business in multiple folds. Research studies suggest that businesses can find new customers on social networks.
What Social Media Analytics Tools Should You Use?
Here’s a list of the best social media analytics tools you should use for your marketing campaigns. These are free social media tools anyone can use to track their social media efforts.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker gives you unlimited free searches for hashtags and keywords across major social media platforms, news, blogs, and forums. It provides a wide range of data such as mentions, sentiment, distribution of conversations, top posts, and more. Overall, Talkwalker is a powerful brand monitoring platform that helps you measure sentiment and compare your performance to competitors’ across channels.
3 cool features:
- Monitor in real-time what customers are saying about your brands, products, events, earning calls, or campaigns.
- Map your mentions to a world map.
- Get demographic information such as age, gender, and occupation on your audience.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Talkwalker Alerts
- Free social search (and monitor)
Paid options: $9,600 per year and custom pricing
Google Analytics
While Google Analytics is built for analyzing website traffic down to the last detail, it is very useful for analyzing the impact of social media as a marketing channel and source of traffic. Click through to Acquisition > Social > Overview, and you can check out how many visits your site receives from each of the major social networks. You can tie this back to your bottom line using goals and conversions.
3 cool features:
- Find social networks and communities where people are interacting with your content.
- Measure the value of social media as a channel by analyzing conversions and ecommerce transactions.
- See how users who come from social media navigate through your site.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
and all other social networks
What analytics you get for free:
- Social referral traffic
- Social traffic flow
- Social conversions
Facebook Insights
Available for all Page admins, Facebook Insights shows you the full stats behind your posts, your fans, and your reach. Additionally, from the Insights tab, you can set up a list of Pages to Watch, which gives you information on the performance of other Facebook pages.
How to access: Click the Insights tab in the menu bar across the top of your Facebook Page.
Quick tip: You can click on the people reached number at the bottom of any individual post in your Page’s timeline to see a pop-up of the full stats for that post
Instagram Insights
If you have an Instagram Business Profile, you will have access to Instagram Insights — Instagram’s native in-app analytics. It offers a comprehensive range of data about your profile, posts, stories, and ads. It also has detailed information about your followers such as their most active times and days.
How to access: If you have a personal Instagram profile, you’ll need to convert into a Business Profile. Go to your profile page in the mobile app, tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner, and tap Insights.
Quick tip: In the Audience section, you get data on the average times when your followers are online. You can use this to determine your best time to post on Instagram.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that automatically collects social media data & creates reports for you. It excels at four key things:
- Getting you inside the minds of your customers.
- Simplifying your reporting — so you can easily share results with your team.
- Showing you what attracts your consumers’ attention.
- Saving you a huge amount of time — as you don’t have to crawl different social platforms looking for and reporting your social analytics.
These are critical features to look out for when making social media analytics software comparisons.
As Neil Patel says, “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”
The tool shows you when your users are most active, so you get to see your audience’s best engagement days and times.
Using Keyhole, you can find, identify, track, and reach out to your influencers:
You can also conduct a detailed and in-depth sentiment analysis of social media posts over time:
With Keyhole, you get to see the number of impressions, reach, posts, and engagements that certain accounts or hashtags are getting. You are also able to identify key influencers who get the highest engagement rates and the number of followers in specific industries and reach out to them right from the tool.
And if you ever want to know the demographics of your hashtag users or account interactors or followers, Keyhole shows you those as well — including the percentage of positive and negative sentiments of your followers.
Also, Keyhole customers can publish and schedule unlimited posts each month from all the accounts included in their plan. Managing anywhere from 3 accounts to unlimited accounts depending on your needs.
Pricing: Custom pricing for businesses of all sizes.
Agorapulse
AgoraPulse is one of the greatest social media analytics tools that helps you identify your best content and see what users need. And we all know that social media sucks time like a plague… But AgoraPulse is good medicine for it.
This tool is a huge timesaver for social media marketers. It helps you execute virtually all your social media tasks in one place.
Pro: You’ll be impressed by Agorapulse’s Twitter reporting functionality. The tool generates specific reports for your Tweets, mentions, retweets, and favorites as well as other engagement stats. This makes social listening pretty easy for you.
You can also post or schedule content across all your profiles at once. Plus, the tool’s chrome plugin helps you do all this at once — saving you time.
Con: Agorapulse’s listening is only available for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. So, if you’re interested in tracking LinkedIn and Pinterest you’ll have to use another tool.
Pricing ranges from $99 – $199 per month.
Oktopost
Oktopost is focused on helping B2B brands manage, monitor, and measure all of their social media activities from a single platform.
Do you have global social media teams? Manage social media teams in more than one country all from one platform.
Social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions are some of Oktopost’s best features.
You can measure your social media marketing performance and optimize your efforts accordingly.
Pro: One huge Oktopost plus is that you can integrate other applications such as Google Analytics to access even more detailed social media marketing insights.
Also, did you know Oktopost has recently partnered up with Keyhole? Powered by Keyhole, Oktopost now offers advanced social listening capabilities as well as in-depth research and analytics required to remain competitive.
Con: Unfortunately, the platform does not have the ability to cross-post between networks.
Price: Contact Oktopost for pricing.
Brandwatch
Data is huge these days and BrandWatch is all about it. They set you up with the right industry data to make smart marketing decisions.
Monitoring your brand online has never been easier. BrandWatch provides you with in-depth insights into your target customers’ thinking per time, which makes it super easy to sell to them.
Pro: You can search the Internet for specific conversations about your brand, segment those conversations into categories, and analyze them to spot out critical information. Additionally, they have an image analysis tool that can uncover logos.
Con: Brandwatch can be quite technical for someone new to brand monitoring tools and the query structure can be tedious. However, for someone with medium to expert experience, this is one of the best tools to monitor online brand mentions.
Pricing begins at $1,000 according to PC Mag
Twitter Analytics
Twitter’s built-in analytics point at your top-performing tweets and their impact. But they don’t tell you why. The number of tweets, tweet impressions, visits to your profile, mentions, and followers are all tracked in the Twitter analytics dashboard. You can simply click on any tweet to see its corresponding metrics such as impressions, likes, retweets, and engagements.
Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest’s analytics measures the traffic sent to your site from Pinterest and other channels. Pinterest analytics also provide data as content that people save. Some analytics include average daily impressions and viewers, audience location, gender, language, the total number of repins, number of clicks, and likes.
Youtube Analytics
Youtube analytics is the most comprehensive feature of YouTube and can help you maximize your earnings, engagement and find out traffic sources with sorting filters like content, geography, and more. You also get audience retention reports that show how style, length, and promotion efforts affect your video performance.
LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn’s social media analytics are very distinctive and offer data about visitors, page updates, followers, and visitor demographics that revolve around job functions. Post impressions, followers count, and follower/search demographics are additional insights that LinkedIn analytics provides for creating targeted campaigns.
How to Get Social Media Analytics With Your Own Data?
Social media management doesn’t need to be frustrating. A fuss-free way to excel at tracking these complex data is to use an automated template.
DashThis is a reporting tool that gathers your social media content and data across multiple platforms in a clear, concise report. With our time-saving dashboards—all templates come with pre-set KPIs, so you don’t need to add them manually—you can create your reports in the blink of an eye.
These templates are highly customizable and convenient for daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly use. Add notes for report benchmarking, display Instagram images directly within the reports (no more copy-paste!), or customize it with your client’s brand colors—DashThis can do it all.
You’ll see how easy it is to create your social media analytics report only once and save it for future use. Use it together with any of the social media management tool above and save more time for your marketing teams.
Conclusion
You’d hate to miss out on an important update or important customer. That’s where a social media analytics tool comes in handy. With it, you can easily track your most important social media accounts in one place. You will also be able to get detailed reports about how each account is doing and what you can do better for next time.
Social media analytics is important for online businesses in this day and age. Every business owner wants to know exactly how their social media efforts are affecting their bottom line. If a business can’t track its social media ROI, then it’s mad money management skills will be on display for all to see.