Social media is a huge part of our lives, and for businesses especially. It’s fast becoming an essential part of the marketing plan. There are lots of different analytics tools available to help track growth and performance.
In this list, I’ll be looking at the best social media analytics tools on the market right now.
BuzzSumo
Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is an awesome resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.
If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.
Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your own content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.
Snaplytics
The popularity of ephemeral content on social media speaks for itself.
Snaplytics focuses solely on analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The platform looks at metrics such as open and completion rate, allowing brands to see where story engagement peaks and likewise at what point viewers drop off.
The need to optimize story-based content is something that modern brands should overlook at their own peril.
Although Snapchat might have fallen out of favor for some brands, bear in mind that the network still boasts hundreds of million active users among millennials and Gen Z.
Meanwhile, Stories represent one of the most-engaged methods of Instagram promotion. Going beyond native analytics is a smart move for brands who want to craft more compelling Stories or eventually run story-based ads.
Curalate
More and more brands are trying their hands at direct social selling.
Platforms such as Curalate serve as a hybrid storefront and analytics tool for companies looking to maximize their sales from Instagram
Chances are you’ve seen a branded or unbranded “Like2Buy” link in the wild. Major brands like Bose take advantage of Curalate for social sales – take a peek at their Instagram bio.
Upon clicking through, we’re led to a social storefront where users can shop directly.
Curalate’s platform empowers businesses to understand which products score the most clicks and sales. This can directly inform your future campaigns and product strategy as you learn which sort of posts click with customers.
Additionally, Curalate tracks product tags and mentions, making it a cinch to spot and analyze the performance of user-generated content campaigns.
Keyhole
For the sake of expanding your content’s reach, hashtag analytics are a must-have.
Tools such as Keyhole provide a real-time performance analysis of the industry and campaign-specific hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Doing so allows brands to promote during peak times and likewise understand which tags are most popular among their followers.
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.
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
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.
CoSchedule
At Brand24, we use CoSchedule as our editorial calendar – it never let us down and we can surely recommend it to all small, medium and large businesses.
The cool thing about CoSchedule is that it analyzes the performance of your social media posts and, on this basis, suggests improvements and recommends particular actions across all your social media channels, for example:
- Best day to post
- Best time to post
- Best type of content to post
What’s more, CoSchedule provides analytics of your social media posts, including:
- Social engagement analytics: Analytics of interaction your social media posts receive
- Social campaign report: Tracking across multiple platforms the performance of a campaign
- Audience insights: In-depth reports about performance of your social media channels
- Social message analytics: Tracking engagement for particular posts
- Social share analytics: How many times your link has been shared across social media
- Top projects reports: Analysis of top 100 posts
Conclusion
Social media analytics are techniques to determine data about social media users to gauge their online activity. Social media analytics are used by various companies, organizations, governments, and individuals for a variety of uses. These include analyzing demographics to target their marketing efforts, delivering customized content to the right users at the right time, measuring effectiveness of content marketing by different social media channels/tools/products to evaluate return on investment (ROI), and so much more.