Social media analytics tools are a great way to take control of your social media accounts. Of course, they don’t replace a real, responsive and interactional social media strategy. That’s why we have collected the best free analytic tools for social media you should try.
The free analytic tools for social media offers the easiest way to get the most accurate data on your social media marketing. You can analyze and extract valuable information of what’s working and what fails. It’s a great way to use social media even more useful and efficient.
Free social media analytics tools our favorites. BrandMentions. A free social media analytics tool that gives you a quick snapshot into what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more.
Social media analytics is the process of gathering data from social media websites and analyzing that data and extracting valuable information. Different social media analytics tools are effective in different ways. These tools allow you to analyze your data and identify areas where you can improve your social media marketing strategy.
What a Good Social Media Analytics Tool Should Have
The properties of a suitable analytics tool for your brand need to achieve the 5W and 1H (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How) of the litmus test. To get you started, consider the following properties of a good analytics tool.
- Who?
- The right demographic and psychographic information on the audience segments engaging with your posts.
- What?
- What is your reputation like? What are people saying about your business?
- Where?
- Where can you get the best results for your social media campaigns? Which platforms and channels to focus on?
- When?
- When is the best time to post? This often hinges on when your audiences are most active online.
- Why?
- Why are people engaging with your posts? This may require you to do some investigation, and possibly conduct some A/B/C testing to determine which content types or themes work better.
- How?
- How should you improve your social media performance? This is based on the data which the different analytics tools are telling you.
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
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
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
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.
Mentionlytics
Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.
Want to get a big picture view of what’s being said about your brand on the internet? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the world of social media monitoring — especially if you run a global business in more than one language.
Other things you can do with Mentionlytics:
- Sentiment analysis
- Find top influencers that follow you
- Filter results by keywords
- Reply to mentions directly
Panoramiq Insights
Key benefit: tracks Instagram analytics, including Instagram Story analytics
Free or paid: Paid (or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: All skill levels
Best for: Instagram marketers
Alert all the Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite free users or pro users who want to get deeper insights on their Stories in particular. (Just download the app from our App Library).
Among other things, Panoramiq Insights lets you:
- Analyze follower demographics, including age, gender, country, city and language
- Monitor Instagram account activity (for up to two accounts), including views and new followers
- Find your best posts with view and engagement analytics
- Measure Story views and interactions
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
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.
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
Likealyzer
Likealyzer is a Facebook Page analyzer tool by media intelligence firm Meltwater. It audits your Facebook Page and returns metrics such as posts per day, engagement per post, timing, and length of posts. Likealyzer also grades the Page’s performance based on more than 70 different data points, and offers recommendations for improvement based on the results.
3 cool features:
- Benchmark your Facebook Page against a million others to know how you are performing.
- Get recommendations based on how your content is performing.
- Export your chosen metrics and insights in the form of easy-to-understand reports.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Analysis of your Facebook Page’s front page, about page, activities, response, and engagement
Importance of using Social Media Analytics Tools
“You cannot manage what you do not measure” — Peter Drucker. This age-old statement is still relevant in today’s digital-first world where the right data on the right channels drives important business decisions on a day-to-day basis.
(If you have not already done so, do read our article on how you can measure your social media analytics.)
After you have a better idea of what social media analytics are, the following pointers should assist you in better understanding how and why it is important to utilise social media analytics tools.
#1 Track the performance of your marketing goals
Social media analytics allows you to assess how well your brand performs in relation to your marketing objectives. It also compares your social media performance against your competitors’. To truly assess how well your brand is performing, you need to benchmark it against your competitors’ and the average industry performance.
Unsure of your marketing objectives? Give our guide on defining marketing objectives and KPIs a read.
#2 Understand what your audiences prefer
Using the right tools helps you to analyse and track the engagement rate of your brand’s previous posts, allowing you to determine the optimal time to upload your posts on your social media channels. You can also assess which post types are more well-received, and which are less popular amongst your users. This ensures that your content will resonate with the right audiences which will, in turn, boost overall marketing results.
#3 Reveal the ideal social networks to share your content
You can leverage social media analytics to also understand the engagement, traffic and sales that your brand acquires for individual posts and campaigns. You can then focus your attention on social networks that work best, and eliminate or focus less on those that perform poorly.
#4 Understand your brand’s competitors
By legally monitoring and spying on what your competitors are doing on social media, your brand can decide which social networks work better for you. It also prevents you from making the mistakes your competitors are making, allowing you to focus on result-oriented strategies. You can adapt and change your competitors’ best practices to suit your own purpose.
Conclusion
With the recent boom in social media, there has also been a simultaneous growth in social media analytic tools. With so many different analytic tools available, it is important to understand which tools are right for the job. This article will take an in-depth look into some of the most popular social analytic tools, and explain each tool’s benefits and drawbacks.
There are too many social media channels to keep track of these days. Which ones are best for you, your business, and your customers? The first step is to determine where your target audience is. Check out which channels all of your competitors are using, as this will give you a better idea of which channels you should be on.