Have you ever been curious about how many people opened your last post on social media or wondered how many times your page was liked? Social media analytics tools can help marketers and owners of social media accounts to increase their engagement with the right audience. You can use social media analytics tools to get answers to all these questions and more. Here is an article that will give you an overview of the best and most useful free solutions that are available online at the moment.
Social media analytics tools are growing in importance as companies recognize the need to understand and manage their social media presence. However, many businesses have little knowledge of which tools are available or how they can use them to meet business goals.
The online is the platform for sharing information. Social media analytics tools help you to track and analyze your social media presence easily by providing data on what people are saying about you, your brand or your products. There are lots of social media analytics tools which are available in both paid and free version.
Social media analytics is the art of collecting, studying, gathering and analyzing information about social media marketing. The process helps in optimizing your efforts towards attaining goals such as exposure, visibility and brand promotion among others. In this article I will take you through some top rated and most popular free online social media analytics tools.
What are social media analytics?
The definition of social media analytics is the systematic collection and evaluation of data that helps you measure how well or how poorly you are doing on social media. After all, resources are limited in most businesses. You can’t afford to spend time and money on activities if they don’t pay off. The analytics tools in our list help you decide where to spend time, how to maximize your efforts, and how to gain insights into your audience (see data analytics tips).
Analytics tools are different from social media management tools. There are plenty of tools that help you post updates on social media channels and even schedule content in advance. Those are not the kind of tools we mean. Below we are mainly focused on tools to understand and measure your social media performance.
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.
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
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a social intelligence tool suite that has acquired TweetReach, which provides a free snapshot of your Twitter analytics. Type in any keyword, hashtag, or username, and you get useful charts and graphs for reach, exposure, activity, and contributors. It’s quite valuable for checking in on mentions, tracking branded hashtags, and analyzing industry keywords.
3 cool features:
- Measure the potential reach for any hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.
- Look at your competitors’ activity and measure their share of voice.
- Know what sort of content works in your industry by analyzing conversations in real-time.
Social networks analyzed:
What analytics you get for free:
- Twitter assistant
- Twitter analytics report
- Instagram account checkup
Paid options: $49, $99, $199 per month
Quintly
Quintly is an enterprise-level analytics tool that monitors your engagement on all major social networks. You can mix and match dozens of customizable metrics and automate the deployment of flexible, shareable dashboards. By adding multiple pages belonging to you or your competitors, you can compare them against pre-set benchmarks or each other.
3 cool features:
- Choose from 350+ metrics to effectively set up and measure social KPIs.
- Export data in a variety of formats including CSV, XLSX, PDF, and PPTX and send automated reports.
- Use Quintly’s API to extract data into custom dashboards and integrate it with a BI solution.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Advanced analytics
- Reporting
- Customizable dashboard
Paid options: $100, $255, $480 per month, and custom pricing
Followerwonk
One of our favorite Twitter tools, Followerwonk shows you detailed breakdowns of your followers and activity. Click on the Analytics tab, enter a Twitter username (either yours or someone else’s), and view information on followers and following. See stats like when your followers are online, when you typically post, and how your followers fall into categories like social authority, activity, total tweets, and follower count.
3 cool features:
- Find targeted users by keywords used in their profiles or bios.
- Sort users or followers of an account by insightful factors such as influence or activity.
- Compare your stats to those of competitors or peers with the help of a visual graph.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Search up to 50 profiles per day
- Analyze accounts with up to 25,000 followers
- 20 comparisons per day
Paid options: $29 and $79 per month
SparkToro
SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool-in-the-making, founded by former Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin. It will eventually be a search engine that helps you identify the websites, publications, podcasts, and social profiles that appeal to your audience. At the moment, it is a collection of nifty tools that evaluate your Twitter handle and followers, and give an objective assessment of your brand influence and authority on Twitter.
3 cool features:
- Audit your followers and know what percent of them are fake.
- See the specific topics that marketers are talking about on Twitter.
- Get a ‘SparkScore’ of your influence, based on the performance of your tweets.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Fake follower audit
- SparkScore
Audiense
Audiense Connect provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of Twitter profiles. You can glean information about your followers’, peers’, or competitors’ location, language, interests, and influence. Audiense uses machine learning on social data such as affinities and demographics to help you understand your target audience. You can then engage these audiences directly at scale.
3 cool features:
- Create your own chatbot and engage customers via Twitter DMs.
- Analyze your followers in-depth and use these insights to build communities.
- Analyze historical and real-time conversations on Twitter.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Best time to tweet
- Community insights dashboard
- Twitter list management
Paid options: $9 and $89 per month
Klear
Klear is an influencer marketing analytics tool that helps you easily identify influencers in any category, in any location across the world on Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram, and manage your relationships with them with a CRM-like system. Klear can analyze not just influencers, but also your own profile and followers, and segment them by niche or interests.
3 cool features:
- Identify influencers in your Twitter feed with a Chrome extension.
- Extract qualitative metrics by tracking hashtags on Twitter and Instagram.
- Generate PDF reports for your social activity, engagement, content performance, fan-base growth, and brand awareness.
Social media channels:
- Instagam
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Analytics for Facebook Page, YouTube, and blogs
- Social PDF reports
- Hashtag tracking and influencer campaign monitoring
Paid options: Custom pricing
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.
What should small businesses look for in social analytics tools?
Depending on which social media analytics you decide to use here are some of the essentials you should be looking for:
- Comprehensive analytics: Besides looking for a social media analytic process that crank out numbers, look for one that gives you further insights. This includes engagement, likes, demographics; conversations, hashtags, and even competitor’s performance. So there’s no need to flip through different systems just to get the results you need – these come in handy for tweaking your outreach. If your social media analytics tool integrates with Google Analytics it would help in building robust reporting.
- Integration across social media platforms: Look for a solution that offers analytics for social media across the board that measures Instagram, Facebook and other data. This will help you get a good perspective on the performances on your various social media handles.
- Offers customized team tracking and collaboration: Besides how you measure your social media analytics it should help you customize how you share, plan and collaborate across teams.
- Multiple reporting options: A key component in analytics is in the manner in which reports are generated. Look for the best social media analytics tools offering data and reports in multiple formats this could be in PDF, JPEG, PNG or even .xls.
- Additional tools: In addition to analytics look for tools that help you edit pictures as well as integrate with other Customer Relations Management System (CRM) solutions. Particularly integration with a CRM system will help you convert your engagement into leads thus helping you go up the ladder of engagement.
Conclusion
Social Media Analytics tools are the best way to stay on top of your social media marketing strategy. It will allow you to track, monitor and carry out a successful social media campaign that is built around useful metrics and results.
Social media plays an important role in every business, whether they are a large enterprise or a small startup. With over a billion people using social media, you can’t be oblivious to the power of social media analytics tools and reports.