Social media analytic tools are now a crucial part of social media campaigns. They provide detailed information about the engagement and reach of your website, account, or business in the form of data, reports and analyzes. Analytics can show you how successful your content marketing strategy is and what methods are working best for you. Social media analytics tools come in different forms. There are many social media software solutions that allow you to track your performance, measure ROI, and make informed decisions about your future campaigns.
There are a lot of social media analytic tools available, but which ones can you trust and which ones will you use? You don’t need to worry as I’ve got your back. In this article I’m going to help you go through the world of social media analytics tools, and share with you the best free social media analytic tools 2021.
If you’re a fan of social media (who isn’t these days), then you likely have an interest in monitoring your social media accounts for growth and engagement. In fact, you’re probably reading this article because you’re curious about the best social media analytic tools.
Social media analytics tools help businesses that use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter to understand the success and performance of their marketing strategy. These tools offer in-depth analysis of social media performance, mentions and detailed reports.
Reasons to integrate competitor analysis and monitoring into your workflow
1. Dive deeper into your market segment: Analyzing your competitors’ social media behavior will give you an advanced idea of how your market segment fares on digital platforms.
Even if your segment is absent from social media platforms, it will help you understand how to build your content strategy. In this case, you might need to spend more effort to educate people about your offerings, considering that the chances are high the audience hasn’t heard of your product.
2. Learn what works for your market in terms of social media: Each industry does social media marketing differently. Some rely heavily on media posts, such as short video clips, infographics, product photos, while others post articles and reports.
What works for some businesses might not work for you regarding social media marketing, so take the time to study what’s already popular in your industry. Always make sure to have what’s tested in your content strategy, and don’t rely only on experimental mediums and content types.
3. Set accurate KPI Expectations: To set measurable goals realistic to your segment, you need first to understand what your competitors have achieved. Are they ahead of you or behind you? If it’s the former — study how they have achieved it.
4. Follow market trends: Make competitor analysis a routine task. A regular analysis can help you identify market trends, like seasonal sales, hashtags, or even social media challenges that either one of your competitors started or just participated in.
Cyfe
Cyfe is a custom dashboard tool that you can fill up with integrated metrics from dozens of marketing tools. Its social media section allows you to sync up all the major networks and pull overview reports for the accounts you manage and those you want to track. It offers 50 widgets for Facebook alone, for tracking reach, impressions, clicks, check-ins, and posts.
3 cool features:
- A fully customizable dashboard
- Set up email and SMS alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are crossed.
- Monitor your brand mentions and competitors’ activity using the Twitter search widget.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Five widgets
- A fixed view of the trailing 30 days of data
Paid options: $29 per month
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
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.
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.
Why is it essential to approach competitors on various social media differently?
Every social media platform has its audience and in-platform tools. Since every social media network is different, users expect the content they want to see and share there.
While Instagram is all about connecting through photo and video content, LinkedIn is designed to showcase users’ job experience and professional thoughts.
The content posted on each social media affects how well your account performs.
Not every brand/business has to be on every social media possible. Brands/businesses should present on platforms where they can reach and engage the right target audience. Sometimes it’s better to spend time and effort on one social media platform and use it to its fullest.
Conclusion
It is beyond doubt that social media has grown in leaps and bounds in the recent years. From a mere trend to the most sought-after form of digital marketing, social media has made its mark, and overall, it’s here to stay. It’s something that you must consider when looking for the best social media analytics tools 2021.
Social media analytic tools are the modern key to success. If you know how to use them properly, they can be very useful in your daily job. They’re really good to have, especially if your organization relies on social media as part of their marketing campaign. With them, you can keep track of your competitors’ activity and generate reports that will help you not only in assessing the situation on social media but making timely changes in your approach.