Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of the buzzword “social media.” Everyone is creating content and sites around the social media site Reddit. A great deal of platforms have launched in recent years including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and more. If you’re looking to get started with social media analytics tools but don’t want to spend a dime, you won’t be disappointed with free social analytics tools.
Social media analytics tools is a necessary tool that works as a backbone in building a successful social media marketing strategy. With the help of these social media analysis tools you can easily find out what people are talking about your brand, products and services.
This software is a set of analytics and reporting tools for social media professionals. It also provides an aggregation platform that pulls in metrics from other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to give comprehensive metrics across multiple platforms.
Social media analytics is an invaluable part of any online marketing campaign. Without it, you’re flying blind. That’s why when looking for social media stats software, we need to look for the best ones that are accurate, reliable, and low cost.
Software for Social media reporting
Social media monitoring is important because it shows you what’s working and what you might need to tweak across your social channels so you can create the right type of content. These agencies – along with many others – use these to create social media reports, saving them time and money. We think we’ve got one of the best social media analytics tools around – but don’t just take our word for.
Twitter Analytics.
If you’re not ready to use one dashboard for all of your accounts, there are analytics tools built into many social media platforms already. For Twitter, you can usually get a good grasp on the content your audience likes just by noticing your mentions and retweets. What you can’t easily discover, though, is the basic demographic information of your followers and their interests. By connecting Twitter Analytics to your account, you can easily find this information and make better decisions based on it. After logging in to the analytics platform, you are provided with an abundance of statistics including your audience’s geographic location, the common profiles they follow, and their top industry interests. You can also track your follows and unfollows, which helps you gage the effectiveness of your campaigns and show possible issues with your content. It is very important to keep track of analytics in order to avoid following trends that aren’t working, and test new ways to get your audience’s attention.
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.
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
BrandMentions
BrandMentions is another powerful tool for measuring your social media marketing impact.
From brand monitoring, reputation management, business intelligence to competitor spying, the tool provides you with the relevant information about the success of your brand awareness campaigns.
BrandMentions also provides real-time notifications; you get notified once your site gets a new backlink or is mentioned in places that matter across the web.
Pro: BrandMentions is a great option even for small businesses and is easy to use even for a novice.
Con: Be sure to include/exclude mentions based on keywords otherwise you’ll get results that include spamming sites or results that are too generic.
Price: $99 – $499 USD per month.
Meltwater
Meltwater is the go-to social media tool if you want to focus on brand engagement, while also monitoring what is being said about you and your industry online.
This social media analytics tool can also help you connect with influencers and quantify your PR impact.
One of the best ways to drive engagement is by using influencers. Meltwater makes it easy to connect with and vet influencers for your brand. You can also use the tool to manage influencer relationships and measure their ROI.
And like most other social media analytics tools, Meltwater provides email alerts that matter and reporting capabilities.
Pro: The site has over 1 million influencer accounts that you can easily filter and sort. This makes prospecting new high-profile accounts that are relevant to your brand easy.
Con: Meltwater offers a limited number of users and you have to pay more for more users. Additionally, the price can increase easily for basic functions such as reporting.
Price: Contact Meltwater for pricing.
Google Analytics
Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but especially those who work for a web-based business
You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics already. That’s because it’s one of the best free tools to use to learn about your website visitors. And if you’re a social marketer who likes to drive traffic to your website, then it’s an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.
While it’s not a social media reporting tool per se, you can use it to set up reports that will help you:
- See which social media platforms give you the most traffic
- See what content drives the most leads and traffic on which social networks
- Get to know your audience with demographic data
- Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns
With these data points, you’ll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google analytics.
UTM parameters
Key benefit: See how much web traffic and conversions your social media channels and campaigns generate (to be used with a web analytics platform like Google Analytics).
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: intermediate
Best for: all social media managers
UTM parameters are not a standalone social media analytics tool, but they are essential in helping you set up Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) to best measure social performance.
Put simply, UTM parameters are short pieces of code appended to the links you share on social media. They very precisely tell you how many people interact with your content and end up on your website.
In the screenshot above, the UTM parameter is everything that comes after the question mark.
UTM parameters aren’t essential if you’re only concerned about reporting on social media performance in terms of engagement, followers, etc. But if you want to take it to the next level, UTM parameters + Google Analytics will give you more precise data on which social media content and channels drive traffic and conversions.
Pro tip: You don’t need to know how to write code to include them on your social media posts. If you use a social media management platform like Hootsuite, you can automatically generate UTM parameters in seconds.
Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Key benefits: Analyze brand sentiment and customer demographics in real time, alongside all your other social media performance data
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Intermediate to advanced
Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small to large social media teams
Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.
It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve customer experience.
It also analyzes data about your audience demographics like gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics across networks, or look at the aggregate picture of your audience for all networks combined.
This is a tool that really tells you a lot about your audience — and how they feel about you. It can tell you whether a spike in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it can help you capitalize or avoid either one, respectively.
Reputology
A single customer can make a review on your product that impacts several other customers. Reputology helps you monitor and analyze your reviews online so you get to monitor, catch and handle bad customer reviews before it spreads like wildfire.
This social media analytics tool is particularly great for companies that have multiple reviews across multiple platforms because it lets you view all your reviews in one dashboard.
Pro: You can respond to the reviews straight from your dashboard without having to visit every review source; which saves you a whole lot of time, and ensures you respond to all reviews – or complaints – in a timely fashion.
Con: At the moment you can’t reply to Yelp reviews within the software, which is unfortunate because Yelp is one of the most popular review sites.
Price: $180 – $2500 per month.
What Are the Most Important Social Media Metrics?
The most important social media metrics for your brand depend on what your team wants to accomplish. That’s why you have to decide on your social media marketing goals before you can zero in on the right metrics.
Some common objectives and related metrics include the following.
Enhance brand awareness
Track your account growth, your reach and impressions, and the number of brand mentions and post shares.
Send traffic to your website
Keep an eye on the number of clicks, the traffic volume from each channel, and the bounce rate for website visitors from social media channels.
Improve customer service
Monitor the number of questions or comments you receive, your team’s overall response time, and individual team members’ contributions.
Increase revenue
Watch the number of email list subscriptions as well as the total value of “adds to cart” and completed checkouts.
Conclusion
Social media has become an integral part of day-to-day activities for many people. Whether you use it for your business or for yourself, social media allows you to reach out to others and build connections. You can use these connections to get feedback on products, hear about news and events, stay connected with old friends, and connect with new ones. The thing about social media is that it can be an overwhelming place if you don’t know where to begin.
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