Social media is everywhere these days. It’s hard to find people who do not use social media. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram that make quick communication on the internet much more easier and convenient. But how can you use such platforms without spending money on professional social media management tools? There are lots of free social media analytics tools available online to get over this problem.
As social media marketing has advanced, you have developed a lot of qualitative methods of measuring success. But if you are like many marketers, you would like to see some quantitative measurements as well. Luckily for you, there is a lot of data available to help you determine which social networks are giving your company the greatest returns on your time and resources. First, let me tell you about free social media analytics tools 2021 so that you can measure social media success for free.
Social Media Analytics Tools can be used daily. They offer very useful insights that you can use to help the performance of your social media campaigns. With these tools you can analyze the traffic on your website, find the sentiment of the posts, and more. The top social media analytics tools are free!
Free social media analytics tools in 2020 Social media infographics offer various facts, figures, and statistics useful for businesses. If a brand wants to know more about its presence on social networks, they can use free social media analytics tools to understand the performance of their posts and campaigns.
Native Social Media Analytics Tools
But before we dive into specific tools and platforms that you can check out, you need to know one thing. Practically every single social media platform comes with inbuilt analytics. In some cases they’re only available to business profiles – but if you’re running a business, then you’ve probably got your company profile set up already. If not, make sure to create one as soon as possible to unlock all possibilities.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin come with separate analytics boards that give you a big chunk of useful data. Facebook analytics are likely the most complex ones in this group, but other than that, the differences are minor.
If you understand how one platform works, you’ll have it easier to understand the analysis patterns for the rest.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter provides a 28-day summary of your profile and show you how it has performed in terms of profile visits, follower growth, tweet impressions and mentions. It also gives you an analysis of the impressions your tweets are getting, as well as details on engagement, i.e. retweets, mentions, favorites, and clicks. You can export all the data and run some pretty neat reports for yourself.
How to access: Log in to your Twitter account and go to analytics.twitter.com.
Quick tip: Clicking on the bar chart icon of any of your tweets will show a complete breakdown of the engagement on the tweet, including clicks on URLs, clicks on your username, clicks on images, and expanded details.
Pinterest Analytics
One of the best sources for Pinterest analytics resides on Pinterest itself. The dashboard shows growth in impressions and followers, audience stats, and website engagement. You can click into more in-depth reports for each of these and see which posts and boards have performed the best.
How to access: Pinterest analytics is available only for business accounts. So, first convert your personal account to a business account (for free). Then make sure you’re logged in to Pinterest and go to analytics.pinterest.com.
Quick tip: There’s a new Audience Insights report, which shows a breakdown of your audience’s interests and demographic.
LinkedIn Analytics
For a Page belonging to your company or organization, you can track engagement with your updates as well as see various metrics about your followers and visitors. If you’ve enhanced your Page with LinkedIn Career Pages, you also have access to Talent Brand stats.
How to access: To access LinkedIn Page analytics, sign in to your Page admin center, click the Analytics tab in the menu and select Updates, Followers, or Visitors from the dropdown.
Quick tip: The Visitor metrics section for your Company Page shows a blue line representing desktop views and an orange line representing mobile views. Toggle the Aggregate mobile and desktop metrics option at the top right to see the combined results.
YouTube Analytics
YouTube Analytics is a comprehensive system for tracking the performance of your videos and channels. It reports on a plethora of metrics including estimated traffic sources, watch time, views, earnings, ad performance, audience retention, and subscribers.
How to access: Sign in to YouTube and go to youtube.com/analytics
Quick tip: Click SEE MORE below the main dashboard and you’ll be taken to the detailed channel analytics page. Once there, click More > Playback location to see where people are watching your video – on your YouTube channel page, its regular YouTube URL (watch page), or embedded in another website or app.
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.
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.
Pros of using native social media analytics tools
Let’s be honest, using inbuilt analytics of a given platform is simply a matter of comfort.
First of all, it’s free. You get a full package of all available features without spending a dime. No premium accounts, trials or locked features. You make your profile and you’re ready to start analysing.
And once you have a tool that you can use for free, you don’t have to look for a paid one. Bouncing between social media analytics tools can be a hassle at times. But it’s not if you limit yourself to the native tool of your platform.
Last but not least, a lot of these native tools give you an opportunity to take action directly from a post level. If one of your posts grew particularly popular, it’s likely that a platform will notify you about it and offer a chance of boosting it (for a modest fee, of course).
Conclusion
Analytics tools for social media are a powerful way to understand user behavior, create targeted content and measure ROI… 2021 is the year that businesses will change how they lead. Social media has already proven to be a valuable channel when it comes to customer engagement. However, the full potential of these platforms cannot be realized without extracting value from the data gathered by these analytics tools.
Social media has transformed the way organizations can connect with their audiences, and vloggers are ready to gear up with the best social media analytics tools. Online professionals need a comprehensive analysis and visualization of their social data to determine the most useful information from any source. This evaluation provides insight into the social media performance of your brand or business.