Are you curious about free social media analytics tools 2021? Or about best social media analytics tools 2021? Then, you are at the right place. In the latest post, we will look into these aspects in detail and provide a few handpicked ideas for each aspect.
Social media is not just a category of social media tools only. It is much more than that. It is an aspect that governs human interaction and communication in this highly technological world. It is a medium through which people can get more followers, views and likes for their content. And the good news is that today we have a vast amount of free social media data analytics tools available for businesses to use to produce better results and create more engagement among netizens.
Not too long ago, social media monitoring tool was unheard of, but it is helping companies understand what customers are saying about their product, services and competitors. If you are curious about free social media analytics tools 2021 or about best social media analytics tools for business 2021, this article will help you out.
Social media analytics tools are software tools that assist in the data gathering, analysis and graphical representation of social media platforms. The existence of free social media analytics tools makes it easier for individuals and companies to track their social media engagement. Free social media data analytics tools such as Hootsuite or TweetDeck make it easy to engage in conversations across multiple platforms, schedule posts, monitor keyword searches and conduct surveys. This saves time and increases the efficiency of many businesses who use these free tools on a daily basis.
What Is a Social Media Analytics Software?
Social media analytics software and tools are web applications similar to web analytic tools that track, measure, and analyze the performance of social media campaigns based on data points collected from social platforms. These tools help marketers make sense of the data collected via social networks by providing visual and graphical data representation.
Social analytics software tools offer various features such as performance tracking, interactive dashboards, custom reports, competitor analysis, and sentiment analysis. Monitoring social media performance through social analytics tools helps marketers to assess and improve the performance of their campaigns constantly.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a social media management tool with built-in social media analytics and reporting features. It allows you to track the performance of your social media campaigns across channels for multiple profiles and pages. Interestingly, you can also track your competitors’ social media activity.
Equipped with data from NapoleonCat, you’ll easily spot tendencies and craft social media content that resonates with your company’s target audience and brings the best results. Here’s what NapoleonCat can help you with:
- Viewing what content types work best and when and how often you should post to achieve the highest engagement
- Monitoring your team’s activity to keep your social customer service major-league
- Comparing audience insights and post engagement of multiple social media profiles, including your competitors
- Scheduling weekly, monthly, or quarterly social media analytics reports that will be automatically sent out to your boss, your client, or whoever else needs them
Pros:
- Allows you to benchmark your results against your competition
- Automatically generates customizable social media analytics reports
- Tracks social media key metrics in real-time
Cyfe
One of the best social media analytics tools is Cyfe – a business dashboard tool.
It syncs up data from many, many, many marketing tools in one place.
The number of available integrations and dashboards is astonishing and makes Cyfe a powerful tool – it covers not only social media analytics tools but also advertising, email, monitoring, sales, SEO and web analytics tools!!!!
However, let’s focus on the social media part.
In Cyfe, you can build your social media dashboard including following apps and data:
- AddThis
- Bitly
- Facebook Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, actions
- Facebook Pages: Likes, clicks, active users, page views
- Flickr: Top photos, slideshows
- Google+: Plus ones, circled by
- Google+ Search: Posts
- Instagram: Photos, followers, following
- LinkedIn Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, conversions
- LinkedIn Company: Followers, impressions, engagement
- Pinterest: Boards, pins, likes, followers, following
- Publisher: Schedule social media posts
- Reviews: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google, YP
- SlideShare: Views, favorites, comments, downloads
- Twitter: Tweets, followers, listed, mentions, influencers
- Twitter Ads: Cost, impression, engagement, follows
- Twitter Search: Tweets, mentions, hashtags
- Vimeo: My feed, top videos
- YouTube
You can try it out for free.
Pros:
- Create reports with in-depth social analytics.
- Easy set up.
- Pre-built widgets for services like Google or Saleforce.
Cons:
- UI can be unintuitive.
- No custom reports with social data.
CoSchedule
At Brand24, we use CoSchedule as our editorial calendar – it never let us down and we can surely recommend it to all small, medium and large businesses.
The cool thing about CoSchedule is that it analyzes the performance of your social media posts and, on this basis, suggests improvements and recommends particular actions across all your social media channels, for example:
- Best day to post
- Best time to post
- Best type of content to post
What’s more, CoSchedule provides analytics of your social media posts, including:
- Social engagement analytics: Analytics of interaction your social media posts receive
- Social campaign report: Tracking across multiple platforms the performance of a campaign
- Audience insights: In-depth reports about performance of your social media channels
- Social message analytics: Tracking engagement for particular posts
- Social share analytics: How many times your link has been shared across social media
- Top projects reports: Analysis of top 100 posts
Pros:
- Great for scheduling social media campaigns.
- Creates social media reports.
- Good for task tracking.
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.
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.
Falcon.io
Falcon.io is a social media management and marketing platform. It also includes social media listening to help you keep tabs on conversations about your brand, provides audience data cards filled with valuable information about who you’re engaging with, and provides analytics to help you measure and track performance across each platform. Among these features, one social media managers and digital marketers will find helpful is the cross-channel insights report. It’s an overview of the performance of your social accounts and includes new fans and followers, engagement metrics by geography, age and gender, and more.
Brand24
Liked other social media listening tools, Brand24 doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it packs a solid punch when it comes to identifying opportunities to strengthen social strategy. It does this with features like alerts for discussions around important terms, sentiment analysis of mentions that include your brand and product names, influence scores that inform who you should partner with to reach a larger audience, and more.
Altogether, these features, make it possible to cut through the noise and zero-in on the right data and metrics, and how to devise a stronger social media plan.
Audiense
As its name indicates, Audiense is all about making sense of your audience. It helps you to identify relevant audiences, discover amazing actionable insights, and give you informative strategies to grow your business.
It gives you a unique visual segmentation of your audience.
Audiense Insights allows you to identify and understand your social audience, no matter how specific or unique it is. It offers numerous filter options when you create a report, which you can mix and match to ensure you are analyzing precisely the segment of your audience that most interests you. You can, in turn, compare segments with baselines or other audiences and create benchmarks with different segments, countries or your competitors.
You can easily integrate Audiense Insights with your own data or visualizations.
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.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Analytics Tool?
As a marketer, you constantly juggle between software tools such as marketing automation platforms, CRMs, social media automation tools, and web analytics tools. This means you need a good reason to add another tool into your martech stack. Here are five significant reasons why you need to invest in a social media analytics tool.
1. To Measure Your Content Performance
Social media analytics tools give you a deeper understanding of your content performance. It automates the process of tracking content interaction on various social media platforms, sharing data points that assess the content performance based on content type, topic, or design. For example, your social analytics software can help you understand that your video content may drive engagement on your Instagram channel but does not work on your LinkedIn profile. Such minute but critical observations automated by social analytics tools can significantly impact your social media campaign performance.
2. To Analyze Your Competitors
One of the basic principles of succeeding on social media is to keep a close watch on your competitors. Social media analytics tools are an extremely useful medium to keep track of your competitors’ social media activities, as well as keeping in check of current trends in your industry. These tools can automate the process of analyzing the content engagement and performance of your competitors on multiple platforms, providing valuable insights on what works and what doesn’t in your domain. This will help you avoid the mistakes your competitors have made, and focus on techniques that are working well for them.
3. To Understand Your Audience
Social media analytics tools are excellent sources of information when it comes to understanding your audience. From simple observations to detailed sentiment analysis, social analytics software tools offer features that can help you plan your content, strategy, and campaigns based on the behavior of your target audience. For example, analytics tools can identify time intervals when your audience is highly active, what content is more engaging for your audience, and what other content and pages your audience shows interest in. Aligning your social strategy based on audience behavior can do wonders for your social media campaign.
4. To Analyze Your Social Ad Spending
Social media advertising likely contributes to one of the significant expenses in social media budgets. This is why it is imperative to measure and analyze the performance of social advertising campaigns. This analysis helps justify the total ad spend by measuring the ROI from social ads. It also answers other important questions such as what is the ad content performance, what social media network works best for social advertising, and how much budget should be allocated for each social channel.
Conclusion
Free social media analytics tools in 2022 are generally internet based, and provide information about the reach and engagement of posts. The best free social media analytics tools also incorporate functions that allow you to measure traffic from each social network to your website. Free social media analytics tools help you to better understand your target audience’s interests and habits so you can improve your marketing strategy.
Social media analytics tools can be useful in your efforts to find out what is working on social media. There are several different types of social media analytics tools, including free analytic tools from your social networks, paid analytics tools from 3rd party providers, and some self-hosted analytics web platforms that you could run yourself on your own server.