Online users’ attention has been split across multiple platforms and they are searching information related to their needs fastly. Social media plays a vital role in business marketing and is used by companies to build brand reputation, generate leads, find new customers and increase sales. Businesses need an affordable tool that can help them analyze the performance of their social media channels, set up social media campaigns, schedule posts and measure ROI. There are different types of social media management tools available but paid tools for business use cost hundreds of dollars per month. So many businesses prefer free social media management and analytics tools .
Social media management is a huge industry that includes everything from social media scheduling to social media analytics. It can be overwhelming to decide what tools are best for you depending on your needs. There are many options out there, and some of the best social media management and analytics tools have frequent updates. This article will give you a list of the top free social media management and analytics tools for 2021.
These social media analytics tools will help you do more with your free time. Used by over 10 million users, these free social media management and analytics platforms can help optimize your social media presence, target the right audience, show ROI and make sure your posts are working as hard as possible.
If you are a small business owner and want to grow your business then you always need a free social media management tool. You cannot afford to hire an agency that offers these services. So, you need to manage it by yourself and this could be tiring. You cannot waste your productive time on such activities.
What is social media management?
Social media management encompasses many moving pieces in the process of managing online interactions and content on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Twitter. It’s to create the online face of a company, promote and sell products.
A social media manager is in charge of handling social media activities with many tasks, from creating, scheduling content to analyzing data, and engaging with the audience.
Therefore, social media management goes beyond just posting things to your company’s social media accounts. It starts with determining which person you want your company to represent on social media. Then you’ll need to create appropriate content, engage with the audience, and look for new opportunities to increase visibility as well as reach out to more people.
Sprout Social
Another all time best social media analytics tool is Sprout Social. It’s comprehensive social media management tool you can use to track your performance in social media.
The platform offers plenty of features to analyze social media performance, engagement, post social media messages or listen to social media conversations about your company. Sprout Social has a plenty of features. To make users’ lives easier, they offer solutions:
- By business type:
- For enterprise
- For agencies
- For small businesses
- By need:
- For social management
- For social marketing
- For customer care
- For employee advocacy
- By network:
- Google+
Pros
- Great social media reporting tool.
- Good solution for social media marketers – includes advanced social media management and analysis options.
- You can track social media campaigns inside the tool.
Cons
- Can cause problems with Instagram posting.
- No integration with YouTube or TikTok.
- Expensive.
Keyhole
If you’re interested in the hashtag game, Keyhole is a nice tool to learn a bit about the hashtags you use. Keyhole supports also account, keyword and URL tracking on the Web. What’s more, you can use Keyhole to track mentions about social media profiles, keywords and URLs.
Importantly, you can request historical data from Twitter and Instagram including information about the number of posts, users, engagement and influencers. There are 5 pricing plans and the highest one includes:
- Historical data
- PDF reports
- Real time data
- Twitter analytics
- Instagram analytics
- Facebook analytics
- Youtube analytics
- Sentiment analysis
- API access
- +more!
Pros
- Ability to measure influencer impact & ROI.
- Tracking and analysing competitors in social networks.
- Hashtag tracker.
Cons
- Hidden pricing. Might be too expensive for some companies.
- Not easy for first-time users.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the best social media monitoring and analytics tool out there.
It collects online mentions from all over the Web: social media, discussion forums, blogs, news sites and other publicly available sources. Also, it has plenty of features that allow in-depth analytics of your online mentions. Some of the features include:
- Demographics: Data about authors of mentions, including gender, interests, profession or location
- Image analysis: Detect images that contain your company logo
- Influencers: Find top influencers mentioning your keywords
- Locations: Discover where do your mentions come from
- Automated reports: Get your data directly to your inbox in HTML or PDF formats
- +more!
Pros
- Provides valuable marketing data and custom reports.
- Great tool to collect brand mentions.
Cons
- Pricey
- Offers too much data for just a social media marketer. It’d be wise to use it for more than just social media analysis.
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.
TapInfluence
Without a doubt, influencer marketing has become one of the most effective ways to reach today’s audiences.
But before spending a dime on any influencer, you want to measure the impact they actually have on your audience.
That’s where TapInfluence comes in; it helps you find the right influencers (who have a real impact) for your business.
It can be difficult to determine what to pay your influencers or even what they should be doing for your brand. From intelligence about an influencer’s reach and impact to their potential rates, TapInfluence can provide you with all this information.
Pro: TapInfluence allows you to create campaigns, schedule, manage, and track influencer deliverables. Also, you can monitor engagement analytics on your campaigns from the platform.
Con: There’s still a lot of work needed to set everything up as the process is not fully automated. Also, Tapinfluence caters to enterprises, so the price is inaccessible for most agencies.
Price: Contact TapInfluence for pricing.
Hootsuite
There’s hardly any social media marketer who doesn’t know Hootsuite.
Use Hootsuite to publish and schedule your social media posts. You can also generate powerful social media analytics so you can see which content performs best or worst and make smarter decisions.
The tool integrates with all social media platforms so your social media analytics and management are done from one platform.
Pro: Compared to other similar tools, Hootsuite’s primary advantage is that it connects to more social networks.
Con: On the downside, having so many social networks and profiles on one dashboard can get confusing and feel cluttered. Also, some integrations are less functional than others.
Price: $29 – $599 USD per month + custom pricing.
AgoraPulse
Agorapulse is packed with solid listening and reporting functionality. While also a social media planning tool, its ability to provide insights makes it a powerful solution. You can track conversations about your brand and later unpack the impact of your social media marketing effort using its reporting and analytics functionality. With Agorapulse, you can find out when it’s best to publish content based on past content performance, use the hashtags report to determine which tags and content drive the most engagement, and uncover click and reach (paid and organic) results. Agorapulse’s Power Reports add-on allow users to save customized reports and schedule reports to be automatically sent on a weekly or monthly basis.
Sendible
Sendible is a social media platform to manage your social activity at scale. You can use Sendible at all stages of the process, including planning your content and strategy, collaborating, and approving social media posts, monitoring brand mentions, and improving engagement. It also features a comprehensive analytics module giving you dynamic insights about your social data.
Sendible comes with eight standard reports covering:
- Engagement: performance engagement metrics across all accounts
- Facebook Page: audience behavior and engagement trends
- Twitter: audience and engagement
- Instagram: impact of your posts on your audience and engagement
- LinkedIn: company presence
- Monitoring: what’s being said about your brand, keywords, sentiment, and influencers
- YouTube: audience growth and video engagement
- Google Analytics: the impact of social media traffic on your website
In addition, you can create custom drag-and-drop reports, combining from a selection of modules.
Digimind
Digimind is primarily a social listening and market intelligence tool. It’s powered by AI and does all the heavy lifting for you. You will find a considerable quantity of data neatly presented in one place. It is ideal for brands and agencies that want to step up digital transformation using data and insights. You will find everything you need to make sense of social and online data and transform it into actionable business insights.
Digimind’s social listening tool helps you keep tabs on social media. You can monitor apps to listen, engage, analyze, and report on what’s happening around your brand and products. In addition, you can measure how owned content performs while benchmarking it against your competitors’ social performance.
The company’s Marketing Intelligence product monitors changes in your business environment by sourcing information from web pages, databases, RSS feeds, forums, social media, and more. Real-time analysis ensures that you spot new trends as they develop.
NetBase Quid
Want to know how people feel about your brand? Try NetBase Quid.
NetBase provides social analytics for brands.
Global brands like Taco Bell, Coca-Cola, and Yum! use this tool to track conversations around their brands on social and make important marketing decisions.
The tool analyzes consumer sentiment around your brand from social platforms, websites, forums, comment data, blogs, news, and review sites.
It also allows you to conduct social listening to understand your competitor’s audience. Also, you can monitor your brand to know when certain key actions occur. It also provides you with customer experience analytics.
Pro: With these three functionalities, you can know exactly where your brand is getting love from, why customers are dissatisfied, and how you can intervene to get more people to love and trust your brand.
Con: Netbase Quid takes some time to grow on you as the various dashboard templates available are not as intuitive. Also, there is some limitation to the sentiment analysis tool.
Price: Contact NetBase for a demo.
Social media management techniques
Social media management can be time-consuming and irritating. It’s also a job that requires a wise investment and considerable efforts. And if you want to be a top-notch social media manager, here are a few of the best tips:
Quality first
Consistency is the key to social media content publishing, but it would be better to have nothing rather than nonsense posts with invaluable content. Having a constant flow of updates is no more important than sharing content that delivers value. You’ll want to make sure that your content is excellent or appealing enough to be re-shared or retweeted, and your brand name is mentioned.
If you can create content that stays relevant and useful for your audience over time, there would be an influx of engagements. This tip is a way more effective to gain the audience’s attention and build a long-term bond with them across social media channels. After all, content is the core of social media marketing.
Data tracking and analyzing
Data doesn’t tell a lie, it shows your social media strategy is hitting the mark or not, which content is favorable and which one is falling. You will not know your posts have reached out to how many people and the engagement rate if you don’t look at the numbers! Therefore, tracking and analyzing data plays a vital role in social media management.
Many tools help to mine social media data quickly, such as Buffer – useful for analyzing tweets or looking at Facebook insights. You’ll get to know metrics related to every goal you’ve set for your social media strategy.
Automate repetitive tasks
Getting bored with overwhelming and mundane tasks that need to be done on social media day by day? You can stop wasting time on those repetitive tasks and save time by automating your social media efforts.
But how? Many tools can ease your social media management by various automation recipes. They are not only available for automatically sharing posts across many platforms at once, but also enabling you to find new content. One of the most recommended tools is IFTTT that we’ll discuss more in the next section.
Use essential tools
You can maximize your social media efforts by using multi-functional tools. These tools can help you manage your social media campaigns more effectively, streamline your workflows, and save hours of fulfilling your social media feeds.
Social media management tools have various functions ranging from scheduling to tracking and analyzing data. You may use different tools for your social media activities, depending on the purpose and requirements of your social media strategy. Whatever tools you use, make sure it fits your business in terms of price, functionality, usability, and efficiency. It can waste time and money if you’re using the wrong tool.
Luckily, most of the social media management tools are affordable and even free, so it makes sure to have a solution for you.
Conclusion
Social media is not only about being where your audience is, but also about knowing who your audience is online. Free social media management is not so different from paid marketing tools. And the number of free social media management tools and analytics tools is growing every year. If you manage free social media for your business, these are the best free tools that I recommend.
Social media has become one of the most powerful and popular marketing tools available to businesses across the world. As the popularity of social media platforms continues to grow exponentially, so does the interest in social media management tools and analytics software.