Social media has quickly become the most popular form of advertising. People are leaving television and print behind in favor of reading their friends’ Facebook posts and Twitter musings. Social media also provides some excellent opportunities to monitor your brand reputation.Some people will take advantage of this, while others will ignore it.But we are sure that social media is a good way to grow your business if you know how to use it well. Because of that, we have decided to talk about the best social media analytics tools that can help you improve your marketing campaigns.
Are you curious about social media analytics tools 2021? Are you looking for the next great thing that will make all your online efforts really pay off? You’re probably not alone. Breakthroughs are constantly happening in social media, and for marketers, it’s always a challenge to keep up with the ever-changing landscape.
Everyone needs a place to start, which explains why free tools for social media analysis are so popular. Most brands use these and other no-cost resources to start their social media analysis efforts. However, reliance on these tools should be limited in order to create a solid foundation for the brand’s long-term marketing strategy. Most often, basic social media reporting is enough to monitor and optimize brand performance, but they can also be an excellent way to learn more…
It’s undeniable that social media is one of the most important factors in online marketing and business nowadays. Without knowing how our customers behave on social media, we’d often lose a big portion of potential customers. So here are most useful and best free social media analytics tools for you!
Social media monitoring definition
The activity of tracking social media channels. Organizations measure and use social media analytics tools to find out where are the discussions about them, their competition and other topics of interest. Social media monitoring includes measuring opinions and sentiment of groups and influencers. It includes historical data and other information. The goal is to assess the reputation and be alerted to significant events taking place in social channels. — Dreamgrow
SumAll
SumAll helps guide your decision making by connecting all your key online marketing and e-commerce data in one interactive chart. Features include real-time data monitoring, goal tracking, viewing new vs. returning customers, and trendlines that project future performance.
Quintly
Quintly is a social media benchmarking and analytics solution that tracks and compares the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, or all of them, their tool visualizes and checks your social marketing success, benchmarking your numbers against your competitors or best practices.
Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that helps you monitor and analyze data found across all your online services, including Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, WordPress, Zendesk, and Twitter from one single location in real time. No more wasting countless hours tracking down your data from all over the Web every day!
Keyhole
Keyhole provides real-time social conversation tracking for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It helps you measure and amplify conversations around your brand and campaigns, enables you identify prospective clients and influencers talking about (or looking for) your services, and aids in driving engagement by finding and re-sharing relevant content.
Audiense
Audiense Connect provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of Twitter profiles. You can glean information about your followers’, peers’, or competitors’ location, language, interests, and influence. Audiense uses machine learning on social data such as affinities and demographics to help you understand your target audience. You can then engage these audiences directly at scale.
3 cool features:
- Create your own chatbot and engage customers via Twitter DMs.
- Analyze your followers in-depth and use these insights to build communities.
- Analyze historical and real-time conversations on Twitter.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Best time to tweet
- Community insights dashboard
- Twitter list management
Paid options: $9 and $89 per month
Klear
Klear is an influencer marketing analytics tool that helps you easily identify influencers in any category, in any location across the world on Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram, and manage your relationships with them with a CRM-like system. Klear can analyze not just influencers, but also your own profile and followers, and segment them by niche or interests.
3 cool features:
- Identify influencers in your Twitter feed with a Chrome extension.
- Extract qualitative metrics by tracking hashtags on Twitter and Instagram.
- Generate PDF reports for your social activity, engagement, content performance, fan-base growth, and brand awareness.
Social media channels:
- Instagam
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Analytics for Facebook Page, YouTube, and blogs
- Social PDF reports
- Hashtag tracking and influencer campaign monitoring
Paid options: Custom pricing
Talkwalker
Talkwalker gives you unlimited free searches for hashtags and keywords across major social media platforms, news, blogs, and forums. It provides a wide range of data such as mentions, sentiment, distribution of conversations, top posts, and more. Overall, Talkwalker is a powerful brand monitoring platform that helps you measure sentiment and compare your performance to competitors’ across channels.
3 cool features:
- Monitor in real-time what customers are saying about your brands, products, events, earning calls, or campaigns.
- Map your mentions to a world map.
- Get demographic information such as age, gender, and occupation on your audience.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Talkwalker Alerts
- Free social search (and monitor)
Paid options: $9,600 per year and custom pricing
Hootsuite Analytics
Key benefits: Performance data from every social network in one place with easy-to-understand reports
Paid or free? Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, marketing teams
Most social media management platforms have built-in analytics tools. We hope you’ll forgive us for saying Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are our favorite. But it’s the tool we know and love best.
Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.
Social posts metrics:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Reach
- Engagement rate
- Impressions
- Shares
- Saves
- Video views
- Video reach
- And more
Profile metrics:
- Follower growth over time
- Negative feedback rate
- Profile visits
- Reactions
- Overall engagement rate
- And more
Best time to post recommendations:
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.
This is why our Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Link clicks
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:
- Customize report templates for only the metrics you care about
- Get reports on your competitors
- Track the productivity of your social team (response times, and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments)
- Monitor mentions, comments, and tags related to your business to avoid PR disasters before they happen
Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite professional plan, with you can try for free for 30 days.
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.
SocialGimp
SocialGimp provides Instagram analytics for brands, marketers and analysts.
- Detailed analytics for your Brand. Improve your content quality on Instagram and grow your audience!
- Advanced hashtag management. Find the right hashtags and save them to your own user defined categories!
- Benchmark yourself with competitors and industry leaders. Save your favorites!
Better insights about your audience and with proper analytics you can achieve long term effects. SocialGimp provides you with the tools your brand needs and also with advice, guidelines and benchmarks.
Mediatoolkit
Monitor online mentions of your brand in real-time. Mediatoolkit will let you know about every article, hashtag or comment mentioning your business. Mention monitoring for 100+ million online sources. Find mentions from any source in the world: be it profiles on Twitter and Instagram, or updates from websites, blogs, and forums. Free version includes
- Websites, blogs, forums
- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, VKontakte
- Location and language filters
- iOS and Android app
- Slack and email alerts
- Engagement and sentiment data
Union Metrics
The free Instagram account checkup from Union Metrics lets you see how you’re doing on Instagram. It uses clever algorithms to provide a free Instagram account checkup that helps you understand your Instagram health. The tool answers questions about your Instagram account like:
- What’s the best time to post to Instagram?
- What hashtags should you use to get the most engagement?
- What should you post more (or less) of?
The free Instagram analytics checkup analyzes the last 30 days of activity on your account, including your posts and engagement from your fans. Run it any time you need a checkup for updated Instagram analytics.
Zuum Social
Free Facebook page report. Login with Facebook. In your Facebook report you get these 7 insights:
- Know the drivers of your page’s virality
- Know your page’s most influential fans
- Discover the optimal time to post
- Discover how many words to use in your posts
- Understand what media type performs best
- Know where your top fans live
- See where new fans come from
What should small businesses look for in social analytics tools?
Depending on which social media analytics you decide to use here are some of the essentials you should be looking for:
- Comprehensive analytics: Besides looking for a social media analytic process that crank out numbers, look for one that gives you further insights. This includes engagement, likes, demographics; conversations, hashtags, and even competitor’s performance. So there’s no need to flip through different systems just to get the results you need – these come in handy for tweaking your outreach. If your social media analytics tool integrates with Google Analytics it would help in building robust reporting.
- Integration across social media platforms: Look for a solution that offers analytics for social media across the board that measures Instagram, Facebook and other data. This will help you get a good perspective on the performances on your various social media handles.
- Offers customized team tracking and collaboration: Besides how you measure your social media analytics it should help you customize how you share, plan and collaborate across teams.
- Multiple reporting options: A key component in analytics is in the manner in which reports are generated. Look for the best social media analytics tools offering data and reports in multiple formats this could be in PDF, JPEG, PNG or even .xls.
- Additional tools: In addition to analytics look for tools that help you edit pictures as well as integrate with other Customer Relations Management System (CRM) solutions. Particularly integration with a CRM system will help you convert your engagement into leads thus helping you go up the ladder of engagement.
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools are used to evaluate and control communication on social media. One of the most challenging jobs for social media analysts is to create a comprehensive summary of their company’s social strategy, their progress, and any potential roadblocks.
Social media analytics tools 2021 is one of the most important parts of your business. The reason for this is that, in addition to allowing you to know how many people are following you on social media, it will allow you to check the number of sales generated by each platform. This is a very useful tool for anyone who wants to determine the best social networks for their business.