Social media analytic tools have become popular among companies and big organizations when it comes to social media services. With a holistic approach, businesses can take a look at every single piece of data related to their success or failure on certain social media platforms. By leveraging the right social media analytic tools, businesses can better understand what drives their audience, where they come from and how they engage with the companies’ brand.
There are many social media analytic tools to choose from, but which one is the best? The most commonly used social media analytic tools are free. You can run a Facebook page and know exactly what to post at what time to reach your audience. You can schedule posts directly from your phone or computer. There are also thousands of social media analytic tools for SEO, email marketing and more. Discover what tools you should have in your toolbox!
The use of social media analytic tools (i.e. social media analysis software) has grown in an explosive manner over the past few years, and for valid reasons. The variety of information that can be obtained from social media analytics makes it a very valuable tool.
As a marketer, it’s important to stay on top of changing and evolving trends in order to be successful. Social media is no exception. Having an arsenal of the most powerful social media analytics tools will give you the edge you need in 2021 and beyond. While there are some great paid analytics tools available, we’ve put together a list of some great free tools to choose from.
What is social media competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is an analysis of your competition to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to your own.
It’s a process of benchmarking your own results against the heavy-hitters in your industry, so you can identify opportunities for growth as well as strategies that aren’t performing as well as they should.
A social media competitive analysis, specifically, will help you:
- Identify who your competitors are on social media
- Know which social platforms they’re on
- Know how they’re using those platforms
- Understand how well their social strategy is working
- Benchmark your social results against the competition
- Identify social threats to your business
- Find gaps in your own social media marketing strategy
Followerwonk
One of our favorite Twitter tools, Followerwonk shows you detailed breakdowns of your followers and activity. Click on the Analytics tab, enter a Twitter username (either yours or someone else’s), and view information on followers and following. See stats like when your followers are online, when you typically post, and how your followers fall into categories like social authority, activity, total tweets, and follower count.
3 cool features:
- Find targeted users by keywords used in their profiles or bios.
- Sort users or followers of an account by insightful factors such as influence or activity.
- Compare your stats to those of competitors or peers with the help of a visual graph.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Search up to 50 profiles per day
- Analyze accounts with up to 25,000 followers
- 20 comparisons per day
Paid options: $29 and $79 per month
SparkToro
SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool-in-the-making, founded by former Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin. It will eventually be a search engine that helps you identify the websites, publications, podcasts, and social profiles that appeal to your audience. At the moment, it is a collection of nifty tools that evaluate your Twitter handle and followers, and give an objective assessment of your brand influence and authority on Twitter.
3 cool features:
- Audit your followers and know what percent of them are fake.
- See the specific topics that marketers are talking about on Twitter.
- Get a ‘SparkScore’ of your influence, based on the performance of your tweets.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Fake follower audit
- SparkScore
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
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.
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.
Cons
- Can be a bit pricey for smaller companies.
- The UI can be difficult to use for some people.
Why do a competitor analysis on social media?
Learning about your competitors is not the only reason to do a competitor analysis on social media. It will also give you insights into your own business and your audience (which likely overlaps with your competitors’ audiences).
Here are some surprising insights a social media competitive analysis can give you:
- Performance benchmarks for your own business, such as average followers, engagement rates, and share of voice
- Ideas for the best times to post on social media (since your audience is likely online at a similar time)
- An understanding of the potential customer pain points
- New (and better) ideas for content that may resonate with your audience (or that, conversely, does NOT resonate with your audience, and which you might want to avoid)
- An understanding of how to communicate with your audience on certain platforms (i.e., casually or formally)
- Ideas for ways to differentiate your brand
- And more!
Ultimately, a social media competitive analysis will give you as much as you put into it. You may choose to do a one-off social media competitor report or hire someone on your team whose sole job it is to keep track of your competitors. Most businesses do something in-between: a quarterly or monthly report.
Conclusion
Social media isn’t a trend. It’s a way to reach out to more people and build them engaged followers / fans. Social media is where customers get their news, saw tips, experience information overload and make decisions about businesses. Social media analytics is a way to monitor what’s happening in social media.
Social media analytics tools allow businesses and brands to analyze their social media posts, data and performance. This is an overview of what we think are the best social media analytic tools, available for free or upgraded paid packages.