Social media analysis is important for most companies. No matter how you define social media and analytics, social media seems to be an integral part of branding and advertising today. If you want to know the definition of social media analytics, the different forms it can take or the best social media analytics software 2021, you should read this article which explains in depth all of these things.
If you manage social media pages for your brand, then you’re probably interested in analytics. Facebook Insights are very basic, and Twitter Analytics only cover what happens on your Twitter profile. A more complete picture of the performance of a brand’s social media presence must be produced by third-party software. There is no shortage of options in this regard, yet many of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. This article provides an overview of some of the most popular solutions for tracking social media performance and delivers insights into their strengths and weaknesses. To help you find social media analytics software definition or the best social media analytics tools 2021, this article also covers free social media analytics tools that don’t require any payment.
Social media analytics software measure the performance of your social media marketing campaigns. There are many social media analytics tools available. Some are free, and some are costly. But it’s hard to find a good one that can effectively monitor social media posts
The definition of social media analytics software I have found is “software that monitors social media and reports on data collected”, so I will focus on that part. It may be called social media analytics tools 2022, social media analytic tools 2023, social media analytics software 2024, or other names by the rest of the world, but they all do the same thing basically.
What are social media analytics?
First, before we jump into some of the awesome social media analytics tools available, I wanted to quickly talk a little about how we define social media analytics.
At Buffer, we see social media analytics as the gathering of data from social media platforms to help inform us and guide our marketing strategy. By paying close attention to social media analytics, you can measure your performance against your social media goals.
Social media analytics tools are usually used to complement social media management tools. The latter lets you plan and schedule your social media content while the former enables you to measure the performance and informs your strategy.
Google Analytics
While it’s not solely a social media analytics tool, Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track social media campaigns and even help you measure social ROI.
You likely already have an account set up on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic right now. But did you know you can access and create reports specifically for social media tracking, too?
For instance, you can see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network, or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns.
ShortStack
Typically, running a social media contest requires a surprising amount of legwork.
From the process of picking a winner to analyzing engagement from a giveaway campaign, ShortStack can pick up the slack.
For brands running frequent contests or giveaways, a dedicated contest analytics tool ensures that you aren’t just giving away freebies for no reason. ShortStack looks at everything from entry data to long-term campaign performance to do just that.
By analyzing your contest’s performance with a social analytics tool like ShortStack, you’ll be able to see engagement metrics and identify which types of contests work best with your audience.
SHIELD App
As the source of 80% of B2B social leads, B2B brands are paying more and more attention to LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the increasing need for employee advocacy means that brands should be tracking the LinkedIn presence of individual salespeople in addition to their company page.
Up-and-coming social media analytics tools like SHIELD are helping bridge that gap. For example, SHIELD examines the performance of individual employee profiles and their posts. Content analytics including average likes, comments and hashtags can help employees optimize their posts prior to sharing to maximize their reach.
Additionally, SHIELD’s team report allows businesses to showcase side-by-side the engagement and growth of individual employee profiles over time.
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.
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.
Brandwatch
Key benefits: Track and analyze data from more than 95 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social networks
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring
Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:
- Summary: A high-level view of social conversations about your brand, competitors, or keywords.
- Trends: A report on the conversations and accounts influencing a specific topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
- Reputation: A checkup on sentiment trends you might need to monitor or address.
- Influencers: A report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities relevant to your brand and analyze their activity.
- Competitor comparison: Benchmarking social media data for conversation volume, sentiment, and share of voice.
Talkwalker
Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers
Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:
- Mentions
- Brand sentiment
- Important influencers
- Author lists
You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.
Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.
Hootsuite Impact
Key benefits: Track how organic and paid social impact real business goals and get recommendations for how to improve
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advertising teams
Hootsuite Impact provides an in-depth look at the performance of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that performance to specific business goals, like sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to improve your results.
Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture of your post and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don’t have to gather data from separate tools to create a social media analytics report.
Instead, you see exactly how much revenue all your social efforts generate, so you can prove your social ROI. Keep in mind that ROI is not only about sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula developed specifically for your business. Seeing which of your efforts have paid off has never been easier.
You’ll also get a clear breakdown that shows you exactly how to replicate your successes and improve in the areas where you’re falling short.
Then there’s the competitive benchmarks. To get the best insights from social analytics, you need to understand how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Impact shows how your results stack up against your competitors, so you can spot opportunities to improve.
quintly
Do you want to know how your brand stacks up against competitors on social media?
Then quintly might just be right for you. Not only will you get a peek of your brand’s social media marketing performance, but also see how it’s performing against competitors.
Agencies can use this tool as well; they use it for client management, reporting, centralized analytics, and influencer ranking. Media houses can also use quintly for managing their social media platforms as well as tracking relevant conversations and campaigns.
Pro: The tool is simple to set up and has a minimalist user interface, which makes it easy for even the least tech-savvy users to learn how to use it.
Con: The data insights provided can be a little ambiguous, so you may not be able to link ROI or see attribution from individual posts.
Price: Starts at €300 per month.
Why is social media analytics important?
To put it simply, social media analytics help gather, analyze, and interpret data from social networks. Understanding the performance of one’s social channels is key for development and choosing the right direction for social media marketing.
But let’s have a closer look why social media analytics is important.
Understanding your audience
Social media is one of the best places you can observe your target audience.
This is where they speak their mind, react in real-time, and freely express their emotions about something – a product, brand, or service.
Social media are a gold mine of audience insights. By tracking social media metrics and analyzing social platforms, you can get to know your audience, for example:
- Who they are?
- What their needs are?
- What they think about your business?
- What types of content resonates with them?
- What time do they hang out on social networks?
And much more!
“Brand awareness”
Social media analytics helps track various rates connected to the exposure of the brand in social media. These parameters illustrate some sort of awareness, at least online. On this basis, you can track how the online exposure of your branded content changes.
Some of the brand metrics in social media analytics include:
- Social media reach – shows how many social media profiles come across branded content
- Influence score of social media profiles – shows influential profiles that talk about business
- Sentiment analysis – shows happy and unhappy customers and media talking about your business and products
- Volume of mentions – shows how the number of online mentions of branded content changes
- Engagement – shows engagement of branded content changes
Some tools, for example, Brand24, have their own brand metrics.
Some of them are the Presence Score and Reputation score. They help to measure the online popularity of branded content.
Conclusion
Social media analytics is the measurement, collection and interpretive analysis of data from conversations that happen in social media and publications such as blogs, forums and news sites. Users can utilize social media analytics tools for to gather relevant information about their target audience, measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and gather competitive intelligence.
Social media analytics are powerful tools we can use to better understand what’s happening on social media. These tools help us decide the best course of action to take by providing the data we need to inform our decisions. In addition, they provide ways for us to track the reach and impact of our efforts across multiple channels, so we can optimize more effectively. Social media analytics tools 2021 play an important role in your marketing strategy.