Free Social Media Analytics Tools for your Business for 2021. Free Social media analytics tools for small business easily how social media is performing and how big your audience is. Increase your brand presence with the help of Social media analytics tools.
Companies all over the world thrive by using social media analytics tools to get a hold of user generated content from the most popular social networks. While there are paid versions, free social media analytics tools are widely available as well. In short, free services offer limited features, while paid versions offer more in-depth information on the analyzed data.
Social Media Analytics Software Free. Learn how to perform Social Media Analysis with these amazing Social Media Analytics Tools! These social media analytics tools are some of the best in the World. Expert insights on how to use these tools to gain insight into your competitors social media, your own social media and the market you are trying to grow in.
This post is a collection of free tools you can use to analyze your social media data and make the best decisions possible based on your findings. These tools are intended for small businesses and bloggers who want to measure their audience growth and track detailed social media statistics in order to improve their marketing results.
How to Compare Social Media Marketing Software
How do you know what your customers and leads are saying about your business on social media? How do you know if someone who tweets a question at your business is already subscribed to one of your email marketing campaigns? Does this customer subscribe to one of your competitors’ social media accounts?
If you only have a handful of clients, then this information isn’t hard to track, however, as your business grows, you’ll need a more connected view of your customers, and the history and nature of their relationships with your company. SMMS platforms help through integration with your sales or marketing database(s) to create rich, omni-channel customer profiles with information on previous web interactions with the company — page views, email opens, etc. — and their purchase history.
In addition to rich customer profiles, most SMMS platforms have advanced monitoring tools to help track specific keywords or contacts. Having real-time streams of relevant phrases can help you prioritize your social media efforts and identify how and when to interact with your customers. It’s all about being there to say the right thing to the right person — at the right time. To make it easier to monitor all of these channels, nearly all solutions provide a combined social media management dashboard so you don’t have to track mentions or interactions using multiple tools.
With all interactions centralized on a single social media management platform, it’s much easier to generate omni-channel marketing reports and perform robust analytics to determine the return-on-investment of your efforts. You can see the number of clicks per message, as well as the number of leads and customers you generate.
There are several ways to package SMMS solutions. They may come as a module of your marketing automation software (ie Hubspot), or as a standalone social media management tool that integrates with existing systems (ie Hootsuite). The best solution for your business will be the one that integrates your social media activities with any legacy systems. Features will vary from vendor to vendor, ranging from simple social profile access to sophisticated analytics and social media monitoring capabilities. Before your evaluation, determine which functions and criteria are important to you.
Brand24
Brand24 collects all the mentions about a keyword, product, or brand name on the web and provides you with a comprehensive analysis of it.
It shows you where your keyword has been mentioned, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments about it, top sources and users of the keyword, and related terms around it.
Pro: Brand24 has an attractive user interface that is very user-friendly and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge to use it.
Con: The costs tend to add up when data quotas are exceeded.
Price: $49 – $399 USD per month.
Mention
Used by brands like Asos, Microsoft, and Ogilvy, Mention is widely known, and as its name implies, as a tool for tracking the mentions of specific terms online.
This social media analytics tool picks up mentions of the names of your competitors or their products, your brand or product name, relevant hashtags, and many more.
Mention also provides a feature that helps to see the different languages through which consumers talk about you or your competitors, including relevant timeframes and locations.
Plus, you also get to identify top-performing topics in your niche and repurpose it for your business.
Pro: Most platforms only engage with customers, but Mention engages with both customers and employees. This gives you more data to work with.
Con: Mention only shows data collected after setting it up. It doesn’t collect sentiment from past activity, and there is no historical data available.
Price: $29 – $450+ USD per month.
Followerwonk (Twitter)
Followerwonk specializes in Twitter analytics.
It helps you search Twitter followers with the highest follower numbers, compare Twitter accounts, analyze any Twitter user’s profile, and track changes in follower numbers — whether for your brand or a competitor’s.
Pro: The Search Bio function allows you to search for influencers and potential clients within your industry and rank them by the number of tweets, followers, followed users, account age, and social authority.
Con: The free plan only allows you to analyze accounts with less than 25,000 followers and you can only perform 50 searches, 20 analyses, and 20 comparisons per day and receive 100 results only per search.
Price: Free — $79 per month.
Iconosquare (Instagram and Facebook)
With Iconosquare, you can measure the impressions and reach of your Facebook and Instagram posts and stories.
You also get to see when your customers are mostly online, so you can put out content only when they are most likely to engage with it. Making it a competitive social media analytics tool option.
Iconosquare also lets you monitor comments and respond to them, after which you can tick them as read so everything remains organized.
Pro: Iconosquare features are beautifully designed and easy to use. You’ll love its advanced scheduling feature, customized Instagram feeds, and comment tracking ability.
Con: The software does not separate paid and organic posts analytics.
Price: $29/mo — custom pricing.
Keyhole
Keyhole offers various trackers that help you monitor your events, campaigns, influencer activity, brand mentions, and industry-specific social conversations. It lets you track hashtags, keywords, and accounts, for which it provides a wealth of information such as reach, top posts, share of voice, and more for your brand or competitors’.
3 cool features:
- Predict your campaign’s performance with machine learning and make changes accordingly.
- Analyze people’s sentiments when they engage with your posts.
- Manage influencers’ accounts and permissions, and track their performance from one place.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for seven days
- Audience insights
- Sentiment analysis
- Compare brands
- Trends identification
Paid options: $49, $99, $199 per month, and custom pricing
Rival IQ
Rival IQ lets you track a number of different companies and compare their performance across not only social media platforms but also SEO. It also analyzes Facebook and Instagram ads, and features historical data up to 24 months. This way, you can pinpoint the overall digital strategies that are working for your competitors and learn from their tactics.
3 cool features:
- Compare your profiles to others in your industry in terms of social metrics, hashtags, and content quality.
- Integrate Google Analytics to get a complete understanding of your customers’ journey.
- Improve your Facebook and Instagram ad performance with automated insights.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Facebook ads reports and alerting
- Facebook and Instagram insights reporting
- Facebook boosted post analytics
- LinkedIn and Google analytics
Paid options: $199, $349, and $499 per month
Social Report
Social Report provides an overview of your activity on multiple social networks as well as blogs. You can track new topics, measure ROI, and export the data into a handy report layout. Social Report makes it easy for you to monitor your social profiles as well as those of your competitors. It includes useful options to structure and manage your customer data.
3 cool features:
- Enable notifications to receive in-depth reports daily or weekly.
- List insights on different social profiles side by side to find correlations and contrasts in your overall marketing strategy.
- Create and share white label reports with your clients.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 30 days
- Analytics for social media, business reviews, and website performance
- Competitor tracking
- Unlimited PDF and Excel exports
Paid options: $49, $99, and $199 per month
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is a collection of analytics tools that includes all the fundamental resources you might need—tracking of multiple profiles, key performance indicators, competitive intelligence, and automated reports. Beside analytics tools, Socialbakers also offers tools for publishing and optimizing your content, identifying influencers, digital persona mapping, and customer care on social media.
3 cool features:
- Analyze audience sentiment towards your campaigns from their reactions and interactions.
- Decide whether to boost Facebook posts or not based on predictive analysis.
- See how your performance compares to that of your competitors in the last 90 days on Instagram and Facebook.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Social media analytics
- Automated sentiment analysis
- Smart benchmarks
- Omnichannel paid analytics
- Facebook and Instagram performance report
- Facebook benchmarking tool
- Instagram analytics tool
Paid options: $200 per month and custom pricing
Google Analytics 
One, seemingly unrelated social media analytics tool is Google Analytics.
Even though Google Analytics has been mainly designed to analyze the web performance of your website, it also offers plenty of insights about social media channels, for example:
- Sources of social media traffic to your website: Discover what social media platforms bring the traffic
- Goals completions for your social media posts: Assign goals and analyze their completion
- Conversions from social media posts: Assign revenue to conversions in social media
- Assisted social media conversions: See if any of your social media platform contributed to a conversion
Pros:
- Google Analytics is free.
- Good chances are your site already has it implemented.
- Provides valuable insights about your audience.
- One of the most popular analytics platform – lot’s of tutorials available online.
Cons:
- Takes time and skills to properly set it up to track your social media strategy.
- It’s not designed for managing social media, requires some advanced knowledge about the tool.
BuzzSumo
Another, this time paid, social media analytics tool I personally really, really, really like is BuzzSumo.
What is BuzzSummo? It’s a content analytics tool – among many features such as brand monitoring, social listening or competitor research, it also provides social media analytics:
- Content discovery: Find most shared content in social media networks. It’s a powerful feature for content writers!
- Content analysis: Find social media data about particular topic of interest: content type, top shared domains, top social media platforms, etc.
- Influencer marketing: Find top influencers in a niche or industry based on social media reach or engagement.
Pros:
- Offers free trial
- Presents up-to-date popular content. Allows to find trending topics to share on social media.
- Easy to use.
Cons:
- Bit pricey if you want the full version.
- Not a social media management tool. You will need additional tools if you need that feature.
Social Media Marketing Features
Features of social media marketing software platforms are numerous, as social media platforms allow diverse forms of media, have varying levels of functionality, and wide-ranging options for social promotion, sharing, or paid media. Some common features of social media marketing tools include:
- Publishing and scheduling of posts
- Social listening and monitoring
- Sentiment analysis
- Keyword tracking
- Automation (favorites, retweets, likes)
- Enhanced customer profiles
- Multi-channel management
- Multi-account management
- Campaign management
- Reporting and analytics
Conclusion
Increasingly, businesses are turning to the free social media analytics tools to generate meaningful insights on how to potentially improve their social media campaigns and social media marketing practices. In the past, it was difficult for businesses to monitor the results of their social media marketing efforts by relying on third party software for social media analytics.
What’s the best option for social media analytics? No matter what industry you’re in, your brand likely has a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram page. With all of these platforms offering free analytics, why pay for a tool? While it’s true that you can leverage native data for a limited view of your social marketing performance, our report found that 29% of marketers consider this basic data insufficient to make business decisions.