Businesses have a strong need for social media analytics tools because the abundance of information can no longer be easily analyzed by employees. Simply put, software tools for social media analytics mean better, faster data collection and processing capabilities. The best thing about these tools is that you don’t need to be a computer techie or an expert in mathematics to understand all the data they crunch, analyze and generate into graphs and charts. Some good social media analytics tool software can parse through millions of records in just a few seconds and instantly provide you with the most important statistics.
In this post, I am covering some of the best and most useful social media analytics tools available both for free and paid. For those readers considering using social media marketing as a primary way to market their business or brand in 21st century, I think it’s important to understand which tools are available today and what is on the horizon for social media analytics tools 2021.
Use Social Media Analytics Tool to help you keep track of all your social media posts across different social networking sites and analyze the performance of your content on different platforms. The tool also gives you real time data and statistics on the views, likes, shares and followers of your social media accounts.
There are many social media analytics tools (both free and paid) available but not all of them are made equal. Ranging from several different software platforms, there is something to fit nearly every company’s needs.
Why you need social media analytics tools
Social media analytics tools help you create performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss — to figure out what’s working and what’s not. They should also provide the data you need to assess your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.
They can help you answer questions like:
- Is it worth it for my business to keep posting on Pinterest?
- What were our top posts on LinkedIn this year?
- Should we post more on Instagram next month?
- Which network drove the most brand awareness for our product launch?
- What kind of posts do my followers like to comment on?
- And many more.
Facebook Insights
Available for all Page admins, Facebook Insights shows you the full stats behind your posts, your fans, and your reach. Additionally, from the Insights tab, you can set up a list of Pages to Watch, which gives you information on the performance of other Facebook pages.
How to access: Click the Insights tab in the menu bar across the top of your Facebook Page.
Quick tip: You can click on the people reached number at the bottom of any individual post in your Page’s timeline to see a pop-up of the full stats for that post.
Instagram Insights
If you have an Instagram Business Profile, you will have access to Instagram Insights — Instagram’s native in-app analytics. It offers a comprehensive range of data about your profile, posts, stories, and ads. It also has detailed information about your followers such as their most active times and days.
How to access: If you have a personal Instagram profile, you’ll need to convert into a Business Profile. Go to your profile page in the mobile app, tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner, and tap Insights.
Quick tip: In the Audience section, you get data on the average times when your followers are online. You can use this to determine your best time to post on Instagram.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter provides a 28-day summary of your profile and show you how it has performed in terms of profile visits, follower growth, tweet impressions and mentions. It also gives you an analysis of the impressions your tweets are getting, as well as details on engagement, i.e. retweets, mentions, favorites, and clicks. You can export all the data and run some pretty neat reports for yourself.
How to access: Log in to your Twitter account and go to analytics.twitter.com.
Quick tip: Clicking on the bar chart icon of any of your tweets will show a complete breakdown of the engagement on the tweet, including clicks on URLs, clicks on your username, clicks on images, and expanded details.
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.
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.
Quintly
Quintly takes social data and uses it to provide solutions to brands, agencies, and the media.
It allows them to validate their social media marketing with robust analytics.
Quintly offers more than 350 metrics relating to social media activity. You can use these existing statistics or customize them to suit your business, to measure your firm’s social media goals effectively.
Quintly allows you to arrange all relevant social media KPIs on a dashboard, either one of their pre-existing ones or a customized one you create yourself.
With Quintly, you can benchmark your channels against each other, and gain comparative insight.
Quintly offers a 14-day free trial. If you decide to continue with the software, you can select from Small, Medium, Large, and Enterprise plans. Every plan includes five Automated Reports, three Users, and all Core Features. The plans differ by the number of social profiles you can analyze. With the $120 per month Small plan, you can analyze five social profiles, while the Enterprise plan (custom pricing) permits you to analyze more than 100 social profiles.
Who Uses Social Media Analytics Software?
What was once a very niche user base has expanded greatly, as the need for analytics and the growth of social media marketing efforts for businesses has increased exponentially in recent years. The employees most commonly utilizing social media analytics are social media managers. Many businesses, particularly mid-market and enterprise companies, have dedicated social media managers on their marketing teams to run all social accounts. Social media analytics tools are an excellent way for social media managers to track their goals and metrics. These products also help inform the decisions and strategies of social media managers. Marketing managers, marketing directors, or chief marketing officers may choose to use social media analytics products to track how well their social media manager is growing their presence on different outlets. It is also an easy way to ensure they are hitting goals and driving leads and traffic.
For small businesses that might not have the resources to hire a social media manager, social media management might be allocated to a general marketer who wears many hats. Therefore, social media analytics software can be an easy, fast, and straightforward way of tracking social media campaigns for marketers who do not have the time to deep dive into performance. Because social media analytics tools have digestible visualizations, it is very simple for marketers to track metrics.
Additionally, brand influencers and industry thought leaders may use social media analytics tools to track their interactions and engagements. Influencers are always trying to grow their followings; social media analytics solutions enable this through performance tracking and utilizing social media best practices. Brand advocates may also put out sponsored content for companies; justifying and defending their tactics to those companies is much easier with the help of social media analytics software.
A customer service manager is another role that might take advantage of social media analytics. More and more customers are connecting with companies on social media when they are having issues with products or services. Oftentimes, it can be faster to tweet or direct message a company and explain the problems you are experiencing than it is to phone a call center and wait for a representative to assist you. Customer service teams can track complaints that come in through social media and ensure that issues are taken care of promptly.
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools play a significant role in analytics and digital marketing. Content creation has become an important part of digital marketing and most of the organizations opting for it nowadays. Blogs, paid articles, online publications etc are examples of content creation on social media platforms. These platforms provide information about the number of followers and interactions on any particular post. The idea behind this is that new users are attracted to popular organizations and posts.
If you are a business owner, you may be interested in the best social media analytics tools available. There are many ideal options to help you determine how best to improve your online presence. With a wide range of options, it’s easy to come up with a plan and set goals for your online marketing endeavors.