Social media analytics tools help in analyzing and evaluating the data that is being posted through the various social media channels. The objective of social media analytics is to understand the target audience behavior online and hence make the most effective marketing strategies for the company/ organization. In other words, social media analytics helps in understanding the trends, relevance and performance of a particular content on various social media sites.
Are you curious about free social media analytics tools 2021? You are not alone. There are thousands of people searching for this information, and this is why we created the content below: to help you find a solution to your problem. Here you will find an overview of some of the most popular tools on the market.
Social media analysis allows you to perform a deep insight into customer and user interactions with your brand. It is an integral part of any inbound marketing strategy, but often it blocks as there are too many social media analytics tools on the market. So choosing the right social media analytics tool for yourself can be a difficult task, especially when you don’t know how to compare them.
Social media analytics tools are the essential part of social media marketing. It is the primary source which helps marketers to know what to post on their page, how to improve engagement and increase traffic. On this page, we have listed some of the best free social media analytics tools which will help you to do all these things easily.
What Are Social Media Analytics Tools?
Social media analytics tools gather and process data from conversations on social media that involve your company. This provides you with solid data from which to make business decisions regarding future social media marketing efforts.
Some social media experts divide social media analytics into four different categories:
- Descriptive analytics. Focuses on what has happened and what is happening on social media, in the form of reports and visualizations that help businesses make better informed decisions. Most social media analytics take this form.
- Diagnostic analytics. Goes beyond what has happened to try to analyze why it happened, using advanced statistics to distill data into a single top-down view that lets you see what has and hasn’t worked in past campaigns.
- Predictive analytics. As the name suggests, this is a form of analytics that attempts to predict future events based on past and present social media data. It can be used to link specific customer events to typical past outcomes, such as a specific questions regularly leading to a particular purchase.
- Prescriptive analytics. This form of analytics provides you with the best course of action to take when handling a situation, based on the data accumulated from the outcomes of similar situations in the past.
Social media analytics tools can perform all of these types of analysis, depending upon the size and scope of the software you purchase.
Khoros
Khoros social media platform focuses on customer service and satisfaction. They take digital care seriously and provide marketers social media analytics for community management. By having this tool, they can resolve customers’ needs quickly.
Special features
- Fast Messaging & Analytics – The smooth interface allows marketers to message their customers fast and in real-time. Iconosquare also offers analytics on where messages arrive from and who shares their content.
- Khoros Bot – It’s a self-sufficient chat bot that can communicate with customers. It comes with automated conversation responses to shorten the response time.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is known for its content marketing analytics worldwide. The high-performing platform generates content insights and helps monitor content performances from all angles.
Content marketers have found that it’s the best solution for research. BuzzSumo can measure how much an article has been shared on the web.
Special features
- Content Analyzer – With unlimited searches, content marketers can search the web for any content related to a keyword, and it also includes analytics for content engagement.
- Question Analyzer – Content marketers can now use BuzzSumo to generate metrics for interactions and engagement on question-based sites, such as ecommerce sites, Yahoo! Answers, Quora, Reddit, and more.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the oldest social media analytics tools, and marketers have always relied on its scheduling capabilities. Throughout the years, Hootsuite has grown and developed analytics for social media marketing, publishing, and content.
Special features
- Automated Scheduler – Marketers can maximize their engagement by automating their publishing strategy with Hootsuite
- Hootsuite Impact – Hootsuite provides real-time strategy insights with recommendations to increase social media engagement and performance.
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.
Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Key benefits: Analyze brand sentiment and customer demographics in real time, alongside all your other social media performance data
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Intermediate to advanced
Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small to large social media teams
Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.
It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve customer experience.
It also analyzes data about your audience demographics like gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics across networks, or look at the aggregate picture of your audience for all networks combined.
This is a tool that really tells you a lot about your audience — and how they feel about you. It can tell you whether a spike in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it can help you capitalize or avoid either one, respectively.
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.
Buffer Analyze
Buffer Analyze is our social media analytics tool for online brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling overwhelmed.
3 cool features:
- Instagram Stories analytics
- Posting strategy recommendations
- Create professional reports in as few as two clicks
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Overview and charts for key metrics
- Posts and Stories analytics
- Audience insights
- Answers
- Easy-to-use report builder
Pricing options: $35 and $50 per month
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management and monitoring tool that provides a host of enterprise-level options. Its cross-channel social listening features you perform a contextual and qualitative analysis of topics, hashtags, and keywords. You can tell how your content is performing on various social networks from its visual and intuitive reports.
3 cool features:
- Analyze paid campaign performance across networks
- Get group report of your social media profiles
- Analyze your team’s performance (task performance, response rates, etc.)
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 30 days
- Report builder
- Reports for each social media channel
- Reports for internal team performance
Paid options: $99, $149, and $249 per month
Zoho Social
Zoho is a unique and powerful software suite that has CRM, collaboration, and other SaaS options that take care of your entire operational workflow. Zoho Social is the part that enables you to understand your social media audience and how they engage with you. You can listen to multiple channels from a single dashboard and respond in real-time. You can also dig deeper into each post to measure their reach and engagement.
3 cool features:
- Create intuitive reports from a huge list of pre-defined segments based on demographics of your fans, influencers, or people reached.
- Get a breakdown of the content formats that your connections are engaging with and compare it to those that you publish.
- Compare fans vs. other people reached for every post.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 15 days
- Stats for individual posts
- Analytics for content type, best time to post, etc.
Pricing options: $10, $25, $200, and $300 per month (annual pricing)
Keyhole
Many social media marketers around the world use Keyhole for hashtag tracking. Keyhole can track hashtags and provide comprehensive metrics for social media marketing.
Keyhole takes its social media analytics further with influencer metrics to analyze influencer profiles and connect hashtag metrics and keywords.
Special features
- Easy Reporting – Keyhole makes it easy for marketers to create, share, and download reports, all in a matter of minutes. With easy-to-read graphs and visualizations, marketers can show and explain reports with confidence
- Historical Reports – Marketers can access data on older reports up to 5 years in the past. That way, marketers can reanalyze their social media performance to develop more insights for future campaigns
TapInfluence
If marketers need to revamp their influencer marketing strategy, they can always turn to TapInfluence. The platform can automate every part of content creation, social media management, and measure the impact of influencers.
Special features
- Influencer Profiles – Marketers can access basic statistics of the influencer, including profile details, social connections, and audience data
- Visual Search for Influencers – Marketers can search for influencers based on keywords about visual content, including logos, brand names, and the location of the image
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Social media analytics can range from the small-scale, i.e., providing you with statistics regarding how frequently you are mentioned on Twitter, to the very largest scale of business intelligence data analytics. Depending upon the size of your company, your needs for these tools will vary widely.
- Small business (one to 10 employees). A small-scale business will only need the most basic social media analytics, focusing on descriptive analytics that provide reports about your social media presence, allowing you to make informed decisions for the future.
- Midsize business (11 to 100 employees). Midsize businesses will want the descriptive analytics features as well, but they should also invest in diagnostic analytics tools. At this slightly larger scale, it is much more difficult to manually assess what is and isn’t working in your social media campaigns, so those diagnostic tools will be extremely useful.
- Large/enterprise business (over 100 employees). In addition to the descriptive and diagnostic analytics tools used by smaller businesses, large-scale companies will want predictive and prescriptive analytics functionality to help them choose the next best action for a wide variety of platforms and campaigns.
Conclusion
There are many tools that provide you with big data. Their pricing plans may vary as well as their features, but the idea behind them remains the same: for a certain price, you will get more information about your followers and the way they behave. Social media analytics are used by both beginners and professional marketers, though some features of these tools will be too complicated for beginners to handle.
Social Media Analytics Tools is used to measure the performance and effectiveness of a social media strategy. It gathers data from various social media platforms and analyzes them to provide actionable information on your company’s past performance and future strategies.