Social Media has taken a very pivotal role in modern business marketing. Besides traditional marketing mediums, social media is a fast growing tool to reach a large number of people at a fraction of the cost.
If you’re a blogger, a webmaster or a SMM expert, these free social media analytics tools comes handy for getting regular statistics of your posts on specific social networking sites. You can also get more stats on your competitors – and even more – from these free Social Media Analytics Tools.
BUFFER
Buffer has three different platforms available in one – publish, reply and analyze. And it has different pricing structures for each.
- Publish helps you build your audience and grow your brand on social
- Reply helps brands provide amazing customer service on social
- And Analyze offers analytics around brands’ efforts
Price: Starts at $10/month; $99/month and up for Buffer for Business
Likealyzer
Likealyzer is a Facebook Page analyzer tool by media intelligence firm Meltwater. It audits your Facebook Page and returns metrics such as posts per day, engagement per post, timing, and length of posts. Likealyzer also grades the Page’s performance based on more than 70 different data points, and offers recommendations for improvement based on the results.
3 cool features:
- Benchmark your Facebook Page against a million others to know how you are performing.
- Get recommendations based on how your content is performing.
- Export your chosen metrics and insights in the form of easy-to-understand reports.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Analysis of your Facebook Page’s front page, about page, activities, response, and engagement
Google Analytics
While Google Analytics is built for analyzing website traffic down to the last detail, it is very useful for analyzing the impact of social media as a marketing channel and source of traffic. Click through to Acquisition > Social > Overview, and you can check out how many visits your site receives from each of the major social networks. You can tie this back to your bottom line using goals and conversions.
3 cool features:
- Find social networks and communities where people are interacting with your content.
- Measure the value of social media as a channel by analyzing conversions and ecommerce transactions.
- See how users who come from social media navigate through your site.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
and all other social networks
What analytics you get for free:
- Social referral traffic
- Social traffic flow
- Social conversions
ICONOSQUARE
Iconosquare is Instagram and Facebook focused – which is great if those are your only channels and the only social media analytics you’re interested in. You can get a free audit of your Instagram or Facebook account from them. This tells you whether your account is optimized, and if not, what’s missing. The paid social marketing analytics tool offers more: Track social media and analytics metrics like follower evolution, average engagement rate per post, and reach and impressions history to tweak content. Compare against benchmarks of 100 industries for competitor analysis of follower growth, engagement and reach. See Instagram Stories insights reach and impressions, completion rate by story type, and best time to post Stories. Additional features like community analytics, profile activity, competitor tracking, and hashtag tracking are on offer. Sentiment metrics would improve their offerings, so you’d understand the why behind the insights. Price: Free Facebook and Instagram audits; Full social analytics tool starts at $29/month, billed annually.
PROMOREPUBLIC
Offering content and workflow optimization, and in addition to posting and ad functions, PromoRepublic also offers social monitoring. This is something all brands need when it comes to web and social media analytics understanding. Get live updates from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter; track mentions separately to identify and engage with authors of value; find and join conversations; see insights for all three social networks in one place; and see and resolve customer issues quickly. All good stuff, especially real-time quickness – but there’s no sentiment analysis to tell you where to focus your energy first. Also no help if you use other channels, so it falls short on the web analytics aspect. Price: Free trial, then social monitoring starts at $49/month
SOCIAL REPORT
Social Report lets you track a fairly wide selection of social media channels, along with business reviews, website performance, and blogs. Track your own, or track other brand profiles, for web and social media competitor analysis. The dashboard offers reports, notifications, engagement options, and easy downloading and exporting of data at any time. You can very quickly and easily compare social insights against your business activities/performance, search and track keywords, schedule posts, identify valuable hashtags, influencers, and more. No sentiment analysis that we can see, but that seems to be a theme. Robust web and social media analytics offerings combined are rare in many tools, as is the ability to understand the sentiment behind these analytics – which is really the most powerful online intel available to a brand. Price: 30-day free trial, then starts at $49 monthly
SNAPLYTICS
If Stories are your jam – and they should be as they’re a powerful way to connect with consumers, for sure – then Snaplytics is a great web and social analytics tool. Create and distribute engaging stories, measure impact, and deliver insights on Snapchat and Instagram. You can also post from multiple accounts with auto-forwarding, repost follower content, and reply and communicate with your audience through the Snaplytics platform. Great for identifying best performing social media content, branded hashtag performance, how new followers find you, and performance against competitors. Price: Free 2-week trial, then contact Snaplytics for upgrade details
Cyfe
Cyfe is a custom dashboard tool that you can fill up with integrated metrics from dozens of marketing tools. Its social media section allows you to sync up all the major networks and pull overview reports for the accounts you manage and those you want to track. It offers 50 widgets for Facebook alone, for tracking reach, impressions, clicks, check-ins, and posts.
3 cool features:
- A fully customizable dashboard
- Set up email and SMS alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are crossed.
- Monitor your brand mentions and competitors’ activity using the Twitter search widget.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Five widgets
- A fixed view of the trailing 30 days of data
Paid options: $29 per month
TRUE SOCIAL METRICS
True Social Metrics has a lot of data on offer – even if you don’t quite know where it’s coming from or how they’re calculating it (you need to know these things, FYI – they’re key to understanding social analytics). Analyze your overall account performance, including your best/worst posts, content analytics, audience analytics, and competitive analysis to understand what’s working and what’s not for your own brand and competitors across a decent range of social channels. Again, you won’t know why, as there’s no sentiment data – so this leaves you with a lot of trial and error work ahead of you. That’s a dangerous, uninformed game to play. Price: 30-day free trial, then starts at $30/month
ZOHO SOCIAL
Use this social media analytics tool to monitor posts, messages, connections, and mentions across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Zoho Social helps agencies connect each channel to multiple brands, for those managing multiple clients. Invite team members and collaborate all in the same place. It’s bare bones, but easy to navigate. Understanding the “why” behind the “what” is where it falls short. Pair it with a sentiment analysis tool and this social analytics options could take you places. Price: Starts at $10/month billed annually, up to $300/month billed annually for agencies
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a social intelligence tool suite that has acquired TweetReach, which provides a free snapshot of your Twitter analytics. Type in any keyword, hashtag, or username, and you get useful charts and graphs for reach, exposure, activity, and contributors. It’s quite valuable for checking in on mentions, tracking branded hashtags, and analyzing industry keywords.
3 cool features:
- Measure the potential reach for any hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.
- Look at your competitors’ activity and measure their share of voice.
- Know what sort of content works in your industry by analyzing conversations in real-time.
Social networks analyzed:
What analytics you get for free:
- Twitter assistant
- Twitter analytics report
- Instagram account checkup
Paid options: $49, $99, $199 per month
Squarelovin
Squarelovin is an analytics tool made specifically for Instagram – the tool tracks likes and followers, reviews post performance and measures overall profile engagement. It also highlights the best times to post, best filters to use and hashtags, along with a history of your posts, broken down by hour. You can also get more insight into your audience’s preferences and interests.
Price: Freemium, create a free account here.
4. Rival IQ
Rival IQ analyzes posts, likes, and comments from all the major social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. The platform is integrated with Google Analytics, enabling it to display a comprehensive picture of how your customers get to you, and what they do when they arrive.
Rival IQ analyzes Facebook and Instagram ads separately, to help ensure that you’re getting the most out of them, while it can also provide competitive insight on the same, so that you can see what’s working for your competition, and learn from their tactics. For Instagram, the tool shows demographics, unfollowers and active times for your audience.
You can also set up automatic reports that will arrive regularly in your inbox.
Price: Starts at $199/mo. Start your free 14-day trial here.
Conclusion
I researched, analyzed and personally tested the top social media analytics tools in order to bring you this list of the best free social media analytics tools. I’ve used each of these personally and only promote what I believe in.