Social media is constantly evolving. New networks emerge and while some go, others come in to replace them. With so many platforms in the social sphere, it can be difficult to keep up with what platforms are most popular and receiving the most attention. This article will explore the best free and paid social media analytics & reporting tools that you should be considering adding to your repertoire.
Social media has become a key medium for anyone with a website or blog. With this constantly growing trend, users have been looking for ways to track the progress of their business on social media and also improve their performances. There are hundreds of tools being released that can help improve your performance and use social media effectively. In this article, we will list our top 11 free and paid social media analytics & reporting tools for 2022.
With social media analytics tools, you can improve your campaigns, build better relationships with your customers, and increase brand awareness. Most importantly, they help you improve the ROI of your social media marketing efforts. We’ve put together a list of (free and paid) social media analytics tools that you can use to measure and optimize your social media performance.
Every business looking to build a successful social media strategy should start with analytics, but where can you find quality social media analytics tools? There are lots of choices out there at a wide variety of price points. Here’s a rundown of the top social media analytics tools that deserve to be on your radar in 2021.
SOCIAL ANALYTICS TOOLS ARE EVOLVING ALONG WITH CONSUMERS
Social consumers are constantly evolving. They know they have choices, and they know they’re in charge. Brands that don’t connect at a human, personal level may never break through the noise.
And brands that succeed on authenticity, but fail to respond when things go wrong, risk not only losing customers, but seeing those customers shame them publicly – sometimes with disastrous results.
The good news is, consumers share, share, share on social – and if brands only listen, they have access to everything they need to soar in every area of brand operations. Here are a few ways social analytics data empowers your brand:
IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS:
Consumers trust other consumers more than they trust you, so influencers with a passion for your brand are very valuable. Social listening helps you find them. Not only that, it helps you separate genuine influencers from inflaters. They’re hard to spot with the naked eye.
TRENDSPOTTING:
Whatever topics have audiences chattering obsessively about online – you have the option to weigh in. And you’ll be able to spot the difference between a fad and a trend so you don’t spend too much time and energy pouring into something that has little staying power. Beyond that, social insights reveal industry and category trends worth embracing – the kind that inspire new products to meet unmet need and/or changes in how you do business. If you want to be a category leader, you need to get great at spotting trends before they hit mainstream. It’s no longer just about marketing.
CREATING ENGAGING CONTENT:
What does your audience want to see, and where are they looking? Social data tells you, so you can provide the right content, on the right channels, at the right time. Because it’s not just about what gets the most likes, far from it. It’s about what is providing true lift in brand awareness – and why. Social listening can tell you that.
KEEPING AN EYE ON COMPETITORS:
Competitive intelligence alone is really worth the price of admission, and it’s one reason social listening tools are a must. Everything your shared audience thinks and feels is available to you – and you better believe your competitors are taking advantage of it. Wouldn’t you like to know where your competitors are falling short so you can pick up customers they’re leaving in a lurch? Sure, you would.
And you can bet they’re gathering insight around your brand’s missteps as well. Social analytics helps you understand what is and isn’t working around your own efforts and the same intel is available about your competitors. So, get on that!
GUARDING YOUR REPUTATION:
There’s no margin for error in the current competitive climate, so avoiding a brand crisis is critical. After all, it only takes one post to start the viral snowball rolling down the hill. And once it really gets rolling, getting ahead of it can be impossible. Social monitoring alerts you to potential problems well before you’d know otherwise, so you can nip them in the bud before they go viral. And you can also capture competitor crises and swoop in, as appropriate. Brands are increasingly taking advantage of competitor crisis alerts as well.
There’s really no limit to the use cases social listening supports – especially when you have the right tools. So, what is the best social media marketing tool? Your selection criteria matter. A lot. Let’s check those out.
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)
Sendible
Sendible is a social media management tool with considerable monitoring, listening, and reporting features. It gives you ready-to-use insights into post content and engagement, mentions, and audience profiles across digital channels. Sendible also lets you track what’s being said about your brand on various web and social platforms, and identifies mentions that might need your attention or response.
3 cool features:
- Create presentation-quality reports with a drag-and-drop builder.
- Measure response times and track team performance in responsiveness.
- Get notified of reactions and engage with multiple social profiles across networks from a single dashboard.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 30 days
- Report builder
- Reports for each social media channel
Paid options: $29, $99, $199, and $299 per month
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
BuzzSumo
Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is an awesome resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.
If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.
Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your own content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.
Snaplytics
The popularity of ephemeral content on social media speaks for itself.
Snaplytics focuses solely on analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The platform looks at metrics such as open and completion rate, allowing brands to see where story engagement peaks and likewise at what point viewers drop off.
The need to optimize story-based content is something that modern brands should overlook at their own peril.
Although Snapchat might have fallen out of favor for some brands, bear in mind that the network still boasts hundreds of million active users among millennials and Gen Z.
Meanwhile, Stories represent one of the most-engaged methods of Instagram promotion. Going beyond native analytics is a smart move for brands who want to craft more compelling Stories or eventually run story-based ads.
Curalate
More and more brands are trying their hands at direct social selling.
Platforms such as Curalate serve as a hybrid storefront and analytics tool for companies looking to maximize their sales from Instagram
Chances are you’ve seen a branded or unbranded “Like2Buy” link in the wild. Major brands like Bose take advantage of Curalate for social sales – take a peek at their Instagram bio.
Upon clicking through, we’re led to a social storefront where users can shop directly.
Curalate’s platform empowers businesses to understand which products score the most clicks and sales. This can directly inform your future campaigns and product strategy as you learn which sort of posts click with customers.
Additionally, Curalate tracks product tags and mentions, making it a cinch to spot and analyze the performance of user-generated content campaigns.
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.
Channelview Insights
Key benefits: Analyze the YouTube performance of multiple channels
Free or paid: Paid tool (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels
The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.
With this integration, you can analyze your YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.
Easily see the following metrics in one place:
- Views, engagement, subscription activity
- Video traffic sources
- Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more
How much does social media monitoring cost?
If you pick a free social media reporting tool, monitoring your social media presence doesn’t have to cost a dime. Otherwise, subscriptions for monitoring tools start from $15/month.
Conclusion
Just like you can’t eat just one potato chip, you can’t use just one social media analytics tool. Every social network is different, and each requires a different approach to reach your goals. Yet, it’s important that you combine different types of data when analyzing and reporting on your social media activities.
Social media analytics tools allow you to take information from your social media marketing efforts and use it to increase performance, attract more customers and drive up ROI. Using the right social media analytics tools can help professionals evaluate their social media campaigns in real-time and make improvements on the go.