Social media analytics tools are available to boost your social media marketing strategy. In line with the trends of the digital era, there has been an exponential increase in the usage and consumption of social media by people of different age groups. There are plenty of tools that offer a more sophisticated way to analyze the effectiveness of your brand on various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. These tools can automate a lot of tasks that you would spend hours on doing manually and instead focus on working on your brand’s growth strategy.
Basically, social media analytics tools are designed to help you run an effective social media campaign. They are very much like Google Analytics, only they don’t let you look at as many aspects of your data as Google Analytics does. Still, social media analytics is a very useful tool for finding out how effective you are at engaging your target audience with posts and tweets. If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, this post is going to show you a few top free social media analytics tools that will make it easy for you.
Social media analytics is the information about where user engagement is happening on social platforms. The techniques that data scientists use for social media analytics can be considered and broadened to be used for other purposes like traffic analysis or website monitoring from a brand’s perspective.
If you are in the business of selling products, then the most important thing for you to consider is how to reach your target audience effectively. In this regard, social media channels have been the most popular platform for marketing. There are many social media platforms out there that can be used by people like you to sell your products, along with many other benefits. Social media analytics tools come in a wide range of forms, but they all help businesses make better use of their social media platforms to promote their products and communicate with their customers.
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS?
At NetBase Quid, we define social media analytics as gathering not only social media data from social channels, but other web-wide data as well – from both structured and unstructured sources. The online content that forms the big picture to guide business decisions. It takes many forms, but is always about gaining actionable social insights – the intel you need to guide your business strategy. Though exploring ‘what social media analytics is’ can get rather complex, at its core are three stages:
- Identify primary business goals.
Whether it’s growing traffic, increasing downloads, or building positive brand perception, setting clear business objectives gives your web and social analytics investigation purpose.
- Determine social key performance indicators (KPIs).
What metrics indicate success or failure? They will differ according to your goals, but may include:
- Engagement– specifically, a comparison of owned, earned, and paid media
- Sentiment– how audiences feel about your brand, your products, and your category
- Conversion– how social strategies impact sales and revenue.
And any other KPIs that align with your business objectives.
- Measure & Analyze Social Data.
Once you know what matters and why, it’s time to analyze the actual data. By applying one of the analytics tools below, you can assess the state of your business and make informed adjustments as needed.
Viralwoot (Pinterest)
Is Pinterest a part of your brand’s social media strategy?
Viralwoot is one of the most complete tools for managing your Pinterest marketing. It provides post scheduling, social media promotion, content management, and even influencer management.
Also, Viralwoot’s analytics tool allows you to learn what works and what doesn’t – providing guidance on how to improve your metrics.
This social media analytics tool boasts an impressive client list including, Shopify, Alibaba, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.
Pro: Viralwoot’s calendar view makes scheduling pins and re-pins for Pinterest a breeze. Also, the dashboard and analytics are very helpful in tracking and measuring campaign performance.
Con: The basic plan does not provide the analytics features and only allows you to track one domain.
Pricing starts at $10 – $49+ USD per month.
Social Studio
Salesforce is famous for acquiring businesses that add value to its CRM solution. And today, with the extent to which social media has grown to influence the sales process, the roll-in of Radian6 makes for a smart strategic move. Social Studio integrates with Salesforce offering users the chance to publish content, manage conversations, listen to and gather intelligence on social media. As you’d imagine, it comes with some hard-hitting features that focus on the impact of social on sales. You can get feedback on service and sales campaigns, and tie it all back to social media accounts.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is an AI-powered social media marketing tool. It pools what we think are some of the very best features that help brands control and excel on social media. These features include AI-driven audience analysis, influencer marketing and campaign insights, content intelligence, and analytics and benchmarking across channels (paid and organic content).
Tailwind
Pinterest and Instagram, while important, aren’t the first two platforms marketers focus on when digging deep to uncover insights about audiences. This is where Tailwind comes to the rescue. It’s dedicated to helping brands analyse their social media efforts on these picture-first platforms. And its feature set is rather impressive. On Pinterest, you can track followers and engagement trends, repins and comments at profile board and individual pin level, analyse virality and fan engagement levels, and access historical data to see progress over time.
SproutSocial
SproutSocial provides social media management software to assist businesses to implement their social media goals and strategies. This includes a dedicated social media management tool incorporating detailed social analytics.
You can access all of the analytics relating to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts from a single, centralized platform.
SproutSocial produces multiple reports relating to your use of your social accounts. This includes everything from an Engagement Report to a Facebook Pages report, to a review of your Task Performance.
For example, SproutSocial gives you a quick feel for your Facebook Page impressions, fan growth, and an indication of how your Facebook content performs. You can compare your performance with industry averages, and even directly compare your data with that of your competitors.
In the case of Twitter, you can view your aggregate post stats, by Twitter profile, including engagement details, such as clicks, reach, and engagement. It provides you with Twitter keywords, trends, and hashtag reports.
It offers a similar level of social analytics for the other social networks.
You can experiment with SproutSocial for a 30-day trial. Plans then begin at $99 per user/month, although many of the analytics reports don’t become available until you purchase a Corporate membership, at $149 per user/month.
Squarelovin
Focused more on Instagram insights, Squarelovin is one of the reliable social media analytics tools that helps you get the most out of your Instagram marketing campaigns. The tool lets you track your account growth, helps you review post performance, and gives you social media data to help you optimize content for Instagram.
The insights from this tool can help you frame effective content strategies for your brand’s Instagram presence. Moreover, it also makes you aware of what your Insta audience likes.
Sotrender
Sotrender is a social media analytics tool that provides you with social media insights that help you improve your social media activities. The reports from this tool give you real-time updates on how your content is performing on different social media platforms.
Sotrender also gives data on sentiment analysis by monitoring the comments on your brand content! That’s not all, the tool also allows you to keep a watch on your competitors. This data will surely scale up your marketing strategies.
NetBase Quid
NetBase Quid is a marketing intelligence platform that also has social media analytics solutions. The platform stresses much on listening to what the audience is saying about your brand on different social media channels. NetBase helps you discover audience behaviour and preferences.
The platform also has solutions for analysing the audience. Get data on your social media audience and create effective marketing strategies!
Snaplytics
Snaplytics is a Snapchat and Instagram social media management tool. It helps brands create stories for both platforms and track and measure the impact of their content. You’re able to track opens and completion rates, total views and story items, total followers and open rates, and more. You’re also able to dig deeper and see engagement stats on a story level, track the number of followers and which acquisition method helps pull the largest crowd to your Snapchat accounts.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an analytics, management, and scheduling platform. Our reviewer found that Iconsquare delivers some of the most in-depth analytics we have ever seen and does so in a beautiful way.
Iconsquare presents you with a range of easy-to-read graphs that display your brand’s social performance in virtually every way imaginable. You can even track the success of Instagram Stories, their completion rate by story type and establish the best time to post Stories.
You can customize your dashboard, building one that captures insights important to your brand and campaigns for each social profile you manage.
In addition to its in-depth analytics, Iconsquare lets you schedule posts and monitor conversations about your brand and products. It also provides a media library where you can upload images for your posts. You can use Iconosquare to make driven decisions for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is completely dedicated to Twitter analytics. This social media analytics tool will give you all the social media data for Twitter. Right from comparing Twitter accounts to target new influencers to analysing your audience on Twitter, this tool helps with everything Twitter-related.
Minter.io
Minter.io is perfect for brands that only want to analyse their Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter presence. The platform gives advanced insights which also includes Hashtag analysis.
It also allows you to benchmark your performance in comparison to your competitors.
Tailwind
Tailwind offers both scheduling and analytics solutions. The platform is centric to Pinterest and Instagram. Tailwind’s analysis feature lets you find trends on the two platforms, allows you to track crucial KPIs, and measure follower growth.
These social media insights can help you create fruitful strategies for Instagram and Pinterest.
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a social media marketing intelligence platform that offers analytics for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The social media analytics and intelligence tool has customised features for profile analysis, keyword listening, campaign reporting, and competitive analysis.
HubSpot
With HubSpot’s analytics tools you can tie social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, or publishing using other tools or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. You can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.
HubSpot’s social analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths, and impressions.
What’s important to highlight is that HubSpot’s social analytics tools is part of HubSpot’s Marking Hub, their all-in-one inbound marketing software. This means that using the platform you’ll have insight into the entire customer journey, not only social media-specific metrics. You’ll be able to see which marketing tactics are working best for your business, how are they impacting your bottom line, and learn about your social media campaigns ROI.
That makes HubSpot an excellent choice for businesses whose marketing teams want to keep all campaign functions in one place.
WHY IS SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS IMPORTANT?
There are so many things brands can do with web and social analytics comparison tools, including:
- Provide exceptional customer care to current and prospective customers and lower associated costs
- Discover new customer segments that would’ve remained hidden otherwise
- Identify unmet consumer needs ahead of competitors
- Respond in real-time to a crisis, before it spins out of control
- Track trends in your category and related to your brand specifically
- Uncover new product and/or service ideas to pursue
- Capture customer experience data to inform your next move and enhance acquisition
- Boost campaign performance with create and engaging ideas
- Identify competitor challenges and win their dissatisfied customers’ business
- Monitor brand health and head off any trouble
- See all brand mentions in context, including logos and photos that may not mention your name
- Understand every bit of online data as it relates to a brand, including imagery, emojis, sarcasm and slang
- Identify influencers and brand ambassadors to partner with and enhance brand awareness
- Measure any campaign, idea, and/or influencer effectiveness to tweak efforts as needed
- Capture structured and unstructured data in easy to read/navigate reporting dashboards
- Communicate the ROI of social to key stakeholders
- And so much more
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful tool that can connect your organization with prospects, clients, and partners from around the globe. Still, managing social media presence isn’t easy. You need a strong strategy for generating leads, increasing sales, and growing engagement — especially on fast-paced social platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
A well crafted Social media analytics tools can help you gauge the performance of your online marketing campaigns. These free social media analytics tools are free to use, but may contain premium features that can be unlocked or accessed via paid plans. They also come with pre-set parameters and provide real time data, helpful for understanding and identifying your areas of improvement. Social media analytics tools can help you track ROI, measure audience demographics, qualify leads and gauge campaign success.