Social media analytics tools help businesses keep track of how their social media efforts are being received. But there are lots of social media analytics tools, so choosing the right one can be tricky. This article will give you the rundown on some of the best free and paid social media analytics tools.
Social media is a great way to find out information about your audience as well as communicate with them. But what if you could gain even more insight into who they are and what they want? What if you could see exactly how effective your social media campaigns are and predict what will work in the future? How much more successful could the marketing of your business be?
As a marketer, you have so many tools to choose from; this may be a bit overwhelming, especially when done manually. You need to collect information from different sources and combine them in one place. That is what makes social media analytics tools important. Every business needs these tools but the challenge is you have to choose only the best ones.
Social media analytics offers a view beyond the social media post. By digging into the numbers, you can identify which strategies are working and refine your approach. It also provides a platform where you can better understand your audience and what drives them to engage. With analytics at your fingertips, you’ll be able to see how much time people spend on social media. You’ll be able to get updates about videos on YouTube or understand the impact of changes in strategy.
What Does Social Media Analytics Tools Mean?
Social media analytics tools are pieces of web application analysis software that are used to monitor, assess and consequently improve social media performance. They are simply a subset of web analytics tools that are designed to gather and make sense of web performance data produced by social media sites and platforms, and consists of the usual graphical dashboard and data visualization techniques that give the user a clear understanding on the performance of their social media presence.
TapInfluence
The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.
Enter TapInfluence, an analytics platform which removes many of the “what-ifs” related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.
In short, TapInfluence highlights relevant influencer metrics in black and white so brands can better understand whether or not a potential relationship makes sense prior to outreach.
Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be a black hole of ROI. In addition to individual influencer metrics, the platform also measures the performance of overall campaigns against industry benchmarks.
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.
Socialbakers
Marketers around the world can never go wrong with Socialbakers. Regardless of size or industry, Socialbakers takes analytics and social listening to the next level with predictive AI analytics, content performance, and side-by-side competitor summaries – all in one customizable dashboard.
What makes Socialbakers so unique is the one-calendar publisher, team collaborative community management, and a content creation hub. So there’s no need to flip through different systems just to get the results you need.
Special features
- Deep Content Intelligence – It’s the one place for marketers to see a comprehensive overview of their content performance, bringing data and creativity closer together. With automation, marketers have more room for strategy building and content creation.
- Performance Prediction with Content Grading – For organic engagement, Socialbakers’ Performance Prediction algorithm grades posts from A+ to D — allowing marketers to spot patterns in engagement and replicate their best-performing messages, images, and content types.
Audience Insights – Understanding your audience is important for any marketer. Marketers can access deep insights into their audiences with detailed breakdowns from interactions, activities, and interests across all their social media channels.
Awario
Awario takes online brand reputation management seriously. Marketers can track online mentions from any connected social platform, allowing them to act fast and reply directly from their feed.
Awario can let marketers hone-in on the right conversations online, and they can act fast if one of those conversations turns into a disaster.
Special features
- Mentions & Quick Responses – Marketers can find trending conversations and engage with mentions right from their feed.
- Identifying Influencers – As influencer marketing grows, Awario can help marketers track influencers by age, gender, and demographics.
Talkwalker
Need campaign measurements and advertising effectiveness? Marketers have turned to Talkwalker to get the full scope of social conversations about their brand across multiple social networks.
Special features
- Trending Score – Talkwalker created a unique trending score to show marketers the latest trends right away without searching. That way, marketers can stay up to date with all the social media trends online.
- The Virality Map – Marketers can track posts from a different perspective, allowing them to see posts with details and trends from all over the world in a visual graph.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps marketers connect with audiences and scale social media results at a global level. The platform focuses on social media management, data, and employee advocacy.
It’s a versatile tool that can cover all aspects of social media marketing in one place. Sprout Social can simplify social media analytics that’s easy for any marketer to share across all teams.
Special features
- Smart Inbox – Sprout Social created a special inbox that allows marketers to collect messages sent by people to their social accounts, allowing marketers to view all messages in one spot.
- Twitter Automation – Marketers can measure Twitter performance with suggested replies to incoming tweets and Twitter feedback. They can also streamline conversations and see quantitative scores of audience interactions.
Hootsuite Analytics
Key benefits: Performance data from every social network in one place with easy-to-understand reports
Paid or free? Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, marketing teams
Most social media management platforms have built-in analytics tools. We hope you’ll forgive us for saying Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are our favorite. But it’s the tool we know and love best.
Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.
Social posts metrics:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Reach
- Engagement rate
- Impressions
- Shares
- Saves
- Video views
- Video reach
- And more
Profile metrics:
- Follower growth over time
- Negative feedback rate
- Profile visits
- Reactions
- Overall engagement rate
- And more
Best time to post recommendations:
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.
This is why our Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Link clicks
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:
- Customize report templates for only the metrics you care about
- Get reports on your competitors
- Track the productivity of your social team (response times, and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments)
- Monitor mentions, comments, and tags related to your business to avoid PR disasters before they happen
Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite professional plan, with you can try for free for 30 days.
Google Analytics
Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but especially those who work for a web-based business
You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics already. That’s because it’s one of the best free tools to use to learn about your website visitors. And if you’re a social marketer who likes to drive traffic to your website, then it’s an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.
While it’s not a social media reporting tool per se, you can use it to set up reports that will help you:
- See which social media platforms give you the most traffic
- See what content drives the most leads and traffic on which social networks
- Get to know your audience with demographic data
- Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns
With these data points, you’ll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google analytics.
Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media analytics tools are essential in running a successful social media campaign. It allows social media experts to track and determine the performance of various portions of the social marketing campaign such as sales, customer service and sentiment analysis.
In terms of sales, these tools show how well a social media marketing campaign is going by showing all positive turnovers or purchases that come directly from social media sources such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites are useful for disseminating purchase or signup links and correlate directly to traffic which can be picked up by a specific social media analytics tool. For brand recognition and sentiment analysis, some tools are able to mine the data from social networking sites in order to find or discover the sentiment of people towards a brand or business through methods such as natural language processing and pattern recognition.
Common methods of analysis used:
- Data mining
- Transformation
- Natural language processing
- Data pre-processing
- Data visualization
- Hidden pattern evaluation
- Traffic analysis
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools are different from the analytics tools used to measure the traffic of a website. Analytics tools have the capability to track how many people visited your website, where these visitors come from and what they did on your site. Social media analytics tools provide data relating to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks.
People who run social media marketing campaigns need to keep a close eye on their analytics. This helps them to determine which social media marketing activities are resulting in positive outcomes, what content drives the best engagement, and which channels are bringing new customers. A wide variety of social media analytics tools are available to help you analyze your campaigns and content.