As businesses continue to grow, they need to make sure that all of their social media platforms are up to par. But how do you know what’s going on with your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? And what about your Facebook page? And is your Google+ account even active these days? If you’re like most businesses, you don’t have the luxury of hours to devote to monitoring all of your social media channels. That’s where social media monitoring and analytics come in. These tools allow businesses to see how their social media activity is impacting their bottom line, as well as find out which content is resonating the most with customers.
What Are the Best Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Programs
Keyhole
With Keyhole, you can keep an eye on the keywords, hashtags, URLs, and usernames associated with your Twitter and Instagram accounts. You can browse heat maps that show you the amounts of activity in various regions of the world in addition to real-time and historical data.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a well-known freemium social media monitoring tool that can monitor activity on a variety of social networking sites and applications, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, and WordPress. Posts can be scheduled across many platforms to manage social media accounts. You can assign duties to many people managing a social media account.
Twitter Counter
You can monitor your Twitter statistics with Twitter Counter. Millions of Twitter users and statistics can be tracked, and buttons and widgets that display the number of followers and the most recent Twitter visits can be added to websites, blogs, and social media accounts. You can add numerous accounts to track them all in one location, view retweets, mentions, and historical data, build custom reports and graphs, and download. PDF documents.
Digimind
Digimind tracks sentiment, allowing you to determine whether a keyword is seen as being positive, neutral, or negative. Additionally, you may observe how consumers view your brand in comparison to rivals.
TweetReach
TweetReach is a fantastic monitoring tool if you want to see how many people your tweets reach. Social media debates may be measured for their influence, and by learning more about your most important followers, you can find the perfect contacts. You’ll most likely receive greater results if you target those people.
Sprout Social
Because it provides the analytics you need to boost social media engagement, Sprout Social is one of the most widely used social media monitoring tools. Additionally, you may collaborate with your team and submit posts from the Sprout Social Dashboard.
Klout
Klout is a little contentious; some individuals dislike it, while others are devoted users. Although Klout’s influence rating algorithm has a bad reputation for being unreliable, it can be used to optimize content for the most engagement. Klout is a respectable Twitter tool for determining influence through engagement overall. You can find out what drives people’s opinions about your brand and how they feel about it.
Buzzlogix
In order to know what the public is talking about your goods and services in real time, Buzzlogix is all about “capturing the buzz.” Additionally, you can use a single product to handle all of your social media channels and monitor what others are saying about your rivals. It’s a terrific tool for controlling your interaction with the community because you can respond immediately from the dashboard if you or a certain term is referenced. The statistics and reporting for social media are also beneficial. Joining the free version will allow you to get started.
Simply Measured
Simply Measured monitors a variety of metrics. Data on and analysis of earned, owned, and paid activities are all possible. Although this is a commercial platform, you may build free reports for Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Twitter using the free version. You can get information on trends, customer service analytics, your Facebook content, Instagram interaction, and competition fan sites.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a helpful social media network organizer since it lets you schedule an unlimited number of posts across your social networks. From a single dashboard, you can track interactions and evaluate performance.
Brand24
You might not be familiar with Brand24, which is unfortunate considering they offer one of the greatest social media monitoring tools available.
Our is a paid tool that offers a 2-week free trial (like all the others on this list). This implies that before making a final choice, you can dip your toes in the water and thoroughly investigate the platform.
The key aspects of social analytics monitoring include getting a ton of social analytics from various platforms, viewing engagement and influence metrics, finding trending hashtags, and viewing a variety of significant hashtag statistics.
Don’t forget to check out Brand24; it’s a platform you won’t want to miss. With their comfort
Cyfe
One of the greatest social media management analytics tools is Cyfe, a company dashboard tool. It can sync all of your data from all of your platforms and marketing tools in one location.
The topic of analytics extends beyond social media to include advertising, email, monitoring, sales, SEO, and website analytics.
The enormous variety of integrations that may be included in a single dashboard makes Cyfe stand out. You may sync and combine data and statistics from 19 different social media and other types of accounts using the platform.
No matter how many accounts you have open at once, this enables you to use data and make wise social media engagement decisions while relaxing in the comfort of a single panel.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is likely the greatest social editorial calendar available, in addition to being a fantastic social media analytics platform. It excels in this area since it enables you to evaluate how well your social media posts are performing.
CoSchedule will provide suggestions for enhancements and recommendations to you across all channels using this data.
Not only that, but the calendar also provides information on the ideal time, day, and kind of content to post.
You should give CoSchedule a close look if you need social media analytics for everything from social engagement to social sharing, as well as everything in between.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch completes our ranking of the top social media analytics tools. Comparatively speaking to the other tools on this list, the platform operates a little differently. It gathers mentions from blogs, news websites, discussion forums, social media sites, and other publicly accessible sources from all over the internet.
After combining all of these mentions with other analytical tools that are already there, it generates comprehensive reports in either an easy-to-read HTML or PDF format.
Additionally, the site strives to offer information on a variety of topics, including influences, places, image analysis, and demographics.
If you wish to add mentions in your reporting, take a look at Brandwatch.
Buffer
Buffer is a great tool that will help you in two main ways. You can write a few of posts at a time and choose which social profiles to send them to, and then Buffer will spread them throughout the day or week so that you don’t have to be at a computer all the time in order to have a social media presence. It also shortens your links and tracks engagement so you can see how many people clicked on them.
Why You Should Use Social Media Management Tools?
Actually, there are several justifications for employing social media management solutions.
You can use the ability to track the success of all social media posts across all channels in addition to the obvious tracking and indicator performances for marketing.
This power allows social media marketing teams and managers to more precisely identify the posts and/or paid campaigns that are creating the most discussion and engagement.
Teams can work on developing plans they are confident will succeed in the future with the help of this expertise and insight.
What Features Should You Look For?
One size probably doesn’t fit all when it comes to social media scheduling tools and software. Many of your final decisions will be influenced by both your personal preferences and the actual needs of your business.
Despite this, no matter whatever platform you ultimately choose, there are still several things you should make sure you have access to. Here are some key characteristics to consider.
Competitor Analysis
Let’s face it: you want to be able to monitor both your own social media analytics and those of rival efforts. It is crucial that the social media analytics platform you choose has this feature included for this reason.
You will learn what is and isn’t working for your competitors as a result.
Follower Analysis
Yes, it’s crucial to be able to observe how your followers respond to your content. However, you want to ensure that you can go a step further and learn more about the geography and demographics of your followers.
What works in one location and population might not in another. Improved engagement type knowledge is essential in this case.
Content Engagement Analysis
Similar to follower analysis, this is. It’s crucial to understand who is truly engaging with a post in addition to how much engagement it receives.
This enables even more precise targeting of customised articles and strategies, enabling your company to really connect with some segments.
Attribution
When followers are more precisely defined, you can reach out to them more directly to promote business material or posts with people like influencers and potential brand champions.
Remember that it will also be important to determine which followers have the most extensive networks.
Reporting
Custom reports and the ability to provide clear and concise reporting standards have always been a challenge in this arena.
Social media analytics tools will help improve the reporting process by giving you access to a dedicated reporting tool instead of just the typical spreadsheets and other notes. All of this is particularly useful when it comes to key metrics across the board.
Social Media Analytics and Intelligence
Social media is already a significant component of the information eco-system, and as their platforms and applications become more widely used and have an unprecedented impact on users, consumers, voters, businesses, governments, and nonprofit organizations, interest in social media from both an application and research perspective has been soaring. For-profit companies are using social media as a business execution platform and a rich source of information for product design and innovation, managing customer and stakeholder relations, and marketing. For them, social media is a crucial part of the platform for future business intelligence. Social media is the perfect tool and source of information for politicians, political parties, and governments to learn what the general public thinks about policies and political viewpoints as well as to mobilize support for individuals running for public office. Public-health professionals may utilize social media to provide feedback on public-health policies and response strategies as well as crucial, early indicators of disease outbreaks. Social media offers vast potential for researchers in homeland security and intelligence analysis to investigate terrorist group activity, including their public relations and recruiting strategies as well as the underlying social and cultural circumstances. Even think tanks and social science and business researchers are conceptually using social media as an unbiased sensor network and a laboratory for natural experimentation, providing helpful indicators and aiding in the testing of hypotheses about social production and interactions as well as their implications for the economy, politics, and society.
In order to deal with information- and cognitive-overload issues, find particular answers to inquiries, and learn more about significant chances for social and economic interaction, social media has for many people evolved into a one-of-a-kind information source. Additionally, it has developed into a platform where they can network and participate in a variety of lively discussions by contributing their knowledge and viewpoints. It is safe to say that social media has already had a notable impact across a range of applications. Social media is predicted to continue enabling new, innovative applications and transforming many existing ones given the continuing interest and the always expanding information and meta-information generated by it.
Social Media Analytics and Intelligence Research
Given the enormous interest from the application’s standpoint and the related special technical and social science difficulties and opportunities, research on social media has significantly increased over the past few years. The broad nature of this study agenda has caught the interest of academic groups across all significant fields. Social media research has mostly concentrated on social media analytics and, more recently, social media intelligence from an information technology perspective.
As a result of specific needs from a target application, social media analytics is concerned with creating and assessing informatics tools and frameworks to gather, monitor, analyze, summarize, and visualize social media data. Research on social media analytics has numerous uses.
- facilitating conversations and interaction between online communities and
- extracting useful patterns and intelligence to serve entities that include, but are not limited to, active contributors in ongoing dialogues.
Social media analytics research has a number of particular technical difficulties. First, social media provides a large collection of data or metadata that haven’t been systematically addressed in data- and text-mining literature. User-expressed subjective opinions, thoughts, evaluations, and perspectives; ratings; user profiles; and both explicit and implicit social networks are examples. Tags (annotations or labels utilizing free-form key phrases) are another. Second, social media programs stand out as a prime example of human-centered computing due to its particular focus on user social interactions. Therefore, concerns like context-dependent user profile, needs elicitation, and many types of HCI considerations need to be revisited. Third, social media abounds with problems like semantic inconsistency, conflicting evidence, lack of structure, inaccuracies, and difficulty integrating various types of signals, despite the fact that it promises a novel way to combat the noise and information-overload problems with Web-based information processing. Fourth, the volume of social media data is growing quickly since these streams are dynamic. Semantic computing, in particular, has substantial difficulties due to the dynamic nature of this data and their sheer bulk.
Social media intelligence seeks to extract actionable information from social media in context-rich application settings, develop corresponding decision-making or decision-aiding frameworks, and provide architectural designs and solution frameworks for both existing and new applications that can profit from the “wisdom of crowds” through the Web. It does this by utilizing technology, solution frameworks, and toolkits from social media analytics. Social media intelligence research is still in its infancy compared to social media analytics, despite growing interest from businesses and other groups that could gain from such studies. From a research standpoint, there have been debates on various conceptual aspects of the technical issues associated with social media intelligence and reference disciplines that may produce valuable tools to assist in overcoming these challenges. Systematic study and tangible, well-evaluated findings are still lacking, though.
However, social media intelligence offers a rich, new area of research with significant practical value that may draw on disciplines from both AI and other sciences. Social media intelligence research is now facing a number of significant obstacles. First, research on social media intelligence needs to be highly integrated and cross-disciplinary. Despite the fact that this necessity has been emphasized repeatedly in this developing field, the level of integration in the current study is often minimal.There are few highly integrated research programs that take into account both informatics and domain sciences. In many cases, the informatics research methodology and research questions are taking a dominant role, whereas research focusing on methods and issues from other equally relevant disciplines, such as social psychology, media theory, political science, and social sciences, among others, has been dispersed.
Second, because a lot of social media intelligence research must be carried out in real-world situations with the intention of assisting decision-making, it necessitates well-articulated and precisely specified performance measures. Quantifying these measures is difficult in the wide range of applications where social media intelligence may be applicable. The measurement issue makes it particularly difficult to assess the return on investment (ROI) of social media intelligence and also causes modeling issues.
Third, from the standpoint of pure modeling and decision-making, social media intelligence represents a special class of issues that call for effective data-driven, dynamic decision making, uncertainty and subjective risk analysis, modeling and optimization over vast dynamic networks, and so forth. Researchers will probably need to create new computational and analytical frameworks and methodologies as social media intelligence research develops and finds real-time applications.
Social Media Analytics Tools Free
1. Followerwonk
Explore and expand your social graph with the aid of Followerwonk. To find out who your followers are, where they are, and when they tweet, go at your Twitter analytics. You may use the app to compare your social graph to others’, identify and connect with influencers, and create useful visualizations.
2. Buffer
Buffer is a great tool that will help you in two main ways. You can write a few of posts at a time and choose which social profiles to send them to, and then Buffer will spread them throughout the day or week so that you don’t have to be at a computer all the time in order to have a social media presence. It also shortens your links and tracks engagement so you can see how many people clicked on them.
3. SumAll
SumAll helps guide your decision making by connecting all your key online marketing and e-commerce data in one interactive chart. Features include real-time data monitoring, goal tracking, viewing new vs. returning customers, and trendlines that project future performance.
4. Quintly
Quintly is a social media benchmarking and analytics solution that tracks and compares the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, or all of them, their tool visualizes and checks your social marketing success, benchmarking your numbers against your competitors or best practices.
5. Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that helps you monitor and analyze data found across all your online services, including Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, WordPress, Zendesk, and Twitter from one single location in real time. No more wasting countless hours tracking down your data from all over the Web every day!
6. Keyhole
Keyhole provides real-time social conversation tracking for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It helps you measure and amplify conversations around your brand and campaigns, enables you identify prospective clients and influencers talking about (or looking for) your services, and aids in driving engagement by finding and re-sharing relevant content.
7. Klout
Klout measures influence based on your ability to drive action across the social Web. When you connect your social media accounts, it generates a score on a scale of 1-100 that represents your ability to engage other people and inspire social actions. The platform helps you gain insights that allow you better understand how you influence others.
8. ViralWoot
ViralWoot enables you to get more exposure for your Pinterest profile and your pins. You earn “seeds” (points) by following other users and re-pinning. It also helps with scheduling so your visibility is increased, and you can create alerts that let you know when other users are pinning your content.
9. Addictomatic
Addictomatic is an easy-to-use tool for tracking the reputation and influence of your business. Its discovery technology uses your keywords to search Google, Bing, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, and Flickr to identify the most recent news stories, blog entries, photographs, or videos. The search results are divided into headers for better navigation.
Types of Social Media Analytics
1. Descriptive Analytics
Descriptive SMA tackles the questions of “what happened and/or what is happening?” Descriptive analytics gather and describe social media data in the form of reports, visualizations, and clustering to understand a well-defined business problem or opportunity. Social media user comments analysis, for instance, falls into the descriptive analytics category. Comment analysis can be used to understand users’ sentiments or identify emerging trends by clustering themes and topics. Currently, descriptive analytics accounts for the majority of social media analytics landscape.
2. Diagnostic Analytics
Diagnostic SMA analytics looks into the questions of “why something happened?” For example, while descriptive analytics can provide an overview of your social media marketing campaign’s performances (posts, mentions, followers, fans, page views, reviews, pins, etc); diagnostic analytics can distill this data into a single view to see what worked in your past campaigns and what didn’t. Enablers of diagnostics analytics include inferential statistics, behavioural analytics, correlations & retrospective analysis and outcome being cause and effect analysis of a business issues.
4. Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics involves analyzing large amounts of accumulated social media data to predict a future event. Thus, it deals with the question of “what will happen and/or why will it happen?” For example, an intention expressed over social media (such as buy, sell, recommend, quit, desire, or wish) can be mined to predict a future event (such as a purchase). Alternatively, businesses can predict sales figures based on historical visits (or in-links) to a corporate website.
5. Prescriptive Analytics
While predictive analytics help to predict the future, prescriptive analytics suggest the best action to take when handling a scenario (Lustig, Dietrich, et al. 2010). For example, if you have groups of social media users that display certain patterns of buying behavior, how can you optimize your offering to each group? Like predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics has not yet found its way into social media data. The main enablers of prescriptive analytics include optimization and simulation modeling, multi-criteria decision modeling, expert systems, and group support systems.
Conclusion
Social Media Monitoring and Analytics can be a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. By using it to find new customers, improve customer engagement, measure customer satisfaction, and analyze your overall business strategy, you can make great strides in your business.