In the modern world, it is inevitable to have one or more social media accounts. They are used for communicating with family, friends and fans of a celebrity. For many people, these accounts are also used to share their creative content. This is especially true for independent creative artists and bloggers. One cannot use social media effectively and analyze the performance of their accounts without a social media analytics tool. There are many Free Social Media Analytics Tools 2021 that you can choose from.
There are many social media analytics tools available today, each serving different functions. Below I will try to cover all the important things you should know about social media analytics tools and tools in general that can be used to track the performance of your social media marketing.
When you understand that your chosen social media channels are a goldmine of insights on what your customers want, you need the right tool to help you harness this power. Unfortunately, picking a social media analytics tool can be frustrating. There are so many options, and they all provide slightly different features.
You have all those social media accounts, right? So what do you do with the information they provide? Does the social analytics tools seem complicated to understand? Or are you simply looking for an easy way to track how well your content is performing, on which social media channels? Ignore the noobs, who don’t know anything about free social media analytics tools 2021. In this article, I’ll list a few free social media analytics tools 2021.
WHAT ARE THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS TOOLS?
Much like there’s an art to understanding which sort of tool is best suited for your brand at this point in time, the same considerations apply to selecting the right social media analytics company to partner with. The options there are as varied as the analytics tools themselves! There are four key areas you’ll want to explore to guide your decision: Customer care – how responsive are product specialists to customers? This can feel like a tough one to get an accurate read on, as it’s easy to assume that potential customers are given quicker attention than existing. Watching a few client testimonials, reading reviews and asking for current client referrals will give you a sense of things. If specialists are consistently receptive to concerns, that fact will shine through. And it will also be apparent if they’re not! Ease of use – During your product demo, ask to take the wheel and try it out yourself. Are the options intuitive, or fairly clear after a bit of explanation? What materials are available to help you overcome the learning curve? And how difficult is it to integrate with existing tools/data sources? Data transparency – Where is the data coming from? How granularly are you able to explore? Does what you’re seeing make sense and provide actionable insight? Being able to back-up a sound bite with sentiment analysis that makes sense is very important. Speed of algorithm/API adaptation – How quickly can each social media analytics company pivot to update their analytics tool to keep pace with API changes and such? Ask about the last Instagram API update and how that went for clients. And why. Product updates – How often does the social media analytics company update its offerings? Are they setting the pace for other social media analytics companies and pushing out new updates every couple weeks, or are they struggling to stay relevant? That matters – a lot.
Brand24
Correct, that’s us – one of the best social media monitoring tools. Says who? Says Buffer!
Brand24 is a social media analytics tool starting at $49 a month and offers a free, 2-week trial (no card required).
The tool does web and social media monitoring and analytics across multiple channels. You can monitor keywords related to your company, for example company name, website address, company hashtag, marketing campaign name or hashtag and discover how they perform in social media channels in terms of social media reach, engagement, volume of mentions, influential sources mentioning them, etc.
- Social media analytics: Analyze the performance of your keywords on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, including volume of mentions, social media reach, sentiment analysis of your keywords.
- Metrics of engagement: Track the engagement the social media posts, marketing campaigns and content generate
- Metrics of influence: They’re great for influencer marketing as you can discover the influence of social media authors talking about your company or any topic
- Trending hashtags: Find trending hashtags on Instagram for any keyword
- Hashtag analytics: See how many times a hashtag was used on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Pros:
- Allows tracking brand mentions across all social media platforms.
- It’s possible to generate social media analytics report.
- Ability to check positive and negative sentiments with your tracked keywords.
Cons:
- Doesn’t provide social media management platform.
BuzzSumo
Another, this time paid, social media analytics tool I personally really, really, really like is BuzzSumo.
What is BuzzSummo? It’s a content analytics tool – among many features such as brand monitoring, social listening or competitor research, it also provides social media analytics:
- Content discovery: Find most shared content in social media networks. It’s a powerful feature for content writers!
- Content analysis: Find social media data about particular topic of interest: content type, top shared domains, top social media platforms, etc.
- Influencer marketing: Find top influencers in a niche or industry based on social media reach or engagement.
Pros:
- Offers free trial
- Presents up-to-date popular content. Allows to find trending topics to share on social media.
- Easy to use.
Cons:
- Bit pricey if you want the full version.
- Not a social media management tool. You will need additional tools if you need that feature.
Audiense Connect (Twitter)
Audiense Connect is a great tool from Audiense that helps you uncover details about your audience, discover relevant macro and micro-influencers, and call the best social media marketing shots.
Brands like DHL, Carlsberg, Puma, and Fox Sports use Audiense to discover audience segments relevant to their businesses and make smarter social marketing decisions — especially on Twitter.
Pro: Audiense Connect has brilliant social listening features that help you to understand what audiences are doing on Twitter. Advanced reporting is also really useful for creating events, hashtags, and industry reports.
Con: Audiense Connect offers limited features for lower-tier users, and pricing errs on the higher side for access to more features.
Price: From $948 – $25,000 per year.
Tailwind (Pinterest and Instagram)
Tailwind lets you manage and analyze your Pinterest and Instagram efforts at scale.
You can discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify reach, and analyze your social media performance on Pinterest and Instagram all with one tool.
Trusted by over 2000 brands and agencies, including Walmart, eBay, and Unilever, Tailwind uploads your images in bulk and automatically optimizes your posts to be published at your users’ most engaging times. Also, it uncovers information about your audience, which ultimately improves and measures results.
Pro: Tailwind’s analytics are quite impressive. You get to see how many follow, re-pins, likes, etc., your page has gotten. You also get to see stats for individual pins so you can see what’s getting the most love from your audience.
Con: Tailwind has many capabilities making the dashboard a bit overwhelming for some users. Also, it is extremely affordable
Price: $9.99 – $799.99per month.
TweetReach (Twitter)
Do you want to know how far your tweets travel?
TweetReach helps you see the number of impressions reach and overall engagement your tweets get. It also shows you who your top influencers are, and allows you to monitor Twitter analytics in real-time — helping you take faster marketing decisions.
Pro: You can quickly build reports based on keywords or hashtags and export these reports as PDF or XLS files.
Con: You cannot compare two Twitter campaigns against each other.
Price: $49 — $199 per month.
Followerwonk (Twitter Only)
Followerwonk is a Twitter-specific tool. It makes it possible to gather data on influencers, compare accounts to identify audience commonalities, analyse followers by location, bio, who they follow and connections they have. It also allows you to contrast your brand’s connections with those of your competition to derive insights on how to generate more reach.
TapInfluence
TapInfluence is an influencer marketing platform. It’s designed to help you find the right influencers, generate audience insights, and create lists of potential influencers to work with. It also allows you to take this information, use it and then discover how effective your efforts are. This includes click tracking, campaign and project performance tracking, and the option of exporting your results for further investigation.
NetBase
NetBase is a social analytics solution that leverages AI. It’s able to listen to conversations and provide more than common sentiment analysis. It pulls social conversations apart and can identify consumer preferences, competitive insights, brand passion sentiment, trending topics, sentiment behaviour and consumer behaviour. This level of insight helps busy social media professionals quickly unpack the most important insights to help define a more informed social strategy.
Beyond these capabilities, you’re can compare owned vs earned media content performance. You can also see how your brand is performing using NetBase’s propriety image analytics solution, an image recognition and machine learning tool used to spot brand logos from online content.
Unbox Social
Unbox Social offers an extensive social media analysis solution for brands that gives in-depth social media insights. The tool helps you analyse your brand across various social media platforms namely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Here are the platform-wise features offered by the tool.
- Get an overview of your brand’s presence on social media platforms
The tool gives you an overview of your brand with all the crucial social media data. Check your brand’s page reach, page fans, page views, page impressions, follower growth, impressions, engagement rate, interactions, number of retweets, average views, and other metrics depending on the platform you opt for.
- Get social media insights on your brand’s audience
The success of any social media campaign depends on whether it has reached the intended audience. Unbox Social’s social media analytics solution gives you in-depth social media data on your audience.
Check the age, gender, location, and language of your audience.
Know when your followers are the most active on the platform. Track the audience sentiment and audience feedback for your brand content across platforms.
- Track your competitors on social media platforms
Unbox Social also allows you to track your competitors on various social media platforms. Get social media insights on how your industry competitors have fared in their campaigns. Know the kind of content they are opting for.
See what’s getting them a high engagement rate. Track how the audience is responding to your competitor’s content on social media and gauge the audience sentiment for competing brands. Moreover, you can also track what your competitors are posting for trending keywords and hashtags!
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social media analytics and monitoring tool that enables you to track your social media campaigns. The tool lets you find out trending topics across social media channels which help you curate powerful content for your audience.
The social media analytics tool gives you insights into consumer sentiment and website traffic.
Moreover, you can also measure your brand’s Share of Voice and measure your campaign’s real-time performance.
Awario
More of a social listening tool, Awario also offers monitoring and social media analytics solutions. The tool gives you timely insights on brand mentions and industry conversations.
Check the social media presence of your industry competitors and learn from their mistakes! Moreover, the tool also enables you to track the audience reaction to your marketing campaigns.
The social media analysis on Awario also gives you social media insights on your brand’s online reputation.
Oktopost
While most social media analytics tools cater to B2B and B2C brands, Oktopost is strictly for B2B companies. It helps B2B firms manage, monitor and measure their social media efforts. Oktopost enables brands to keep an eye on their performance by offering lead attribution and post-level analytics on top-performing assets, links, keywords and hashtags. It also strengthens B2B social media activities by roping-in employees for advocacy and provides insights on how effective each participating employee is on social media.
Falcon.io (Facebook and Instagram)
Falcon.io allows you to create organic and paid Facebook posts on one platform.
The tools will also help you understand how viral your content is on Facebook, the rate at which you spam your Facebook fans without realizing it, and then reach your content is getting you.
Pro: Falcon makes it really easy to manage multiple social media channels, allowing you to easily post, interact and create reports.
Con: You have to create your audience from scratch every time you set up your ads.
Price: Starting at $129.99 per month.
Minter.io (Instagram)
Minter.io helps you track your Instagram analytics so you get a deeper understanding of your audience.
You are also able to see when your audience is most engaged on Instagram so that you know when is the best time to post.
Even more, you can export your report as a PDF and share it with your team members and colleagues.
Pros: The platform offers deeper insights and analytics compared to what Instagram shows on their platform.
Con: Exporting information can sometimes be slow and it shows a limited amount of data on competitors.
Price: $9 — $39 per month.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ offers brands four solutions. These are competitive analysis, influencer tracking, social reporting and social media audits. And while three of these features sound common, social media audits is one we hardly see advertised. Rival IQ performs social audits by gathering data from the web and social platforms. Data includes insights on competitors, the best and worst-performing content (think images, topics, and themes your audience may pay attention to), hashtag analytics, and social posts tagging. Together, this data is compiled to tell an interesting story about what’s working and what isn’t for your brand on social media.
How We Chose the Best Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are some of the most powerful marketing channels in 2022, but they’re also among the most competitive. Without a clear strategy, combined with thorough reporting and analytics, you’ll have trouble keeping up with leading brands in your niche.
Fortunately, the growth of social media marketing has also led to an explosion in social media marketing software. These services give marketers access to powerful tools to optimize campaigns and analyze past results. While every social media analytics service offers a unique mix of features, we focused on these four key factors to bring you the top 10 providers available in 2022.
Functionality
As with any other business software, the first thing we consider when looking at a social media analytics tool is simply what it’s capable of. The applications on this list vary widely in terms of both breadth and depth, and it’s critical to find something that offers the features you need to succeed.
Hootsuite was our selection as the best all-in-one social media marketing platform we’ve covered, but other applications may be an even better fit depending on your needs and budget. Of course, you’ll also have to weigh the price of each service against its functionality when coming to a final decision.
Ease of Use
Streamlining your social media campaigns is one of the main reasons to invest in social media analytics software. You don’t want to waste your money on an application that adds unnecessary complications to your workflow.
On top of visual design, we also looked at the integrations each provider offers with third-party software. Connecting your social media service to the other applications you use makes it easier to implement the new software within your existing practices. Furthermore, we looked through user reviews carefully to get an idea of how real customers feel about each provider.
Customer Service
If everything goes well with your social media analytics provider, you may never need to use their customer service at all. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict when you might run into a technical issue or other unexpected problem.
Naturally, customer service is another critical element of our software evaluations. First, we look at their frequently asked questions (FAQs) or knowledge base plus support channels, such as phone, email, and live chat. From there, we also read through user reviews to learn more about typical customer service experiences.
Pricing
Ultimately, you pay for social media analytics because you think that investment will pay off on your bottom line. Spending more money for a more robust platform may be a good idea in some cases, but it’s still important to consider an application’s pricing when trying to find the right option for your needs.
Conclusion
If you have spent a considerable amount of time establishing and optimizing your social media accounts, you can acquire useful analytics data about your efforts. A wide array of social media analytics tools exist to help you with this. Free social media analytics tools 2021 can improve how you run your business’s social media campaigns and manage its accounts at no extra cost.
Social Media analytics tools can present the vital data of how people act, browse and communicate using social websites they are using. The most famous and popular website like Twitter, Face book, My Space etc. are most common social media sites which are used by almost all professionals and normal people. These tools provide their users the data about every aspect and do a lot of activities on social site such as who, where, when, what, why and how. These are kind of questions which help them to identify the behavior of users very properly in this social media sites.