Do you find it challenging to manage all your social media channels, activities, and changes? You are not alone.
Social media platforms are not static. Existing sites evolve or disappear, and new platforms emerge. You can drive yourself crazy trying to keep up without using tools to help you.
Technology comes to the rescue by offering multiple solutions to improve productivity, including marketing automation, data collection, and analytics tools.
Rather than spread yourself too thin trying to maintain a presence on every available network, study your social media performance by reviewing analytics.
Focus your time and resources on the channels that bring in the best results. Test various types of content including videos, webinars, custom images, infographics, and user-generated content.
By gathering data from your social media channels, you can measure your performance against your goals, schedule, and plan content, and guide your marketing strategy.
Below are ten social media analytics tools to effectively analyze your social media initiatives and improve your results.
1. Zoho Social
Zoho offers a robust suite of tools, including collaboration, SaaS options, and a CRM. Zoho Social helps users understand who their social media audience is and how they engage with their brand.
Listening to multiple channels and conversations from a single dashboard enables users to respond in real-time. Other features include:
- Digging deeper into every post to measure reach and engagement
- Seeing details of which content formats such as videos, images, blog posts are creating the most engagement (Zoho Social can upload videos to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram)
- Generating reports based on demographics, influencers, users reached, and fans from a predefined list of segments
- Visualizing and organizing your pipeline in a content calendar to keep your audience engaged with posts spread across time
- Flexible scheduling of unlimited posts from your own schedule or best-time predictions from Zoho
- Publishing and scheduling posts directly to Instagram, reposting user-generated content, and monitoring hashtags from your desktop
Zoho offers a 15-day free trial without requiring a credit card. Prices range from $10/month for one brand and two team members to $300/month for agencies, including 20 brands, 140 channels, 25 custom reports, and five team members.
2. Hootsuite
Simplify your social media initiatives, compare aggregate results across all platforms, and save time with Hootsuite.
View the critical metrics for your social media profiles and posts, including reach, clicks, and shares. Monitor, track, and analyze multiple social campaigns from a single platform.
Platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Hootsuite makes it easier for teams to collaborate, manage social media profiles, and engage with followers. Other benefits Hootsuite’s users will enjoy, include:
- Listening to what others say about your brand on multiple social media platforms
- Gathering meaningful insights about followers and fans
- Seeing which content pieces and formats are resonating with your target audience
- Increasing your social media reach
- Improving ad effectiveness by focusing on the best performing content to the right audience
- Gaining a clear understanding of how your content is performing across all social media channels
- Generating custom reports from more than 200 metrics and exporting them in PowerPoint, PDF, or excel formats
Hootsuite offers a free version for: - Up to three social media profiles
- The ability to schedule up to 30 posts at any time
- Access to self-serve support via FAQs and online help center
- Integration with basic free apps located in the Hootsuite dashboard
Upgraded options start at $29/month for ten social profiles, one user, and unlimited scheduling to Enterprise custom solutions.
3. Buffer Analyze
Use the data gathered on Buffer Analyze from your social media platforms to inform and guide your marketing efforts.
Use one dashboard to track, analyze, and create reports for social media performance on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
In-depth insights enable brands to expand their reach, authority, engagement, and sales. Social media analytics complements other tools, such as those for webinar software and social media management.
Social media management tools let users plan and schedule content while analytics measure performance and help form strategies.
Buffer also integrates with most popular webinar software applications making it easy to share and repurpose webinar videos on different social media platforms. Webinar creators can then get a better sense of which social traffic converts the best.
Buffer Analyze offers two pricing options: Pro for $35/month, $50/month for the Premium version, and a 14-day free trial for either option.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social focuses on growing stronger relationships with your followers on social media. Understanding the needs of your audience improves engagement.
Measure your performance from visual and intuitive reports to know which content is doing the best and which is not.
The increased usage of big data has prompted many store owners to look at data analysis to make informed decisions. Social media is an imperative channel to track.
eCommerce stores integrate their products with online marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, and eBay and on social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Sprout Social is a popular choice among Shopify store owners. It gives them extra data and helps them improve their social reach and tracking.
In particular, Sprout Social’s visualized calendar feature helps you build a blueprint to plan, organize, and maintain your publishing strategy from a central location.
eCommerce owners can use this calendar to promote specific products during the optimum time in advance of seasonal trends in buying.
Maximize time by using social media analytics to make strategic, informed decisions. Plan your social media posting by understanding what is happening today.
Other Sprout Social robust features include:
- Streamlining social analytics
- Managing all social profiles from one dashboard
- Creating customized reports
- Comparing your social media performance with those of your competitors
- Measuring ROI by directly tying business results to social media activity
Choose from three payment plan options:
- Standard at $99//user/month
- Professional at $149/user/month
- Advanced at $249/user/month
5. Socialbakers
Socialbakers offers numerous free tools to boost your social media performance.
This free tools include:
- A template to build personas and organize cross-channel audience data
- Influencer search tool to find top Instagram performers
- AI-generated influencer list searchable by hashtags and including performance metrics
- Facebook page performance for the last 90 days
- Instagram performance competitor comparison report
- Facebook ads performance prediction tool
- Social media benchmarking tool
- Deep dive into Instagram statistics and analytics
- Social customer care tracking tool
- Content inspiration from seeing the best performing content in a database of over 10 billion Facebook posts
- Social media content spotlight
- Enhance your social media strategy by getting an in-depth look into social media’s top performers globally
- Regional social media reports
- Social media marketing report by platform (Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter)
Socialbakers analytics tools provide precise social media analytics, including benchmarking, paid campaigns, content, performance, and influencers.
Premium versions include analytic tools to:
- Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Track multiple social media profiles
- Analyze target audience sentiment to your campaigns from their interactions and reactions
- Compare your performance against a competitor’s on Facebook and Instagram in the last 90 days
- Use predictive analysis to decide whether to boost Facebook posts
- Generate automated reports
Upgraded pricing options offer a free trial and are based on the number of social profiles you want to use. - Ten profiles for $200/month billed annually
- 20 profiles for $400/month billed annually
6. Keyhole
Keyhole is a tracking tool that measures hashtag metrics and social campaigns in real-time. See when users are most active to determine the best days and times for increased engagement.
See the number of impressions, posts, reach, and engagements from specific hashtags or accounts. Other Keyhole benefits include:
- Identifying key influencers with the highest engagement rates
- Simplifying reporting to share with others on your team
- A user-friendly interface
- Gaining insights into your customers’ minds and what attracts their attention
- Saving time by seeing different social platforms in one dashboard
- Accurately track data
- Measuring all metrics in real-time
- Calculating the ROI of campaigns using collected data
- Creating reports and sharing real-time dashboards for clients
There are three pricing options that all include a free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
7. Brandwatch
Track and analyze data from over 95 million sources, including forums, review sites, social media networks, and blogs. Make informed data-driven decisions by understanding how consumers talk about your brand online with Brandwatch.
Brandwatch provides the following easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:
- Summary or high-level overview of social conversations about keywords, your brand, or competitors
- Accounts and conversations that influence a specific hashtag or topic indicating trends
- Report to help identify influencers relevant to your brand as well as their activity
- Comparison of competitors to benchmark data for sentiment and conversation volume
- Reputation report that shows customer sentiments about your brand for you to monitor and address if needed
Monitoring your brand online and getting in-depth insights into what your target market cares about, wants, and needs makes it easier to sell to them.
You can search the web for conversations about your brand, segment them into different categories, and then analyze the results to identify critical data.
Monitor customer opinions, sentiment changes, and fluctuations to benchmark your performance. Brandwatch use cases include:
- Brand management
- Influencer marketing
- Crisis management
- Competitor analysis
- Customer experience
This enterprise tool is best suited for users with some experience with brand monitoring tools, as the query structure can be tedious for the less experienced user.
Contact Brandwatch for a demo and to discuss the best plan and price for your needs.
8. DashThis
If you are looking for automated marketing reporting tools and don’t have a considerable budget, take a look at DashThis.
Although DashThis is not a typical social media analytics tool, it is an automated marketing reporting solution to save time and quickly create custom reports.
Bring together all the data you need into one customizable dashboard. Other time-saving features include:
- Custom data manager
- More than 34 connected integrations such as Ahrefs, Moz, and Mailchimp
- Dynamic dashboards with multiple KPIs and any combination of integrations
- CSV file import system that updates itself automatically to add any data you need
All pricing plans include a free trial and are based on the number of dashboards you need. There are five options starting at $33/month for an individual plan and three dashboards up to the Enterprise level with 100 dashboards at $499/month.
9. Oktopost
If you are a B2B enterprise, Oktopost is an analytics tool you should consider to manage, monitor, and measure your social media initiatives.
With a focus on social lead generation, large datasets, and brand advocacy, Oktopost provides users with visibility into how social media impacts their pipelines and enables them to:
- Measure the impact of all your campaigns, posts, and networks
- Integrate with all social media platforms
- Amplify social media reach
- Track social media lead generation by understanding the customer journey via lead attribution to specific campaigns, profiles, social media posts, and channels
- Assign a monetary value to all social activity to determine ROI
- Understand what resonates with the target audience by tracking clicks, shares, and comments
- Recognize content performance and new social media trends by measuring follower clicks, mentions, and growth
- Optimize social media strategy by viewing best performing keywords, links, hashtags, and multimedia
B2B businesses use Oktopost to optimize social media ROI and expand their reach using their own employees.
Social media experts at the B2B business create content to be shared and provide a platform for their employees to push it through their personal social accounts.
“Oktopost’s employee advocacy solution enabled our employees to share 10X more social content, generating a 70% increase in our organic social reach.” ~ Daniel Klaus, Senior Manager of Global Digital Marketing at Fujitsu
Contact Oktopost to learn about custom pricing options.
10. BuzzSumo
To see how many shares your blog posts receive on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, BuzzSumo will provide you with that data. It is not strictly a social tool but is an excellent resource for analyzing social engagement.
Other ways to best utilize Buzzsumo include:
- Monitoring the performance of competing content by keyword
- Comparing how your campaigns perform against your competition
- Analyzing social shares to see which types of content get the most engagement
- Tracking competitor updates and mentions to stay on top of social media trends
Choose the pricing plan that suits your business needs. Pay monthly or yearly, switch plans, or cancel at any time.
Pricing options start at $99/month for Pro to $499+/month for custom enterprise plans.
The Takeaway
No matter which tool you choose, data is necessary to get accurate measurements of your social media activity.
The choice is between operating in the dark and guessing what works and what does not or running data-driven social media campaigns for a positive ROI.
The massive number of tools and amount of data available to brands today is a double-edged sword. Your goal is to find the best analytics tools to provide real-time actionable insights.
Take the time you need to find the best tool or set of tools to help you maximize your time and resources and grow your business.
Start by taking advantage of free trials to see how a specific tool works before you spend any money.
About the Author
Julie works to grow small businesses, increasing their online visibility by leveraging the latest in internet and video technologies. She specializes in creative camera-less animated video production, custom images, content writing, and SlideShare presentations. Julie also manages HubSpot CRM, blog management, email marketing, marketing automation, and social media for her clients.
amir