Your brand presence on social media requires unique, data-driven treatment. In order to fully utilize all your platforms, you need to get a hold of some meaningful stats. For this purpose, you can employ some incredible tools that give you a deeper insight into your social media activity and enable you to understand your actions on social media better.
These tools are known as social media analytics tools, and they can, in my opinion, be a lifesaver!
As a marketer or a business owner, you already know how important your questions related to social media are. These would include pressing matters such as which platform to pick, how to accommodate your budget, what are your top-performing pieces of content and at what time are your posts more likely to get attention. These questions (and anything else that may fall in the same category) are very important to you! Thanks to technology, you have access to a diverse range of free social media analytics tools.
In this article, I will discuss in length the top ten social media analytics software. So, without further ado, let’s get right into it!
What Is “Social Media Analytics”
Social media analytics software is essential to any brand’s marketing strategy. This is primarily because without measuring and analyzing the content you put out, it would be impossible to achieve goals that you’ve set out for yourself and your brand!
As a brand, you need to have a strong social media marketing portfolio. Not just that, you also need to be able to measure its success in terms of stats and figures. To improve aspects like performance KPIs and other objectives, you must be able to analyze your whole strategy. For this, you need an accurate data roadmap that does not only reflect your current standing as a brand but also goes on to show exactly where you are headed.
Social Media Analytics Importance
Social media analytics are fundamental to success! However, there is still a lot of confusion amongst businesses when it comes to practically analyzing data generated by their social media usage. Brands that only use native tools and analyze each of their channels in isolation severely restrict themselves. As a result, they miss a plethora of key points and ultimately fail to take advantage of what can be the saving grace of their business.
Such problems, although not uncommon, can result in considerable detriment. The only solution is an effort to establish a clear and detailed overview of your performance as a brand, including the ability to leverage data-driven insights. Incorporating this knowledge into your marketing strategy will then enable you to enhance your business.
Through a proper social media analysis, you can provide top-notch customer service, save money, update your brand strategy, and weigh your performance against various competitors! Ultimately, cogent social media analytics can enhance your business as a whole and make it profitable for good.
Furthermore, it’s important for you to be able to share your insights with stakeholders because let is real. It is unlikely that they know your brand inside out like you do. For that reason, a social media analysis that clearly lists down success factors and areas of improvement is important.
How Social Media Analytics Can Help Your Business
In short, the success of your business in the 21st century is highly dependent on social media analytics. This goes beyond web development and e-commerce establishment. You must gear up and get to the grind, or else you’ll be left far, far behind. Social media analytics are the core component of your brand’s content marketing success. In this regard, social media analytics tools and software are the single most important factors that you should be investing in.
There’s a reason that the current marketing industry has such a diverse range of social media tools – they are essential. A few of them can seem to be unnecessarily complicated, and you might feel like it’s something that is beyond you, something best left to the “experts.” And I don’t blame you! All the information and insights you gain from social media analytics software can seem like indecipherable gibberish of data points, charts, and dashboards! But does that mean you need extra, advanced training to be able to operate any of this software?
Absolutely not. The very purpose of these tools and software is to make your life easier! All you need is a practice to get the hang of things, and then you’re good to go. Seriously, you’ll be a pro in just a few weeks.
Advantages of Social Media Analytics Tools
Measure social media ROI
Social media analytics tools help you convince others of the actual value of social media to your brand. For brands, social media analysis is a lifesaver because it will enable you to measure social media ROI for your clients or stakeholders. You can present them with actual stats and figures to reflect the effectiveness of social media campaigns.
Enhance social media strategy
Social media analysis enables marketing teams to gain a comprehensive outlook of their brand and enables them to answer questions such as how to refine their social media strategy and how to achieve all goals and objectives related to the brand.
Understand your audience better
Here’s the thing: no matter what the demographic of your audience is, it is likely to have a digital footprint. As a marketer, or even as a business owner, it is your responsibility to analyze and understand that footprint. Social media helps you to engage with your audience in real time, and social media analysis enables you to get a better understanding of your audience’s needs. Using analytics, you can determine aspects such as which type of content best engages your audience, encourages the most link clicks, app downloads, likes, etc.
Tackle your competitors
Social media analytics can help you gain an insight into not just yours, but also your competitor’s social media behavior. Social media analytics software can allow brands to identify their competitors and understand what they do well and where the discrepancies are in their own social media strategy. A side-by-side analysis with your competitors can enable marketing teams to figure out a method to get a competitive edge and increase their brand’s standing in the market.
Sprout Social
When it comes to social media analytics, Sprout Social is an extremely potent contender. It allows you to keep a look at the most important aspects of your social media experience as a brand.
Covering All Platforms
From tracking Facebook Page Impressions to tallying up Twitter link clicks, you can utilize Sprout Social for all the important social media analytics functions! It also allows you to measure your Instagram growth, analyze LinkedIn engagement, and weigh your content performance on Pinterest. It covers all platforms and gives you an insight into your business like never before.
Straightforward Insights
What else can you do on Sprout Social? Aside from the functions listed out above, Sprout Social also allows for you to organize and share your data in quite a straightforward manner. If you are someone who shies away from complex algorithms and complicated, hard-to-understand language, then Sprout Social is the ultimate choice that you can make.
Increased Understanding
Additionally, this social media analytics tool offers you both templated and customizable reporting options. What does that mean? Well, the ability to choose from these two options means that you can gain a perspective on your social metrics in whatever way you prefer. This allows for increased understanding and comprehension, and that is a significant aspect when it comes to utilizing a social media analytics tool.
Track It All
What’s even greater is that Sprout Social allows you to track competitor data! You can access data related to internal team performance as well as competitor activity. Essentially, Sprout Social makes it easier to enhance your functions as a brand. Whether it’s customer care or individual performance, this tool allows you to improve all aspects of your brand.
HubSpot
If you’re looking to interweave your social media performance with business and revenue growth, then HubSpot is the perfect social media analytics software for you.
A Solution For Everything
Whether you publish your posts directly through HubSpot, or you do so with the use of other apps, the algorithm HubSpot uses will readily help you! HubSpot allows you to gain an insight into your social strategy across all channels. Not only that, but you can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.
Comprehensive Graphs
A key feature offered by HubSpot is the graphs that it provides. Your social media performance will be laid out in expansive graphs and visuals, which not only makes the process of learning more about your brand comprehensive, but also a lot more engaging! These visuals break down the facts and figures of your metrics into understandable, digestible pieces. So, the specific platform features like the audience, session lengths, and impressions are there for you to examine and analyze easily.
An All-in-One Platform
Another thing that makes HubSpot one of the best social media analytics tools in the market is that the analytics software it offers is a part of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. Marketing Hub is the company’s all-in-one inbound marketing software. What does this mean for you? It means that by using this one platform, you can gain an insight into your customer journey as a brand, and not just your social media analytics report. With HubSpot, you can discover which marketing strategy works best for your business, and how it impacts the other components of your business.
TapInfluence
Influencer marketing is the latest phenomenon – it has swiftly and steadily created the need for social media catered specifically for the needs of influencer campaigns. TapInfluence is one of the best social media analytics tools in this regard.
Removing The What-Ifs
TapInfluencer works by eradicating a handful of what-ifs associated with influencer campaigns. To put it simply, TapInfluence helps you gauge metrics such as the reach, engagement, and cost of executing an influencer campaign. All the relevant influencer insights are clearly put forth so that your brand knows whether or not investing in the campaign is a good option.
Measure Overall Performance
In addition to being one of a kind tool that simplifies the unique marketing environment of the 21st century, TapInfluence can also help you measure the performance of your overall campaign against particular industry benchmarks.
Social Media Analytics Report
Like any good social media analytics tool, TapInfluence also provides a detailed and informative account of your social media metrics. For any content that you create with your influencer, you can conveniently view key metrics as to its performance. This would include basic information such as the reach, view, and engagement as well as more advanced stats such as cost per engagement. All of these features ensure that TapInfluence is the all-in-one platform for brands that rely on influencer campaigns.
BuzzSumo
The next on our list is BuzzSUmo. The thing about this software is that it is not exactly a social media analytics tool. However, if utilized to its maximum potential, it can still be potent for gaining an insight into any content.
Analyze Your Blog Posts
With the help of BuzzSumo, you can get data from any piece of content that you like. Say, you want to know exactly how many shares your blog post on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest received. You can use BuzzSumo to get all the data in this regard. It will show you the exact level of engagement a post is attracting, and therefore allow you to have a better understanding of your brand’s standing.
Keep An Eye On Competitors
BuzzSumo also enables users to monitor the performance of any competitors that are producing the same kind of content. Again, this is a wonderful resource to establish a better understanding of where your brand stands in the market, and what other brands it is competing against. This will be shown in regards to relevant industry keywords and similar metrics.
Understand Variables
BuzzSumo enables you to understand different variables in top-performing content. You can see the kind of length, publish dates, and headline types that are gaining attention and then cater your own content in accordance to that.
Snaplytics
As I have already mentioned, the marketing environment that brands operate in today’s day and age is unique. Ephemeral content is just another element that adds up to create this environment. And to make its navigation easier, social media analytics software such as Snaplytics help.
Treat Snapchat and Instagram
Snaplytics primarily focuses on providing analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. In doing so, it looks at metrics such as open and completion rate. This allows users to see where their story engagement is the highest and lowest – therefore, enabling brands to understand their audiences better.
Optimize Story-Based Content
Stories are the most engaging method of promotion on Instagram. Not just Instagram, but this type of bite-size content is rising over other content forms in the long run! Gaining analytics in this field, therefore, will allow you to create content that reaches a larger audience and drives your business growth.
Updated Social Media Analytics
The data analysis you get on Snaplytics is refreshed hourly; so you can monitor the story content metrics for Snapchat and Instagram regularly. The all-purpose dashboard provided by Snaplytics will help you easily make your way through detailed social media analytics.
Keyhole
As a brand operating in the 21st century, you probably know already that hashtag analytics play an important role in expanding your content reach on social media. Social media analytics tools such as Keyhole take on this idea and provide a tool that establishes your performance on the basis of hashtags.
Real-Time Performance Analysis
Keyhole provides a real-time performance analysis of the industry that you are interested in. In addition, it provides an analysis of campaign-specific hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, enabling you to gauge the peak times and methods of posting content.
Automate Social Analytics
Keyhole allows you to automate your social media analytics which means that you, as a brand, can meet your client’s on-demand requests easily and quickly. You don’t have to spend hours downloading spreadsheets and other data – you can just automate your social media analysis on Keyhole and you’re good to go.
Shareable Social Media Analytics Report
Keyhole gives you a live dashboard containing all your analytics. The best part? You can share this amongst clients and team members, without any login! The live-view option makes Keyhole a unique and highly-functional
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an all-purpose analytical service offered by Google It by no means limits itself to being just a social media analytics software. But using it as one can be one of the best ways to track your social media campaigns and measure your social ROI.
Detailed Social Media Analytics Report
Google Analytics gives users detailed reports that will help you establish how to alter your brand in accordance with the needs of your audience. These reports will help you discover which social media platforms give you the most traffic.
Multi-Functional Analysis
In addition, they will also enable you to calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns, see what content works best for you, your brand, and the social media platform of your choice.
Targeted Traffic
You can also make sure that you’re pulling traffic from the right and relevant demographics, and see how many sales conversions your business gets in a specified time period.
ShortStack
Another important form of brand marketing these days is giveaways. As a brand, you should recognize the importance of giveaway campaigns in generating brand awareness and driving revenue. You should also be aware that usually, these campaigns involve a lot of effort. However, social media analytics tools such as ShortStack operate to take away the burden and instead, give you a seamless marketing experience.
Analyze Engagement
From picking a winner to analyzing the engagement generated from your giveaway campaign, ShortStack will help you organize the perfect brand experience – both for your team and for your consumers.
Contest Analytics Tool
For brands that hold regular contests or giveaways, ShortStack provides a content analytics tool that ensures that you aren’t just giving away your products for free.
Well-Rounded Insights
ShortStack looks at everything from entry data to long-term campaign performance to ensure that the goals of your campaign are being achieved and that you are not wasting your products for no reason.
SHIELD App
B2B brands are increasingly choosing LinkedIn as a marketing platform. This, along with an increase in the need for employee advocacy, makes LinkedIn management a pertinent aspect to deal with. This is where the SHIELD app comes into play.
Bridge The Gap
SHIELD allows you to manage your LinkedIn profile in a way that keeps you in touch with not only your company page, but also each individual salesperson. SHIELD examines the performance of individual employee profiles and their posts. This lets you have a more expansive autonomy over how your brand functions.
Survey Essentials
You can get data in regards to average likes, comments, and hashtags- which in turn helps employees optimize their posts prior to engaging the targeted audience.
Compare Performances
Additionally, SHIELD also allows you, as a business, to showcase multiple profiles together, side by side. This means that you get to view individual employee profiles together and see where the performance is up to the mark and where it could use some improvement.
The Key Takeaway
It goes without saying that there are plenty of free social media analytics tools to choose from. The ones that are not free come with a price that is either minimal or worth the few bucks it costs. As I mentioned earlier, social media analytics tools are fundamental to the success of your business and therefore, surely an aspect that you should invest in.
Before making your choice, do remember that: a good analytics tool is intuitive, easy to use, enables transparency, enhances processes and structures. Lastly, it visualizes and presents the data for you in a way that makes your life straightforward, and not more complicated! Remember all that, and you’re good to go.
