Social Media plays a massive role in digital marketing and is a critical medium to reach out to customers. Nowadays, almost everyone has a presence on social media and is greatly influenced by it. People tend to follow what’s happening across the globe and try to mimic it in real life.
Companies have realized that the best place to find potential customers for their products and services is social media and various other online platforms.
This article focuses on Social Media Analytics Tools and provides you with a comprehensive list of some of the best tools you can use to refine your marketing analytics. It also introduces you to the various factors that you must consider before selecting a tool for your business.
What is Social Media Analytics?
You are running a beautiful Social Media Campaign and are expecting to catch the eye of your target audience. But how do you know if your efforts are paying off? To do so, you need to carefully analyze your Social Media Campaigns to look at the output they yield. Sure, you want to see how many people opened your Campaign and what exactly they clicked. That’s where Social Media Analytics comes into the picture.
Almost all of the most popular Social Media Platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc) provide you with some amount of analytics built into them to track and monitor the performance of their campaigns.
You can also leverage other third-party Social Media Analytics Tools like Google Analytics, to extract information and data from your Social Media and aggregate it together for analysis. Further, Social Media Analytics Tools and Reports will help you to make sense out of vague numbers and complex data packets.
With Social Media Analytics Tools, you get a complete package that includes Defining Strategy and Goals, Identifying Target Audiences, Focusing on Key Metrics, Optimizing your Content, and Creating a Management System.
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What are Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media analytics tools are platforms that help businesses track, measure, and analyze their social media performance. These tools collect data from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to provide insights into engagement, reach, and audience behavior. By using these tools, companies can make data-driven decisions, optimize their content strategy, and improve their social media ROI. Some popular features include tracking follower growth, monitoring mentions, and analyzing post performance.
Understanding the need for Social Media Analytics Tools
Here are some of the reasons that make Social Media Analytics Tools a must for marketers:
- Understanding Audience: It provide marketers with a holistic view of their audience. It allows them to draw crucial insights about various aspects such as the kind of content that attracts more audience, the time when a large number of people are online, etc. allowing marketers to refine their Marketing strategies and attain a better reach.
- Analyzing Competitors: They lets marketers analyze the competition. Using these tools, marketers can understand the kind of content the competitors are pushing, the response from the audience, etc. Marketers can then devise better strategies that bring out more positive results and hence prevent themselves from making the mistakes their competitors made while interacting with customers.
- Better Content: With them in place, you can figure out the right kind of content you must create to attract more customers. You can analyze various factors such as the number of shares, likes, the type of media, visits, conversions, etc. to understand the kind of blogs or posts, that bring in the customers in large numbers and generate maximum revenue across platforms. This allows marketers to optimize their content for attaining success in the market.
- Campaign & Platform Performance: They help marketers gain a clear picture of the performance of their social media campaigns, allowing them to analyze whether the campaigns are producing a positive or negative impact on their products and services. Marketers can use various techniques such as sentiment analysis, to truly understand what is going on in the customers’ minds. It also helps marketers identify the right channel and social media platform, that generates maximum engagement for them and how they can optimize it further to improve their performance.
Top 10 Social Media Analytics Tools
Choosing the ideal analytics tool that perfectly meets your business requirements can be a challenging task, especially when there’s a large variety of analytics tools available in the market. To simplify your search, here is a comprehensive list of the 10 best Social Media Analytics Tools that you can choose from and start analyzing your marketing performance:
1. Google Analytics
First up in the list of Best Social Media Analytics Tools is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a Cloud-Based Web Analytics service that delivers different tools to optimize Digital Marketing. It helps you to understand your customers and increase ROI (Return on Investment). Google Analytics gives real-time statistical-based analytics solutions about your user’s interaction with your Social Media website or app. With the help of various features of Google Analytics, you can have control over your Social Media Data. It reduces one’s workload and gives signals to optimize the site’s performance.
Google Analytics offers seamless integration to 100+ sources, allowing users to perform analytics over a vast volume of data. It is an open-source analytical tool that records the trends, customer behavior, and website traffic to generate reports.
Google Analytics provides users with a variety of pre-built dashboards, allowing users to plug in their social media page and start analyzing their data in a matter of minutes. Due to its reporting capabilities, it is the top choice for industries to drive their business decisions based on customer behavior and interaction.
It eases out Data Collection from various Ads sources such as LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, etc, and helps visualize all the data in one place. It operates on Javascript code embedded in your site code and delivers all the customer’s activities data to you, and at the same time provides you valuable and meaningful actionable insights.
2. YouTube Analytics
YouTube is one of the most popular and premier video-sharing platforms by Google that allows content creators, be it individuals or companies to create a channel and upload videos of all different kinds. With YouTube in place, you can create content and share it with the world for entertainment, business, or welfare purposes as well.
YouTube also provides all the creators with the in-built YouTube Analytics functionality, allowing them to track and monitor crucial metrics & statistics for better optimization and performance. With YouTube Analytics, you’ll quickly be able to draw crucial viewer-driven insights about your audience such as audience retention, real-time activities, etc.
Overview, Reach, Engagement, Audience, and Revenue tabs – are available by default for both your Channels and your individual Videos to get better insights. Simply put, YouTube Analytics Reports uncover an incredible wealth of information, from audience demographics to traffic sources such as direct, referral, and search keywords.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most popular Social Media Analytics Tools used by companies to manage and attract customers, generate leads, and provide services. HubSpot offers several tools to create and host web pages, blogs, emails, and manage interaction with customers. HubSpot provides intuitive features, like drag and drops tiles that allow you to design, build and host the website. It also allows you to personalize the content of the website for each visitor with optimized content.
HubSpot also provides an analytics platform that ties social media performance to business and revenue growth. You can further leverage HubSpot Analytics to get a better understanding of your customers, find important clues to attract and retain customers, etc. This, in turn, will grow the business and bring in more revenue.
HubSpot is an all-in-bound marketing hub that not only allows users to analyze their data using HubSpot Analytics but also monitors the entire journey of a customer. It allows users to get a holistic view of their business and ROI-generating marketing strategies.
You can Collect Leads, Schedule Appointments or Tasks with your team and with your potential clients or customers, and make use of the Reporting Tools to understand valuable insights. You can also do Email Marketing through this automation platform. HubSpot lets you segment your customers using various set criteria. You can then go on to create a Customized Workflow for each segment.
HubSpot is an easy-to-use platform and supports both simple and complex workflows. HubSpot tools are divided into segments, known as Hubs. HubSpot is completely free with no time limitations. You can upgrade to paid plans to add extra features and tools to your Software. The base version starts with $40 per month for 100 contacts and tools like content creation, optimization, email marketing, and marketing dashboards are included in this pricing. You can get the details about pricing here.
For further information on HubSpot, you can check the official website here.
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4. Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest is a popular Social Media Service designed for image sharing and discovery of information on the internet. It allows you to upload and share images, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. Pinterest provides users with their built-in analytics platform for better marketing. It measures the traffic your site gets and also tells you critical information about your audience.
You’ll need a Business Account to access Pinterest Analytics. Pinterest Analytics categorizes the Analytics Section into 3 parts: Profile, Audience, and Website Analytics. Profile Analytics shows you the list of pins people liked most from your profile in the last 30 days, the number of times your pins were visible in the feed, and other insights. Audience Analytics shows you the demographics of your audience, like their gender, where they live, their interests, etc. You can compare your audience against the overall Pinterest audience to see where they fall. These crucial insights can help you decide what to pin next.
5. LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn is the biggest Professional Social Network website to ever exist. You can run Ad Campaigns on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Analytics will make it easy for you to analyze and measure performance dynamics. LinkedIn offers distinct, and basic analytics about your followers, visitors, and connections.
It’ll help you understand more about who exactly is engaging with your Business Campaigns and Posts. The Analytics section gives you a quick overview of the page updates and then some analytics to understand your visitors. You get to know who exactly is engaging with your content within a date range, the medium of engagement, their job functions, etc. This is really important because insights of LinkedIn members allow you to tailor your content accordingly for enhanced results. You also get a super handy list of companies observing you, and you may want to consider reaching out to them.
You’re now halfway through the list of 10 Best Social Media Analytics Tools.
6. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content/interaction-based Social Media Analytics Tool, capable of analyzing Big Data. It allows marketing teams across an organization to gain crucial insights about their marketing strategies and optimize them to maximize profits. BuzzSumo works on the concept of keywords and analyzes various social media platforms to understand what people are talking about and get a clear idea of the true requirements or trends of the market.
BuzzSumo helps users reduce their work hours and increase their success rates by providing them crucial information such as alerts, information about influencers, content-based insights, etc. allowing them to not only analyze their marketing strategies but also gain a holistic view of their competitors.
The five core parts of this Social Media Analytics platform are Discovery, Content, Influencers, Monitoring, and Projects, and each section contains features designed to tackle specific tasks.
- The Discovery section of the site is built specifically for brainstorming, it puts thousands of content ideas right at your fingertips by harnessing the power of multiple resources and Databases across BuzzSumo.
- The Content section is designed for Research and Analysis. You can search billions of articles and Social Media posts by topic page or domain to see what is performing best. You can further leverage BuzzSumo’s powerful Analysis Features to get detailed insights into the trends and topics.
- The Influencers section is home to millions of Social Media profiles and authors to help you find the right person or company to promote your content.
- The Monitoring section of BuzzSumo is an immensely powerful Web Text analysis feature designed to find matches for any Keyword published in online media. This feature helps you a great deal to improve your SEO by tracking mentions of your company, your products, or any other term critical to your Marketing teams.
- Lastly, the Projects section is your home for storing data. You can easily save an article post or influencer that you want to remember into a project for quick reference.
BuzzSumo follows a pricing model that starts at $99/month and provides users with four different subscription plans to choose from, based on their business needs. It also provides users with a 7-day free trial.
For further information on BuzzSumo, you can check the official website here.
7. Facebook Analytics
Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms that you can use to promote and boost your business. Facebook allows users to create business pages to help them reach out to millions of users of different ages, interests, regions, etc. that are a part of its vast customer base.
Facebook Insights is one of the most popular Social Media Analytics Tools that focus on inbound marketing and analytics. It analyses the customer interaction patterns across the Facebook platform and provides users with crucial insights about their campaigns, posts, the number of customers they are attracting, etc. Facebook Insights allows marketers to analyze their audience and get a clear idea about customers, their interests, and engagement statistics from different demographics and age groups.
Facebook Insights provides information about every post of yours, based on various metrics that help you understand which marketing strategy or content is producing the most profitable results. It also displays a breakdown of your organic and inorganic content so that you can understand the value of your paid ads.
For further information on Facebook Analytics, you can check the official documentation here.
8. Instagram Analytics
Instagram is yet another top-rated social media platform that has a large customer base. You can set up a business account to promote your products or provide services. Social Media metrics are essential in understanding analytics, and analytics are key to building a goal path for your business. And, Social Media Analytics Tools are here to help you with the analytics. Instagram has its analytical platform, known as Instagram Insights. Instagram Insights app is available only for business accounts, or big influencers who attract a lot of engagement.
With Instagram Insights, you can draw critical information about various metrics such as likes, saves, texts, clicks, reach, calls, impressions, etc. on the go. You can base your key decisions on all the statistical data and ultimately save time and resources. You can see the total number of impressions, engagements, actions, profiles, followers, and comments. To enhance the visualization, you can also see the graphical demonstration of all the parameters including the rate at which your followers are increasing or decreasing.
You can identify the pattern of activity of your audience, the time and day they’re most active so that you can find the best times to publish for maximum engagement.
Hashtags categorize posts on Instagram, and hence it’s extremely important to know which hashtags are trending and which hashtags could work for you. All this information can help you plan and schedule your content based on the type of audience you’re targeting.
For further information on Instagram Analytics, you can check the official documentation here.
9. HootSuite
HootSuite, one of the best Social Media Analytics Tools, provides users with a complete picture of their social media platforms and helps them understand how their social media strategies and efforts fare in the market by comparing the aggregated metrics/results from across the network. HootSuite provides crucial insights about various metrics such as clicks, comments, reach, video shares, etc. It also provides users with a variety of customizable templates that they can use to track, analyze and monitor their performance across numerous social media platforms.
Using HootSuite, you can also export your data in various formats such as CSV, Excel, PDF, etc., and easily share it with your team, allowing you to work collaboratively.
It allows users to choose from four different subscription plans as per their business needs, with the professional plan starting at $29/month. It also provides users with a 30-day free trial.
For further information on HootSuite, you can check the official website here.
10. Twitter Analytics
The concept of Hashtags originated from Twitter. People on Twitter use hashtags to start a new trend. Twitter users interact with brands by retweeting the contents to broader audiences. Twitter has its analytics tool known as Twitter Analytics that helps you refine your marketing strategies and maximize your ROI.
Twitter Analytics, last in this list of Social Media Analytics Tools, can help you analyze user interactions to figure out the right set of audience you must target along with the kind of content that attracts the maximum number of customers. It will also help you understand the optimal time to post your ads.
The Twitter Analytics dashboard represents information about various metrics such as popular tweets, number of retweets, views, etc. associated with your tweets. It provides information monthly. In case you’ve activated the Twitter Cards functionality for your business, you can use Twitter Analytics to track the performance of your Twitter Cards as well.
For further information on Twitter Analytics, you can check the official website here.
Conclusion
This article introduced you to some of the best Social Media Analytics Tools available in the market that you can use to perform and refine marketing analytics. It also provides in-depth knowledge about their features, use cases, and pricing.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are social media analytics tools?
Social media analytics tools help businesses track and measure the performance of their social media campaigns. They collect data from social media platforms to provide insights into engagement, reach, and audience behavior, helping companies optimize their social media strategies.
2. What are 7 layers of social media analytics?
The 7 layers of social media analytics are:
1. Data Collection
2. Data Integration
3. Data Cleaning
4. Data Analysis
5. Reporting
6. Actionable Insights
7. Continuous Improvement.
These layers guide the process from gathering data to using insights for decision-making and improving strategies.
3. Is Google Analytics a social media analytics tool?
Google Analytics is not primarily a social media analytics tool, but it can track traffic and user behavior from social media platforms to your website. It complements social media analytics tools by providing insights on how social media drives website engagement.
Vishal Agarwal is a Data Engineer with 10+ years of experience in the data field. He has designed scalable and efficient data solutions, and his expertise lies in AWS, Azure, Spark, GCP, SQL, Python, and other related technologies. By combining his passion for writing and the knowledge he has acquired over the years, he wishes to help data practitioners solve the day-to-day challenges they face in data engineering. In his article, Vishal applies his analytical thinking and problem-solving approaches to untangle the intricacies of data integration and analysis.
