Social media is one of the most powerful tools in any marketers arsenal. It helps you connect with your audience in a more casual way than through an email or ad, and offers innumerable options for content types — from videos to quizzes, tutorials to behind-the-scenes. But to know how this content is actually performing and serving your goals, you need social media analytics.
Getting the most out of your social media efforts is easier when you choose the right social media analytics tools.
What Are Social Analytics Tools?
Social analytics tools are external softwares, plugins, or native analytics that allow you to see engagement metrics for your channels, as well as your competitors channels.
Many social platforms offer a built-in, easy-to-use analytics dashboard, so you could start there, but note that they do have their limitations if you're looking for omnichannel marketing insights.
For example, Twitter Analytics can tell you at a glance your number of tweets, followers, impressions, profile visits, and mentions. Facebook Insights delivers post-related data, such as audience reach, clicks, and reactions. LinkedIn offers analytics that measure engagement and supply information about your followers’ demographics.
Outside of native analytics channels, you can use third-party social media analytics tools, which provide a holistic view of the effectiveness of your social media strategy. These platforms save you time from switching between the different social media networks and offer customizable dashboards so that you can easily compare your performance across networks.
Tip: Learn how to measure social media campaign success.
Benefits of Using a Social Media Analytics Tool
There are many benefits to social media analytics tools. Namely, they provide context, data, and insights that help you and your social media team understand which posts are resonating the most with you audience, and on which platforms.
Social media analytics tools often offer more in-depth insights than native tools, and allow you to easily compare performance over different date ranges.
Here are some of the top platforms for social media analytics software:
1. Meltwater
2. Linkfluence (a Meltwater offering)
3. Sprout Social
4. Google Analytics
5. Hootsuite
6. Talkwalker
7. Buffer
8. Tailwind
9. Brandwatch
10. SocialPilot
1. Meltwater
With the Meltwater social media analytics tool, you can get the full picture of your earned and owned performance on social media. With easy switching between individual channel and omnichannel views, Meltwater gives you in-depth insights for shaping your social strategy. You can track metrics for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Meltwater also offers additional built-in competitor tracking and benchmarking for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
You can also find top-performing posts by topic tags, to improve your understanding of the content that resonates with your audience. Your analytics can be easily summarized in reports and shareable dashboards to send to key stakeholders.
2. Linkfluence (a Meltwater offering)
Linkfluence, a Meltwater offering, applies AI technology to offer extensive consumer insights and analytics. They're great for learning about consumer perceptions and behaviors on the go, so you can make intelligent decisions quickly. Insights cover all stages of your brand and product-management lifecycle, from strategy to execution.
The Linkfluence team of data scientists, machine learning specialists, and market research experts apply AI and human expertise to global data sources. They analyze online consumer discussions and trends to provide their clients with real social insights to drive your business forward.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a popular social media analytics software option for marketers, particularly at the enterprise level. Like Meltwater social analytics they help you see a cross-channel view, providing qualitative analysis and insights into your top-performing content. They also provide social listening capabilities and a unified inbox to help you reply to all DMs from one place. A unique feature of Sprout Social is their employee advocacy tool, which helps you amplify your messages using employees, thereby improving engagement.
With Sprout Social's social media analytics software, you can analyze various topics and hashtags to understand the best social content for getting engagement from your audience.
4. Google Analytics
We can't go on without mentioning Google Analytics. While not solely designed for social media analytics, they do provide some great insights into how your social content is performing, from a site traffic perspective.
They also offer unique insights from your data, and because it's Google, these insights are always going to give you more context than other tools specifically designed for social analytics (which are more focused on how your posts perform, rather than how your audience performs once they arrive at your site).
In particular, you can assess how social performs against your other marketing channels when it comes to goal completions such as purchases, email subscriptions, or add-to-cart.
5. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a very recognizable name for those in social media, so it definitely has that going for it. Because of their legacy, Hootsuite's social media analytics tools are some of the best in the biz.
Their analytics platform helps you establish benchmarks and track your performance over time. You can choose from 200+ metrics to create reports in multiple formats such as PDF and Excel.
While Hootsuite does a great job helping you analyze your performance on social channels you do need to integrate with other tools for more advanced insights, such as tracking brand mentions.
Tip: Learn more about Hootsuite Alternatives
6. Talkwalker
With Talkwalker, your team can analyze your social performance from all angles. They help you understand sentiment ratings for your brand, as well as track the reach and engagement for various hashtags you use.
No matter which route you take, the best social media analytics tools will help you identify and deliver key insights for advancing your social media strategy.
Tip: Learn more about the what why and how of sentiment analysis.
7. Buffer
Buffer is a user-friendly social scheduling platform, popular for individual use as well as business use. Their features may be on the more simplistic side compared to more advanced software solutions on this list, but if you're looking for a simple and cost-effective way to get started with scheduling content on social media and analyzing performance, Buffer is a great option.
They have 4 tiers, including a free version that allows users to connect up to 3 channels. The higher tiers do allow you to get fancy with integrations and more comprehensive social media metrics.
Tip: Take a look at the top social media management tools on the market.
8. Tailwind
Aside from general scheduling and reporting capabilities, Tailwind also offers a unique ghostwriting and AI-generated content aspect for busy social media and content marketers. They specialize in social media analytics software for small businesses.
Tailwind is cost-effective and designed to help smaller teams make an impact on social and through email. The one caveat is that they currently only support Instagram and Pinterest.
Tip: Learn more about Tailwind alternatives
9. Brandwatch
Brandwatch provides users with comprehensive social listening, brand monitoring, and social media management software, helping their customers get a full picture of brand health and be proactive when it comes to trends, crisis management, and other marketing needs.
Features include a unified inbox, benchmarking, asset library, and trend analysis.
Tip: Learn more about Brandwatch alternatives
10. SocialPilot
SocialPilot is a popular scheduling and publishing tool for businesses, offering several great features including bulk scheduling for up to 500 posts, a single inbox for all your accounts, and even a white-label customization option for their agency clients. SocialPilot offers solutions for small businesses all the way up to Enterprises.
Their social analytics tool allows you to deep dive by channel, as well as a cross-channel dashboard view to compare how your social posts are performing from a high level. You can analytics for all the major platforms, including Pinterest, YouTube, and Google Business pages.
For any modern business, social media is an essential tool to build brand awareness, attract new customers, and establish online presence. But posting content is not enough. You need comprehensive insights and metrics to see how your social media content is resonating.
To learn more about how Meltwater's social media analytics software can help your team, fill out the form below to schedule a demo!
