Are you a social media marketer who wants to better focus your time, effort, and budget? You need a social media analytics tool.
Wondering which of your social media tactics are working? Want to better focus your time, effort, and budget? You need a social media analytics tool.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the best free social media analytics tools available, along with some paid options (for the true nerds who want to dive deep on the data and see real returns).
Then you’ll be ready to learn which social media metrics are important to track.
Not ready to start looking for at analytics tools? Get a primer on what social media analytics even is.
Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.
Social media analytics tools help you create performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss — to figure out what’s working and what’s not. They should also provide the data you need to assess your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.
They can help you answer questions like:
Key benefits: Performance data from every social network in one place with easy-to-understand reports
Paid or free? Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, marketing teams
Most social media management platforms have built-in analytics tools. We hope you’ll forgive us for saying Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are our favorite. But it’s the tool we know and love best.
Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.
This is why our Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:
Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite professional plan, with you can try for free for 30 days.
Learn more in this video or sign up for a Hootsuite Analytics free trial.
Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but especially those who work for a web-based business
You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics already. That’s because it’s one of the best free tools to use to learn about your website visitors. And if you’re a social marketer who likes to drive traffic to your website, then it’s an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.
While it’s not a social media reporting tool per se, you can use it to set up reports that will help you:
With these data points, you’ll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google analytics.
Learn more: How to use Google Analytics to track social media success
Key benefit: See how much web traffic and conversions your social media channels and campaigns generate (to be used with a web analytics platform like Google Analytics).
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: intermediate
Best for: all social media managers
UTM parameters are not a standalone social media analytics tool, but they are essential in helping you set up Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) to best measure social performance.
Put simply, UTM parameters are short pieces of code appended to the links you share on social media. They very precisely tell you how many people interact with your content and end up on your website.
In the screenshot above, the UTM parameter is everything that comes after the question mark.
UTM parameters aren’t essential if you’re only concerned about reporting on social media performance in terms of engagement, followers, etc. But if you want to take it to the next level, UTM parameters + Google Analytics will give you more precise data on which social media content and channels drive traffic and conversions.
Pro tip: You don’t need to know how to write code to include them on your social media posts. If you use a social media management platform like Hootsuite, you can automatically generate UTM parameters in seconds.
Learn more: Using UTM Parameters for robust social media reporting
Key benefits: Analyze brand sentiment and customer demographics in real time, alongside all your other social media performance data
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Intermediate to advanced
Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small to large social media teams
Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.
It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve customer experience.
Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.
Get the free template now!
It also analyzes data about your audience demographics like gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics across networks, or look at the aggregate picture of your audience for all networks combined.
This is a tool that really tells you a lot about your audience — and how they feel about you. It can tell you whether a spike in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it can help you capitalize or avoid either one, respectively.
Key benefits: Track and analyze data from more than 95 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social networks
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring
Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:
Learn more: You can add Brandwatch to your Hootsuite dashboard
Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers
Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:
You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.
Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.
Learn more: You can add Talkwalker to your Hootsuite dashboard
Key benefits: Track how organic and paid social impact real business goals and get recommendations for how to improve
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advertising teams
Hootsuite Impact provides an in-depth look at the performance of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that performance to specific business goals, like sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to improve your results.
Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture of your post and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don’t have to gather data from separate tools to create a social media analytics report.
Instead, you see exactly how much revenue all your social efforts generate, so you can prove your social ROI. Keep in mind that ROI is not only about sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula developed specifically for your business. Seeing which of your efforts have paid off has never been easier.
You’ll also get a clear breakdown that shows you exactly how to replicate your successes and improve in the areas where you’re falling short.
Then there’s the competitive benchmarks. To get the best insights from social analytics, you need to understand how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Impact shows how your results stack up against your competitors, so you can spot opportunities to improve.
Watch this short video to see how Hootsuite Impact works:
Key benefits: Analyze the YouTube performance of multiple channels
Free or paid: Paid tool (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels
The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.
With this integration, you can analyze your YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.
Easily see the following metrics in one place:
Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.
Want to get a big picture view of what’s being said about your brand on the internet? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the world of social media monitoring — especially if you run a global business in more than one language.
Other things you can do with Mentionlytics:
Key benefit: tracks Instagram analytics, including Instagram Story analytics
Free or paid: Paid (or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: All skill levels
Best for: Instagram marketers
Alert all the Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite free users or pro users who want to get deeper insights on their Stories in particular. (Just download the app from our App Library).
Among other things, Panoramiq Insights lets you:
We’ve created a free social media analytics template you can use to collect data about your performance on the various social networks. It’s a great place to start if you aren’t ready to invest in a tool that will automatically collect data for you. Simply download it, make a copy, and start customizing it with your own data.
Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.
For more information on how to share your analytics data effectively, check out our post on how to create a smart and simple social media report.
Track your social media performance and maximize your budget with Hootsuite. Publish your posts and analyze the results in the same, easy-to-use dashboard. Try it free today.
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This article identifies the social media metrics that really matter, why they’re important, and how to track them—helping you make smarter decisions.
A smart and easy-to-understand social media report is key to proving the value of your social marketing plan. It shows what you've accomplished, backed up by data.
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