An important facet of digital marketing is social media marketing. Social media marketing allows you to connect directly with customers on the same platforms that they spend their time on. This can help you get your marketing messages in front of the eyes of your most valuable customers.
But while you might understand the value of social media marketing as a whole, you might struggle to properly collect and analyze the data you can get from your social media efforts. That’s where social media analytics tools come in. In this article, we’ll help you understand what these important resources are and give you a list of some of the best options for your business.
What are Social Media Analytics Tools?
Social media is an incredibly powerful marketing tool in the digital era. Many people spend several hours on social media every day. That provides marketers with a great opportunity to connect to audiences and increase brand awareness. However, in order for your social media marketing strategy to be efficient, you need to analyze your social media data.
Without proper data analytics, you won’t be able to engage your followers, build an audience, expand your brand’s reputation, increase conversions, or make the most accurate business decisions. That’s where social media analytics tools come in.
Social media analytics tools can measure the performance of your social media efforts and provide your organization with essential data related to your social media channels. The tools will often connect to your social media profiles and pull data from your channels, or allow you to publish and organize your social media efforts through the tool itself. Let’s go through some of the most powerful social media analytics tools available for brands today.
Tool #1: Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an all-in-one data analytics tool that helps you complete all of your social media tasks from a single location. With a focus on Twitter, this platform can track mentions, favorites, retweets, and other important metrics. You can quickly get a snapshot of your engagement from different social media campaigns on a single dashboard, and track and respond to messages you get immediately.
Tool #2: HootSuite Analytics
HootSuite Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring and analyzing social media data while organizing data to provide quick and valuable insights into your audience’s behavior. You can track over 200 social media metrics, and share internal performance metrics among your team to help encourage more collaboration and productivity. You can also plan and schedule your posts directly from the tool.
Tool #3: Google Analytics
Google Analytics, while not a tool just for social media, helps you track the data behind your social media campaigns. You can use Google Analytics to track social return on investment and see how much traffic your website has coming from social networks. If you have a Google account, this tool is great for people who don’t want to use a wide variety of different tools.
Tool #4: Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a cross-channel tool that helps you compare the performance of multiple social media channels at once. You can track and examine the clicks, impressions, follower growth, and engagement from all of your social media channels in the same location. You can then create a report from within the tool using standard or customized templates. There are also advanced tools to help you learn about demographics, campaigns, customer sentiment, and more.
Tool #5: Meltwater
Meltwater is a tool that can help you monitor and analyze your brand reach with the help of tools that track industry and brand mentions on social media platforms. It helps you get notified immediately when there is a brand mention online, and also helps you understand which influencers will be the best fit for your social media marketing efforts. You can also gather quick reports for your social channels and listen to both social media and traditional media.
Tool #6: HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one inbound marketing platform that allows you to tie your social media performance directly to your business growth and revenue. You can use the HubSpot platform to track all of your important social media metrics while tying those metrics directly into your other marketing efforts, so you can see how your campaigns and strategies are working together.
Tool #7: TapInfluence
TapInfluence is a great social media analytics tool for influencer marketing. This platform helps you understand important information like the engagement rate, reach, and cost of working with an influencer. It helps you understand whether working with an influencer makes sense for your brand, and gives you more control over the relationship, so you are able to make a return on your investment in an influencer.
Tool #8: BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great tool for tracking your relevant keywords on social media and displaying those metrics clearly, resulting in easily understood content. You can also use BuzzSumo to compare your social media performance against your competitors, allowing you to see where you stand in the industry. You can also learn more about the variables of your social media content like the headlines and length, which can help inform your ongoing social media strategies.
Tool #9: Snaplytics
This tool is focused on the analytics of Snapchat and Instagram stories. By looking at the open and completion rate of the short videos and snaps on these platforms, you can learn where the interest of your viewer’s peaks and where they start to lose interest and drop off. This can help you optimize your content moving forward for these specific platforms.
Tool #10: Curalate
Curalate is a powerful tool for brands who want to get involved with social selling, which is the process of connecting your e-commerce platform directly to your social media pages for your followers to access. This tool helps you understand which of your products are getting the most clicks and sales through social media, which helps inform you about your product and strategies for social selling.
Tool #11: Shortstack
Shortstack is a social media analytics tool specifically created to help you with your contests and giveaways. This tool helps you analyze your social media contests, understand your engagement metrics, learn which types of activities work best for your audiences, and can even help you pick winners. Shortstack helps take some of the manual work away from social media campaigns while providing important analytics.
Tool #12: Keyhole
Hashtags continue to be a valuable and important part of any social media strategy. Without the right hashtags and keywords in your social media posts, you can miss out on opportunities to reach a wider audience and expand your brand. This tool helps you track real-time hashtag performance on your Twitter and Instagram posts, so you know which tags are most popular.
Tool #13: Socialbakers
Socialbakers is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to help you create personas and understand your audience. You can use the advanced analytics of this tool to plan your social media strategy and understand all of the important metrics from your social media channels. You can also use the tool to help you with social listening and basic social media management on a single platform.
Tool #14: Falcon.io
This social media analytics tool is much more than just a data tracker. It’s a CRM that has great analytics tools for conversions, engagement, and customer targeting on social media. This tool was designed for enterprise-level and medium-sized organizations to manage many different aspects of digital marketing in a single tool. You can use it to help focus your targeting and diversify your social media campaigns.
Tool #15: Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a social media analytics tool that helps you monitor your brand’s reputation online. You can learn more about your customers and understand the brand sentiment that your company has on social media. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to ensure you only collect data from real followers and track brand-related conversions online so you understand what the real sentiment about your brand is.
Tool #16: BrandMentions
As the name suggests, BrandMentions is a tool that helps you monitor your brand on your social media channels. It enables you to understand if people are talking about your brand, as well as helps to find relevant keywords related to your brand, allowing you to understand the tone of the conversations and the sentiment of your brand mentions. You can also use this tool to see historical data of your brand on social media.
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Wrap Up
In order to know the best ways to progress, you need to analyze data. Social media analytics tools can help you uncover the best decisions for your efforts. By tracking lead sources, clicks, views, shares, activity, and other important social media metrics, you can learn how to convert more customers and drive more revenue for your business.
Tracking data is just one problem that social media marketers face. To learn more about solutions to social media problems, check out our blog on social media challenges. There you’ll learn how to tackle the biggest and most common issues that social media marketers struggle with, and gather valuable information on how to address these challenges head-on.
