Social media analytics is a key part of a social marketing manager’s job. While it’s great to get likes and new followers right after a post, you need to look at the bigger picture, which only comes from examining your social media analytics. Without this insight, you won’t know how well your digital strategy is working. You can’t truly understand your brand’s success on social media without checking your profiles’ performance.

Most social media platforms give you some kind of performance insights, some do it better (hey, Facebook!) and some worse (looking at you, Instagram). So what’s the point of social media analytics tools? Well, here are a few reasons to get one:

  1. Social media analytics tools analyze data that is inaccessible to you otherwise (social media monitoring data).
  2. These tools structure data to allow you to immediately see the strengths and weaknesses of your social media strategy.
  3. They combine data from different online platforms to show you your general progress.
  4. They visualize insights which makes it easier to draw actionable ideas.
  5. They compare several brands’ social media data to show how you stack up against your competitors.
  6. Social media analytics tools build and send out social media reports for your team and stakeholders.

How to choose a social media analytics tool?

There are many tools available, each with its own unique features. We can usually group social media analytics tools into three categories: tools that evaluate your own social media accounts; tools that collect and analyze social media data related to your brand, competitors, or niche from other online sources through social listening; and social media management tools that offer both analytics and scheduling options.

In this article, I want to go through all the different kinds of social media analytics tools, from the best free marketing tools to Enterprise-level all-in-one platforms. So without further ado, let’s begin!

1. Awario

Starting with a tool that can help you with anything from researching the market to finding hot leads on social media.

Awario is a social listening tool that analyzes online data gathered from other people’s profiles. It gathers data based on the keywords you provide: they can be your brand name and social media handles, niche-related words, the names of key persons and so on.

Main strengths

Powerful and detailed social analytics. Awario breaks down social media monitoring data by a number of metrics: mention growth, reach, sentiment, languages and locations of the mentions, and the online source of the mentions. It also displays the most popular words used along with your chosen keywords in the Topic cloud.

Convenient reports based on use-cases. Awario offers three types of reports. Mention Statistics report shows all the analytics around one alert, i.e. one set of keywords you wish to monitor. Alert Comparison report allows you to benchmark several brands against each other which lets you, for example, compare your brand with your competitors, or compare the reputation of two different products you sell. Influencers report ranks the most prominent voices that mentioned your keywords for each source to help you with influencer marketing.

What makes it stand out

  • Awario supports multiple platforms. It lets you analyze data from a number of Internet sources including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, blogs, news sites, forums, and the rest of the web.
  • Boolean search mode for laser-focused monitoring. It enables you to create extremely specific queries, which ensures that you analyze only the relevant data.
  • Historical data. With Awario you’re able to go back to any time in the history of the Internet (granted, social media had already existed at this time) and see what people were discussing back then.

Price

If you’re interested in the tool, there’s a free trial available. The prices start at $29 per month.

2. Agorapulse

This tool aims to be your all-in-one hub for managing social media. It allows you to schedule social posts, analyze your performance, and even monitor hashtags and some keywords (although its monitoring abilities are quite limited compared to a designated monitoring tool).

While this is not a social media analytics tool per se, Agorapulse’s analytics features are quite powerful and give you the full picture of your social media performance.

Main strengths

Diverse analytics for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. The tool displays graphs essential for understanding your social media data such as reach, engagement, how fast your community is growing, etc.

Competitive benchmarking. Agorapulse enables you to compare your Facebook page with your competitors’ on key metrics.

Community management report. With such metrics as response rate and conversation rate, it’s easy to evaluate how well your social customer care team is doing (both in general and in regards to each team member).

What makes it stand out

  • Actionable recommendations. The tool doesn’t just analyze your social media data, it gives you actionable tips based on this analysis. You can find out what’s the best time of day to post, which hashtags drive the most engagement and what type of content attracts more eyeballs.
  • Report for Instagram Stories. Every social media manager knows the pain of ephemeral data — Stories data is only available for 14 days. However, Agorapulse gives you access to Stories data for a chosen period of time.
  • Labeling system. If you use Agorapulse for scheduling, you can label each post by the topic and then see which topics generate most discussions in reports.

Price

Agorapulse offers a 28-day free trial after which you pay a minimum of $99 per month.

3. Social Status

This is a straightforward social media analytics tool. It combines data from several social media platforms into one report to help you evaluate your social media strategy.

Main strengths

Platform coverage. Besides the Big Three, Social Status analyzes your YouTube channel statistics, which will come in handy if you’re focusing your marketing strategy on producing video content.

Competitor analysis. The tool lets you compare your metrics with any public Facebook Page, Instagram Business profile, YouTube channel or Twitter account.

What makes it stand out

  • Ads Analytics. You can connect your Facebook Ads account to get detailed reports on your Ads, Ad Sets, and campaigns.
  • Influencer Analytics. Usually, even the best social analytics tools that dive into your own social media profiles don’t offer influencer marketing capabilities, so it’s really special that this one does. You can track influencers’ overall performance on social media and the performance of specific posts that they published as a result of your collaboration.

Price

Social Status is a freemium tool. Prices start at $29.

4. Falcon

Falcon is one of the oldest social media tools on the market that strives to include everything: scheduling posts, managing direct messages, tracking your performance, gathering social media listening data and more.

Main strengths

Powerful analytics across multiple platforms. Falcon displays everything from demographics data to user behaviour and engagement metrics. The tool is a certified partner of Facebook and Instagram, so you have one more reason to trust their analytics.

Social media listening capabilities. Falcon doesn’t just break down the data of your profiles, it also is able to monitor your brand reputation and identify trends using social listening capabilities.

Customizable reports. You can mix and match all the graphs Falcon builds depending on what you want to report and who you want to report to.

Instagram Stories analytics. Falcon also saves the data on impressions, replies, taps and exits on your Stories and allows you to track changes in these metrics.

What makes it stand out

  • Custom URL tracking. You can add certain parameters to every URL you include in a post in order to track traffic in Google Analytics, thus enabling you to monitor how much of your traffic comes from social and which posts drive it.
  • Open API access. The tool allows you to share its analytics capabilities with the whole world by displaying your data on external dashboards.
  • Audience analytics. Thanks to the labeling and filtering system, you’re able to easily segment your audience (filters include hashtags, social platforms, and gender) across several social networks. You can export filtered lists to Facebook Ads Manager.

Price

Falcon doesn’t provide information on its pricing publicly, which is common for Enterprise-level tools. They have two plans (Starter and Pro), as well as custom solutions. You should contact Falcon for pricing information.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that combines data from your YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter profiles with the analysis of social media monitoring data.

Main strengths

Robust analytics that is easy to navigate. Keyhole aims to put your metrics into perspective and make it easy to get actionable insights from your data. The way they display data is extremely intuitive — you can see your growth, engagement, and other key stats in one place. Moreover, Keyhole will make suggestions based on your posting history such as the optimal time to post, the optimal length of a post, which hashtags you should use, etc.

Hashtag and keyword tracking. The tool offers real-time social media monitoring for hashtags and keywords. The analytics include the total number of posts with your keywords and hashtags, the data on who mentions your keywords, engagement on these posts, sentiment, and associated hashtags.

What makes it stand out

  • Trend analysis. This dashboard allows you to see which topics are being featured more and more in conversations, and which are losing traction, all in real time.
  • AI to predict hashtag performance. The tool uses AI technology to predict how hashtag will perform in the following days, weeks and months, namely, the amount of engagement, reach and impressions it will generate.
  • Social analytics API. The access to API allows you to embed Twitter, YouTube and web data in your own website, reports or software you’re building.

Price

You’re able to test the tool with a free trial. The pricing starts at $199 per month.

6. Quintly

Quintly is an exceptionally visually appealing social analytics platform that first and foremost strives for providing valuable insights for established brands and corporations.

Main strengths

Powerful, reliable and deep analytics. Quintly puts more than 350 metrics at your disposal to derive valuable insights from and track your social success.

A plethora of social networks. The tool pulls data from multiple social media platforms including those that are rarely supported by social media analytics tools: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

Competitive benchmarking. You can add several competitors’ channels across various platforms and benchmark them against your metrics for comparative insights.

What makes it stand out

  • Highly customizable dashboards and reports. Quintly’s premade analytics dashboards are all based on popular use cases, but you can also arrange and organize them in your own way to highlight data points that are important to you. Moreover, you’re able to add your own sets of private data for the profiles you own.
  • API integration. The platform allows you to display its analytics anywhere through the API access or export the analyzed data to a social data warehouse. You can combine social media data with other digital marketing data to get a full picture of your digital strategy.

Price

Quintly offers custom plans that start at $300 a month.

7. Sotrender

This is a powerful and affordable tool for analyzing social media data. It supports the most popular social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Main strengths

Thorough social analytics in one dashboard. Sotrender provides valuable insights on how your content is distributed across social media networks, what type of content performs better, how your audience engages with your posts, etc.

Scheduled customizable reports. The platform allows you to customize standard reports and even build tailored reports specifically for your needs.

Competitive benchmarking. Sotrender offers a dashboard specifically designated for comparative analytics. You can compare your social content strategies, audience, growth rates, keywords and more.

What makes it stand out

  • Thorough actionable tips supported by analytics. The tool makes personalized recommendations for your social marketing strategy regarding your profiles, content you post, engagement with your audience, and so on.
  • Excellent customer support. Every other review on G2Crowd and Capterra mentions the friendly and knowledgeable customer support team.

Price

Sotrender has a 14-day free trial after which you have 4 plans to choose from. The most affordable is the bronze plan that starts at $50.

8. Rival IQ

As you can guess from the name, this tool puts a lot of focus on competitor analysis. In addition to that, it analyzes your brand’s performance on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Main strengths

Facebook and Instagram insights. You can compare your brand metrics with your competitors by channel or across several channels. The tool also shows you detailed audience analytics of your Facebook and Instagram profiles including Instagram Stories.

Ad Analysis. The tool allows you to analyze your social ad performance on Facebook and Instagram.

Social media listening. Rival IQ uses social media monitoring to analyze hashtag performance, identify trends and recommend you popular hashtags.

What makes it stand out

  • Boosted post detection. This is a unique tool for competitor analysis: using machine learning Rival IQ is able to identify which content your competitors decide to invest in.
  • Google Analytics integration. You can combine your social media data with the insights on traffic to understand how your social strategy is generating leads.

Price

The prices start at $199. You can also test the tool with a 14-day free trial.

In conclusion

As you can see, the social analytics tools market is much more diverse than someone would think, offering various solutions that differ in their functionality and price ranges. I hope this article will help you define what you need and choose the best tool for your business.

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