Social Media Analytics Tools: Measuring and Analyzing Social Media Performance

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where social media platforms have become thriving hubs of connectivity and engagement, harnessing the power of data-driven insights is paramount. To truly understand the impact of your online presence and optimize your social media strategy, you need the assistance of robust tools specifically designed for this purpose—social media analytics tools. In this blog, we will explore social media analytics tools and how they can empower you to uncover valuable trends, measure performance, and make informed decisions. By leveraging these tools, you can transform your social media presence into a strategic powerhouse, driving engagement, expanding reach, and achieving your desired objectives. So, let’s dive in and discover the transformative potential of These tools.

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics refers to collecting data and metrics that help you measure your overall social media performance. This helps marketers understand which types of social media content best resonate with their audience so they can shape and adapt their strategy accordingly.

What is the importance of social media analytics?

Social media analytics help marketers with several tasks, from informing their strategy to planning campaigns and content ideas. Five major benefits tracking social analytics can help with.

1. Trendspotting

Trendspotting is pinpointing upcoming trends before they’re mainstream, and keeping a close eye on your social media analytics can help you do just that. Some of the trends that your social media analytics can help you determine include:

• Which platforms are gaining more traction and popularity (or losing popularity)
• Topics of interest that your audience is talking about (and mentioning your brand in conversations about)
• Types of ads that your audience is interested in
• Up-and-coming influencers and products in your niche
• Types of content that your audience engages with most

If analyzed properly, your social media stats can help identify what you should post more of, what types of content are becoming more popular, and what your audience will want to hear more about in the next quarter or year.

2. Brand sentiment

Brand sentiment ultimately means how people feel about your brand. It includes all positive and negative feelings discussed online, and your brand sentiment can be measured through sentiment analysis by looking through your social media analytics.

This can help ensure your audience is happy with your business and that you can detect and manage any unhappy customers.

3. Value perception

Value perception (or perceived value) refers to the overall customer opinion of your brand’s product or service and whether or not it can meet their needs. Perceived value is key to determining demand and even the price point of a product or service. For example, if your product has a low perceived value, customers will only be willing to pay a little.

You can measure value perception by using social listening tools and monitoring the analytics and data from those dashboards. This can help drive your strategy, guide the content you create to improve value perception and showcase how your product or service can hit key pain points.

4. Setting social media goals

Social media analytics can also help you see which channels and content are performing well, helping you to create actionable and realistic social media goals and objectives.

The key word here is realistic. If you look at your social media analytics and realize your Instagram account is growing by 10 followers per week, trying to jump from 5,000 followers to 10,000 followers in a single quarter is not a realistic goal, even if you revamp your posting strategy.

Instead, you could make a goal where your account grows by 20 followers per week and steadily increases that goal. This way, you can consistently improve your campaigns and increase your goals to get free Instagram followers organically

5. Proving ROI

Finally, your social media analytics can help to prove the ROI of your social media marketing efforts. Each time you run a new campaign, monitor your social analytics to see how the content is performing, if people are clicking on your website, and if you’re generating new sales.

UTM tracking and URL shortening are two ways that make proving ROI via analytics even easier. This way, you can track specific campaign clicks and purchases that lead back to your social media efforts.

What are the types of social media analytics?

You should monitor several different types of social media analytics that can help guide your strategy and discover various data and information. We’ll walk you through the six main types of analytics below.

Performance analysis

First and foremost, you need to measure the overall performance of your social media efforts. This includes social media metrics like:

• Impressions
• Reach
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Views
• Clicks
• Sales

Audience analytics

Next, you’ll want to take a look at your audience analytics. This will help you discover which audience demographics your audience is reaching—and ensure they match up with your target audience. If not, you may need to adjust your content strategy to attract better those you’re aiming to reach.

Audience analytics will include data like:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Device

Competitor analysis

Another key area to look into is how your competitors are doing on social media. How many followers do they have? What is their engagement rate? How many people engage with each of their posts?

You can then compare this data to your own to see how you stack up and how realistic growth in engagement may be for your goals.

Using a tool like Sprout, you can gather all this data in one place and measure it network by network.

Paid ads analytics

You want to ensure they perform well when you’re putting money behind specific social media posts. This is why you must pay close attention to your paid ads analytics.

Some of the most important ad analytics to measure include:

• Number of active ads
• Clicks
• Click-through rate
• Cost-per-click
• Cost-per-engagement
• Cost-per-action
• Conversion rate
• Total ad spend

Also read : PPC Advertising Platforms: Running and Optimizing Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Influencer analysis

If you’re running influencer marketing campaigns, tracking the success of these partnerships is essential to proving ROI. Some of the data you’ll want to keep track of include:

• Number of posts created per influencer
• Total number of interactions per post
• Audience size of each influencer
• Hashtag usage and engagement

Sentiment analysis

The last major segment of social media analytics you’ll want to track is brand sentiment. We discussed this earlier and how social media analytics can help you determine this. You can use social listening tactics to gauge connotation about a certain topic; in this instance, said topic would be your brand name.

Sprout’s social listening dashboard can also help measure your brand sentiment, showcasing how users feel about your brand or any brand topic you set.

 

Top Social Media Analytics Tools to Track Your Social Presence

1. Sprout Social

The need for cross-channel social media analytics makes Sprout Social’s analytics tools an easy choice for number one on our list.

Sprout can let you analyze your performance in-depth on a single network or swiftly compare outcomes across several networks simultaneously.

From the same spot, monitor Facebook Page impressions, count Twitter link clicks, track Instagram follower growth, assess LinkedIn engagement, monitor Pinterest article performance, and more.

Afterward, rapidly organize and distribute your data using clear, presentation-ready reports. Alternatively, use Premium Analytics to produce a custom report based on the KPIs of your company.

Sprout comes complete with both templated and customizable reporting options, meaning you have multiple ways to gather essential social metrics, truly understand what they mean, and easily present them to others. You can easily include only the metrics you care about most to reduce the noise.

From tags to trends and everything in between, Sprout puts powerful analytics at your fingertips. Take this case study from the University of North Dakota, where Sprout Social helped streamline and optimize social media performance and tracking. You can even access internal team performance and competitor activity data to help you improve customer care or benchmark your brand against others in your industry.

But that’s only scratching the surface.

Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data surrounding audience demographics, industry influencers, campaign performance, share of voice, and consumer sentiment.

No matter your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout has been built from the ground up to give you a fast, user-friendly way to display social insights.

2. HubSpot

With HubSpot’s analytics tools, you can tie your social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, publishing using other tools (like Sprout Social), or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. You can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.

HubSpot’s social media analytics tools include detailed graphs and graphics that segment the data according to unique platform characteristics like audience, session durations, and impressions.

It’s crucial to emphasize that HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, an all-in-one inbound marketing platform, includes social analytics capabilities.

This indicates that using the platform will allow you to learn more about the full client journey than simply social media-specific analytics. You’ll learn more about your social media strategy’s ROI and which marketing strategies are most effective for your company.

Because of this, HubSpot is a great option for companies whose marketing teams wish to centralize all campaign operations.

3. IZEA

Social media solutions designed expressly for influencer campaigns are becoming necessary due to the surge in influencer marketing.

Enter IZEA, an analytics platform that removes many of the what-ifs related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate, and any influencer’s potential price tag.

Brands can also examine the audience demographics of potential influencers, the effectiveness of influencer campaigns, conversion rates, and other information using IZEA’s Flex software.

Influencer campaigns shouldn’t have zero return on investment. A fantastic approach to measure performance is to use a platform like IZEA to find and manage influencer partnerships.

4. BuzzSumo

Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is an awesome resource for analyzing any given content’s social engagement.

BuzzSumo can show you the number of shares your most recent blog article received on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. To see how your content marketing initiatives compare to the competition, you can also track the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords.

One of the most popular platforms for content delivery is still social media. The most engaging article types can be identified by looking at social media shares, and you can use that information to guide your content strategy. You can learn more about factors in high-performing content, such as length, publish date, and headline style, with the aid of BuzzSumo.

5. Google Analytics

While it’s not solely a social media analytics tool, Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track social media campaigns and even help you measure social ROI.

You may already have an account on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic. Did you know you can also access and create reports specifically for social media tracking?

For instance, you can see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns.

Just ensure that if you already have a Google Analytics account, you’ve migrated to the new GA4 interface (seen above). Access to the old interface will be shut down and switched to GA4 by July 1, 2023.

6. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter-specific analytics tool that can help brands search relevant Twitter bios to find users to engage with, compare users, analyze accounts, track followers, and more. Users can access valuable insights and help with their Twitter strategy using a free Followerwonk account.

Followerwonk was recently acquired by Tweepsmap, a social media software working to improve the Twitter analytics tool’s dashboard and analytics capabilities even more.

7. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a social media analytics tool that can help businesses track their success across several YouTube channels. With features like competitor analysis, basic social analytics, social listening, reporting, and social media audits, Rival IQ is a great option for businesses with a widespread online presence. It can also be a huge help for agencies working with multiple clients.

Create unique dashboards for each customer based on their unique social media marketing objectives. Then quickly download reports in various formats, such as PPT, PDF, PNG, or CSV, to share. To assist you in keeping track of influencer campaigns and picking the ideal hashtags for your content, Rival IQ also provides influencer tracking and hashtag analytics.

8. Iconosquare

Iconosquare started as a basic Instagram analytics tool years before the platform offered its built-in insights. At the time, this tool was one of the only ways to monitor your Instagram efforts effectively. However, analytics tools must do the same as platforms adapt and change.

Iconosquare is a powerful social media analytics tool that enables users to keep track of more than 100 metrics across different social media networks. Social media sites, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok, are supported.

Make your custom dashboards so you can quickly and easily view your most crucial analytics, such as follower growth, audience demographics, post interaction, reach, and more. Iconosquare provides publishing tools, community management, social listening, and collaborative content production and approval.

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is another social media analytics tool that has changed and evolved. What started as a Pinterest scheduling tool called Pin League has quickly evolved into a sophisticated social media management and analytics tool.

The main drawback of Tailwind is that it only supports a few social networks. Although users can link their accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, Tailwind’s capabilities are most suited to the visual platforms of Pinterest and Instagram. However, brands with a strong emphasis on such platforms can use this instrument’s capabilities.

With Tailwind, you can generate and schedule posts, locate the most effective hashtags, use a seamless link-in-bio tool, and more. With this platform’s aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly interface, brands can quickly track the effectiveness of their visual social media profiles.

10. SocialBee

SocialBee is an all-inclusive social media management tool, providing users with the ability to schedule, publish, and track their social media content across various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and Google Business Profile.

What sets SocialBee apart is its robust analytics module, offering a centralized hub for tracking and analyzing all social media data. Users can effortlessly access and monitor page and post analytics, gaining valuable insights into their overall social media performance.

The analytics module extends its capabilities by allowing users to compare performance across multiple platforms, offering a comprehensive view of their social media presence. Plus, SocialBee enables users to download detailed analytics reports.

SocialBee goes the extra mile by empowering users to generate a social strategy, schedule and post content, engage with followers, and collaborate seamlessly with their team. With its multifaceted capabilities, SocialBee emerges as the go-to solution for efficient social media management.

11. Audience

Audience is an audience-building tool that helps brands monitor their performance across several social media platforms. That being said, Audience is also a very Twitter-minded tool, making it an ideal option for brands that emphasize their Twitter audience and performance.

With Audiense, brands can easily create customer personas based on their target audience demographics, gather sources of influence that their audience likes to get content from, find the best influencers to work with and more. However, Audiense’s Twitter marketing tools also enable brands to dive deeply into their Twitter analytics.

12. quietly

quietly is another advanced social media analytics tool that supports several social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok—and even YouTube and Snapchat. The platform also offers analytics specific to Instagram Stories so brands can ensure their audience properly responds to the stories they post.

To determine which KPIs are most important to their business, brands may create dashboards using more than 350 metrics. Quietly enables organizations to create several dashboards, even providing templates to get them started, ensuring that they only receive the most thorough overview of the data from each platform.

13. SparkToro

SparkToro is similar to Audiense in that it’s also an audience intelligence platform. While this tool doesn’t necessarily provide data and analytics from your social media performance, it’s perfect for giving brands insight into their audience, competitors, and other social media profiles within their networks.

Also read : SERP Analysis Tools: Understanding and Reacting to Search Engine Results

Conclusion

As we conclude our exploration of social media analytics tools, it’s evident that they have become essential assets for anyone seeking success in the digital realm. By leveraging these tools, you can gain valuable insights into your audience’s behavior, measure the impact of your content, and refine your strategies accordingly. With many options available, selecting the tools that align with your specific needs and goals is important. So, why wait? Embrace the power of social media analytics tools today and unlock the potential to elevate your online presence, engage your audience, and drive tangible results.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are social media analytic tools?

Social media analytic tools are essential for measuring the performance of social media marketing campaigns. By leveraging a tool, businesses can make informed decisions about their social media strategies at scale, such as what content to create and when to post it.

What can social media analytics tools help you measure?

Social media analytics tools enable businesses to track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, reach, and impressions.

What are the benefits of social media analytics for business?

Social media analytics provide businesses with valuable insights into their performance across major social media networks, allowing them to track their progress, measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, and optimize their strategies.

In addition, these tools enable businesses to understand their audience better, gain competitive intelligence, and make data-driven decisions. Ultimately, social media analytics can help achieve better results and stay ahead of the competition.