10 of the best social media analytics tools for marketers

If you’re responsible for your brand’s social media analysis, you have a lot of explaining to do.

Because your business’ ability to build a following and convert customers means answering questions backed up by data.

For example, which social network deserves the bulk of your time and budget? What are your top-performing pieces of content? What’s the overall impact of your brand’s social presence on your business?

On top of answering these questions, according to Sprout’s 2019 Social Index, 63% of marketers are expected to discuss social ROI with their bosses to justify their spending for campaigns. Even still, measuring the ROI of social media is still a thorn in the side of so many marketers.

It doesn’t have to be, though. Whether you’re laser-focused on a single channel or need an all-purpose solution, the right social media tools can give you the analytical answers you need to grow your brand.

These 10 social media analytics tools can help you track your social presence

1. Sprout Social
2. HubSpot
3. TapInfluence
4. BuzzSumo
5. Snaplytics
6. Curalate
7. Keyhole
8. Google Analytics
9. ShortStack
10. SHIELDApp

1. Sprout Social

The need for cross-channel social media analytics makes Sprout Social an easy choice for No. 1 on our list.

Whether you want to dive deep into your performance on a single network, or quickly compare results across multiple networks at once, Sprout has you covered.

Track Facebook Page impressions, tally up Twitter link clicks, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement, asses content performance on Pinterest and much more, all from the same location.

Then quickly organize and share your data with easy-to-understand, presentation-ready reports. Or take it a step further with Premium Analytics and create your own custom report, tailored to your organization’s KPIs.

Sprout comes complete with both templated and customizable reporting options, meaning you have multiple ways to not only gather essential social metrics, but truly understand what they mean and present them to others including only the metrics you care about most and reducing the noise.

From tags to trends and everything in between, Sprout puts powerful analytics at your fingertips. You can even access data related to internal team performance and competitor activity to help you improve customer care or benchmark your brand against others in your industry.

The analytics other tools had just didn’t have the power. We needed the best analytics we could get.

Layne Pfliiger
Social Media Manager

But that’s only scratching the surface.

Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data related to 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 discover and display social insights.

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2. HubSpot

With HubSpot’s analytics tools you can tie social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, or publishing using other tools 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 analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths, and impressions.

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What’s important to highlight is that HubSpot’s social analytics tools is part of HubSpot’s Marking Hub, their all-in-one inbound marketing software. This means that using the platform you’ll have insight into the entire customer journey, not only social media-specific metrics. You’ll be able to see which marketing tactics are working best for your business, how are they impacting your bottom line, and learn about your social media campaigns ROI.

That makes HubSpot an excellent choice for businesses whose marketing teams want to keep all campaign functions in one place.

3. TapInfluence

The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.

Enter TapInfluence, an analytics platform which removes many of the “what-ifs” related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.

In short, TapInfluence highlights relevant influencer metrics in black and white so brands can better understand whether or not a potential relationship makes sense prior to outreach.

Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be a black hole of ROI. In addition to individual influencer metrics, the platform also measures the performance of overall campaigns against industry benchmarks.

 

4. BuzzSumo

Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is an awesome resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.

If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.

 

Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your own content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.

5. Snaplytics

The popularity of ephemeral content on social media speaks for itself.

Snaplytics focuses solely on analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The platform looks at metrics such as open and completion rate, allowing brands to see where story engagement peaks and likewise at what point viewers drop off.

The need to optimize story-based content is something that modern brands should overlook at their own peril.

Although Snapchat might have fallen out of favor for some brands, bear in mind that the network still boasts hundreds of million active users among millennials and Gen Z.

Meanwhile, Stories represent one of the most-engaged methods of Instagram promotion. Going beyond native analytics is a smart move for brands who want to craft more compelling Stories or eventually run story-based ads.

6. Curalate

More and more brands are trying their hands at direct social selling.

Platforms such as Curalate serve as a hybrid storefront and analytics tool for companies looking to maximize their sales from Instagram

Chances are you’ve seen a branded or unbranded “Like2Buy” link in the wild. Major brands like Bose take advantage of Curalate for social sales – take a peek at their Instagram bio.

Upon clicking through, we’re led to a social storefront where users can shop directly.

Curalate’s platform empowers businesses to understand which products score the most clicks and sales. This can directly inform your future campaigns and product strategy as you learn which sort of posts click with customers.

Additionally, Curalate tracks product tags and mentions, making it a cinch to spot and analyze the performance of user-generated content campaigns.

7. Keyhole

For the sake of expanding your content’s reach, hashtag analytics are a must-have.

Tools such as Keyhole provide a real-time performance analysis of the industry and campaign-specific hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Doing so allows brands to promote during peak times and likewise understand which tags are most popular among their followers.

8. 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 likely already have an account set up on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic right now. But did you know you can access and create reports specifically for social media tracking, too?

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.

9. ShortStack

Typically, running a social media contest requires a surprising amount of legwork.

From the process of picking a winner to analyzing engagement from a giveaway campaign, ShortStack can pick up the slack.

For brands running frequent contests or giveaways, a dedicated contest analytics tool ensures that you aren’t just giving away freebies for no reason. ShortStack looks at everything from entry data to long-term campaign performance to do just that.

 

By analyzing your contest’s performance with a social analytics tool like ShortStack, you’ll be able to see engagement metrics and identify which types of contests work best with your audience.

10. SHIELD App

As the source of 80% of B2B social leads, B2B brands are paying more and more attention to LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the increasing need for employee advocacy means that brands should be tracking the LinkedIn presence of individual salespeople in addition to their company page.

Up-and-coming social media analytics tools like SHIELD are helping bridge that gap. For example, SHIELD examines the performance of individual employee profiles and their posts. Content analytics including average likes, comments and hashtags can help employees optimize their posts prior to sharing to maximize their reach.

Additionally, SHIELD’s team report allows businesses to showcase side-by-side the engagement and growth of individual employee profiles over time.

What about native social media data analysis tools?

Hey, fair question.

Sure, there are valuable insights you can glean from Facebook or Instagram’s Audience Insights, for example.

The reality, though? Sticking solely to native tools limits what you can learn about your social presence.

Not only can third-party social media analytics tools provide you with more data, but multi-purpose tools like Sprout mean that you don’t have to bounce between platforms. In addition to saving time, this means you can see by the numbers how your campaigns are stacking up across platforms with no second-guessing involved.

What a brand needs in terms of analytics will obviously vary from business to business. That said, we adopt a “the more, the merrier” mentality when it comes to gathering data.

And with that, we wrap up our list!

How can you use social media analytics tools to grow your business?

The takeaway from all of these tools? Marketers need to own their data.

Doing so is the difference between running data-driven campaigns that result in a positive ROI versus just winging it.

The amount of information and functionality available to brands today via social media management tools is staggering, and the number of options you have for analytics is just one example.. No matter what tools are in your arsenal (and we hope Sprout is one of them), make a point to dig deeper into your data to get the most out of your future campaigns.