Your social media budget may be rising, but how do you know if your company’s social content is impacting business goals? The sad truth is, only 4.6 percent of marketing leaders say their social media efforts contribute “very highly” to business performance. If you, too, are struggling to show impact, this listing of the best social media analytics tools to use in 2017 is for you.
To help you better understand how various tools can help your team, and how they can fit in with your marketing technology stack, we’ve organized the listing into nine categories:
- Reporting
- Listening
- Competitive analysis
- Campaign optimization
- ROI
- Attribution
- Omnichannel
- Real-time analytics
- Integrated
If you’re ready to get a handle on how you’re progressing toward your social media marketing goals, knowing your options is an important first step.
Here’s our list of the best social media analytics tools of 2017.
The Best Social Media Analytics Tools
Social Media Reporting Tools
In order to monitor the success of your social media marketing strategy, you’ll need a tool that lets you run customizable reports to track how your efforts are performing against key social and business objectives.
Look for tools that let you create in-depth reports on social media campaign performance, follower growth, and engagement, as well as those that let you export in various formats so you can easily share insights across your company.
Crowdbooster social media analytics tool uses real-time metrics to create simple reports around Twitter and Facebook activity, as well as provides recommendations to help companies grow their social presence. Dashboard reports cover growth and engagement metrics, and the platform includes an export function for more in-depth social media analysis.
Iconosquare is a social media analytics software platform that tracks and reports on Instagram metrics, including impressions, reach and engagement. You can also report on growth and influencers, as well as determine the best time to post based on performance of your past posts.
Tailwind provides social media measurement tools for Pinterest and Instagram, including reports on industry trends and competitive insights. Track and report on social KPIs to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media strategy, stay up to date with customizable performance reports sent to your email box, and export graphs and data to PowerPoint.
Moz’s Followerwonk allows you to optimize and grow your Twitter following through social media analysis and shared reporting. Track follower losses and gains, compare social graphs for competitive analysis and find the best times to tweet.
Social Media Listening Tools
While it’s impossible to control the social conversation around your brand, having a proactive way to monitor and immediately respond is essential to protecting brand integrity, especially when the conversation turns negative. But with so much activity across networks, monitoring each channel separately is an impossible task. Be sure to look for tools that cover a variety of platforms to help you listen more efficiently, and incorporate analytics so that you can get a holistic view of how your activity — and that of your competitors — affects your goals and objectives.
Audiense Community Manager is first up on our social listening tools list. This platform helps you expand your social reach by engaging those who are not (yet) followers on Twitter and Instagram. Monitor conversations and campaigns, including social ads.
TrendSpottr Signal is social media software that uses real-time data streams to predict social trends. The platform helps you monitor influencers, sentiment, content, hashtags, predicted growth and momentum.
This platform monitors real-time mentions and notifications across social, online, print and broadcast media to help inform not only your social media marketing strategy, but your business strategic goals, as well. You can also create competitive benchmarking based on share of voice insights and track influencers.
Brand24 is social media monitoring software that tracks and analyzes mentions, reach, sentiment and influencer scores across a variety of channels. Social media reports may be exported to PDF, data files or infographics.
Social Media Competitive Analysis
Keeping an eye on competitor campaigns and strategies should be a key component of your social media management strategy. Learn from competitor activity by finding out what works and what doesn’t, so you can be sure to execute your strategy in the most effective way. When evaluating tools, look for those that provide insights on competitors and influencers, as well as industry benchmarks.
This tool helps you track social media trends around your competitors. Social traffic analysis helps you uncover viral content items and the most relevant social platforms. You can also find out which competitors lead the industry based on traffic source, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others.
This tools lets you analyze social audience, activity and engagement for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and YouTube. Learn which of your competitor’s social media campaigns were successful, and which weren’t, and compare them to your own in real time.
Campaign Analysis
Understanding the impact of your campaigns will help you allocate your budget more effectively, and show greater return for you social investment. Analyze campaign performance to find out what you should keep doing more of, and what you should scrap. Be sure the tools you use go beyond vanity metrics such as likes and clicks, to help you understand how performance moves your goals forward (or not).
Easypromos offers a collection of apps that lets you create and manage digital campaigns across social media networks. Applications include include sweepstakes, contests, quizzes, surveys and loyalty programs. Report on campaign KPIs including visits, views, shares, recruitments and referrals.
ShortStack is a social media contest platform that allows you to increase engagement by creating sweepstakes, photo and video contests and offers for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Run campaign analytics, including views, shares, traffic sources, entries, device type and platforms.
With Woobox, marketers can create a variety of campaigns, including hashtag contests, polls and quizzes, and bring social media channels, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube into Facebook page apps. Campaign analytics track numbers such as likes, shares, visits, clicks and invites.
Social Media ROI
If you can’t demonstrate return on social investment to your CEO, you can wave your budget goodbye. Even though many marketers find it difficult to demonstrate social media ROI, it’s not such a daunting task if you have the right tools to help. Look for tools that track KPIs related to revenue, show how ROI changes over time, and incorporate a variety of channels so you can track the performance of each channel in one place.
Oktopost is a social media management platform developed for B2B marketers. The platform allows marketers to see the actual ROI of social media, by tracking leads back to the exact social post they came from.
Using LeadFerry, you can track the ROI of your content, gaining insights on leads and customers generated, as well as engagement scores for each piece of content. This tool also tells you which channels are performing best so you can allocate your budget to those that make the most impact.
Designed for e-commerce companies, RJMetrics lets you measure marketing ROI by channel, including from social media advertising. You can also keep track of revenue-related social media KPIs like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs.
Social Media Attribution
Your social content changes many hands, so incorporating a tool that measures attribution is a must-have for your marketing tech stack.
There are many attribution models you can use, but just be sure that whichever tool you choose is flexible enough to support your model. From tracking what triggered a mobile app install, to understanding the performance of your social media ads, a good attribution tool is essential for accurately tracking ROI of your social efforts.
With Start a Fire you can attach your brand’s recommended content to any link you share, including third party content, and track attribution related to that content, including page views and clicks. The tool also integrates with other social media management tools if you want to do more in-depth campaign analysis.
AppsFlyer gives you the tools to attribute installs of your mobile apps to any media source, including Facebook, Google and Twitter. Multi-touch attribution capabilities record clicks and views to help you understand which sources assisted the install, and which one prompted the final conversion.
ClickMeter provides a URL shortening tool, as well as analytics capabilities to let you track attribution of URLs shared on your social media channels. You can discover which channels and ads are most effective, as well as view ROI percentages for each channel.
Omnichannel
Your customers interact with you on different social networks, sites and devices, so it’s important to understand how these interactions impact your social strategy. Choose an analytics tool that helps bring these omnichannel touchpoints together, as well as data from web, CRM and marketing automation so you can get a better understanding of performance and identify areas for improvement.
Cyfe is an integrated dashboard that lets you perform social media tracking, in addition to managing all kinds of other data across your business. Add pre-built widgets from Google+, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other channels to your dashboard to monitor brand mentions, followers, traffic sources and demographics, or create customized widgets to track campaign and revenue data.
Buffer helps you schedule and manage postings for several social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram. The platform also features analytics around engagement, trends and conversions.
Real-time analytics
If you want to see social media performance over time, a static report will do the trick. However, those who are in the trenches monitoring competitor activity, changes in social engagement and opportunities to respond, need a tool that tracks conversations, provides updates, and allows colleagues to collaborate in real time. Choose a tool that monitors various social networks, includes competitor activity, and sends email alerts for easy sharing with colleagues.
Crowdfire allows you to perform real-time management of your brand’s following activity on social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and others. The platform also recommends content for you to schedule and post, and allows you to assign different team members to manage your various networks.
Using Keyhole, you can search hashtags, Twitter handles, keywords, mentions and URLs for real-time social media tracking of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram content. Track engagements, likes and retweets for your own brand, as well as those of your competitors. You can also share your dashboard with colleagues and clients.
TweetDeck is a social media management software platform for Twitter that provides real-time tracking of notifications and messaging to help you gauge engagement on web and mobile, as well as organize and schedule your Twitter activity. The platform allows multiple team members to access and post from the main business account.
Agorapulse provides real-time tracking of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram content, in addition to reports on audience, engagement, management and awareness. Team management tools allow you to invite colleagues to view or post to your social networks, depending on the permissions you assign.
Integrated analytics
With so much to keep track of, who has time to log in and out of so many different tools, or try and merge the data silos that result from using separate solutions? Wouldn’t it be great if you could use one tool, instead of seven, eight or nine, to track your social media impact?
There is one tool — our own TrackMaven.
With TrackMaven, you can:
- Go beyond engagement metrics to gain a real understanding of how each post and piece of content contributes to ROI through social and content attribution capabilities.
- Prove the impact of your marketing efforts by accessing customizable reports across all of your channels, including social media, web analytics, email and blogs, and easily sharing these reports across the organization.
- Gain a competitive edge by tracking performance against competitors and industry influencers, and acting on real-time recommendations to improve your market position.
- Show which campaigns are driving pipeline, revenue and deals, and understand where to best allocate your budget.
- Collaborate with team members in real time by sharing dashboards and reports, and stay up to date with content performance through social media email alerts.
Just collecting social media data isn’t enough. If you really want to be a data-driven marketing organization, generating actionable insights in the most efficient manner, acting on those insights, and measuring progress against business goals is the only way to get there.
