Free Social Media Analytics Tools
From the smallest online store to the largest enterprise, everyone should have a strong online presence. With no doubt, a well-planned social media strategy is powerful with no equal. You must study each social media platform, with its features and targeting services, before you make your decision. However, that's not it; you need to measure your performance and estimate your efforts. This way you get to know your weak points and what you should improve or change in the future. That's how; the social media analytics tools emerged.
Once you've studied your options, compared between the different tactics, and started advertising, you must have a dedicated social media analytics tool. This tool will give you an insight into your campaign and business strategy, providing the whole picture. So, to help you improve your online presence and track your social media performance, we have prepared a list of effective free analytics tools. All these tools are free, yet useful, optimizing your social media accounts. Also, you must know that some of them offer premium plans. Shall we start?!
Built-in Social Media Analytics
Built-in Social Media Analytics is a good way to start optimizing your social media accounts. These tools may offer a bit restrictive services when compared with the more specialized ones. However, they are perfect, especially if your presence is limited to these platforms and moreover, they are completely free.
Facebook Insights
Facebook insights provide essential metrics upon your page's performance. This feature is available to any page that has more than 30 followers. It offers detailed information about your posts whether they are organic or promoted ones. These analytics help you understand your audience; what they prefer and what they are interested in. Facebook Insights also shows how people are responding to your content, including demographics and locations. They tell you when your audience is most active and their activity.
Instagram Insights
Instagram analytics offer insights into your account's activity, regarding your content and audience performance. You can know more about your followers and how they react with your content. You can also know when your audience is most active during the week by hours and days. So you know, you can't access Instagram Insights unless you have a business account. You can get different metrics on each post including:
Saved posts
Reach
Impressions
Profile Visits
Likes
Website traffic
Demographics and location
Story analytics
Promotion analytics
Yes, these analytics may not be in-depth; however, they offer very important information. You can access the Instagram Insights through the application only.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter offers simple analytics that is available for both businesses and individuals. This analytics tracks your impressions, the number of profile visits, followers, and tweets' engagements. The "Audience tab" shows the demographics' breakdown, including location, gender, age, and more. Video view insights give you important information regarding your videos' performance, tracking conversions. Just click on any tweet and you will see the number of likes, retweets, and engagements. Also, you can view monthly statistics, showing the results of the most popular tweets and the followers too. If you have active Twitter Cards, Twitter analytics will provide the performance and results of these cards as well.
Pinterest Analytics
Once you've switched into a business account, you can easily access Pinterest Analytics. This tool shows which pins get the most engagement so you understand your audience. You get to know which content they prefer and how they react with it. They also offer information regarding your followers' demographics and location, as well as the number of clicks and total likes. The analytics are divided into pin activity and your audience activity, highlighting which pins drive more traffic into your website.
LinkedIn Analytics
Similarly, LinkedIn offers basic metrics, including demographics, locations, traffic sources, page views, followers number, and more. These analytics give you hints upon your campaigns' performance, your content, and audience. Also, the Visitor Demographics show the job function of your audience. This valuable information will help you greatly in your marketing strategy, of used right.
YouTube Analytics
Track the performance of your channel and videos using detailed reports conducted by YouTube Analytics. Find out who's watching your videos and how they are reacting. This tool shows engagement rates, traffic sources, video views, demographics, and more. It helps you understand your audience, what content they like, and what ad formats drive more revenue. And, there are also the Audience Retention Reports, which show the best type, length, and tactics suit your business the most.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an essential webs analytics tool, offering social media analysis. Yes, it may not be as effective as other analytics tools. However, it shows which social media platform is convenient more for your business, shifting your attention to the one driving more traffic.
Social Media Analytics Tools
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a well-known social media management tool, as well as an excellent social analytics provider. It also has a scheduling feature to keep your content organized and help the team be consistent. It has a free plan, in addition to paid ones, starting from $29 per month with a free 30-day trial. It offers over 200 metrics, making it a great choice to optimize your social media accounts and grow your business. It offers:
Three social profiles
30 scheduled messages
Integration with Brandwatch, Unmetric, and more
Conversion maps
Customizable dashboards
Reports
One user
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is basically a media marketing platform, offering several free analytics tools. The great thing is; it is totally free. It offers:
Analytics tool for Instagram
Performance reports for Facebook and Instagram
A benchmarking tool
A persona mapping template
Followerwonk
If your business' marketing depends only on Twitter marketing, then Followerwonk will be perfect. Connect your profile to Followerwonk and dig further into your Twitter analytics. You will learn who your audience is, how they react with your content, and their location. You can easily search for relevant keywords, find influencers, and analyze your audience's bios. You can easily optimize your account accordingly, identify the losses and gains, and know which time to tweet. It offers some visualization to compare your social graphs easily. Followerwonk offers a free plan for only one account and paid ones, starting from $29 per month.
SparkToro
SparkToro offers different social media analytics tools that help grow visibility, traffic, and reach. You can easily know which account reaches your target audience and which has the best results. It has a free plan with five searches per month and paid plan, starting from $112 per month. SparkToro offers:
Your audience demographics
Fake followers audit, so you can identify the fake accounts or spam
SparkScore which helps you improve your Twitter account
Engagement rates and average retweets
Quintly
Quintly is a social media analytics tool that tracks your performance across all your social media accounts. You can easily check your results and success on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+. It has a free plan and paid ones, starting from €129 per month, with a 14-day free trial. It offers:
The free plan offers analytics for 3 Facebook pages
Breakdown of your followers and their demographics
Engagement statistics
Metrics of your overall performance
Vizia
Vizia is a great reporting tool essential for social media analytics. It tracks data throughout different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Analytics, Consumer Research, and more. It is powerful to keep an eye on your social media strategy and campaign performance. Vizia has a free plan and it also looks great. It offers social analytics tools that increase engagements such as questions, polls, and quizzes. You can use these results to improve your content based on your audience's feedback.
Cyfe
Cyfe is a great social media analytics platform, connecting all your accounts in one place. You can easily track and compare the results of all your accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, AdSense, MailChimp, and WordPress. Cyfe has a free plan and a paid one, starting from $29 per month, with a 14-day free trial. It offers:
Free plan with two dashboards and a 30-day history
Integration with 100 useful platforms
Over 250 metrics
Monitoring sales and traffic
SEO
Website data
SumAll
SumAll is a powerful social media analytics platform that connects your social media channels, including Facebook and Twitter. It has a free plan with no paid ones until now. It offers:
Charts that compare the results of your different accounts
Integration with Facebook, Instagram, and more
Daily or weekly emails that show you the top metrics
Automated actions such as automatically sending a "thank you" tweets to all who have retweeted your content
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a good social media analytics tool that helps improve your overall media strategy. You can easily find out which time to post on Twitter or Instagram, highlighting the content with the most engagements. It also gives you in an insight into your behaviour, as well as your audience, identifying your top hashtags. It also tracks the important topics relevant to your industry on the different social media accounts. It has a free plan.
Audiense
Audiense is an effective marketing platform for Twitter, offering useful metrics to improve your strategy. It helps to raise brand awareness, craft successful campaigns, and measure the results. You can also learn more about your audience, study their behaviour, and identify which content suits them. It has a free plan that offers basic community reports and paid plans, starting from $79 per month.
The Three Stages of Social Media Analytics
1. Identify your business goals
You need to identify your goals to be clear on what you are looking for behind your online presence. What is your purpose? Is it boosting sales, driving traffic to your website, establishing your online presence, or expanding your reach?
2. Determine the key performance indicators
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Engagements
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The audience's reviews
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Conversions and sales
3. Measure and analyze your efforts
Once you've known your main objectives, take your time to analyze the metrics and reports. This data helps you know what is convenient for your business and what needs some adjustments in the future.
Why is Social Media Analytics important?
Track new trends in your business and industry
Monitor your performance
Helps you understand your audience
Enhance the user experience
Monitor your competitors and understand their challenges
Identify the creative and engaging ideas
Track the ROI
Discover new ideas and products' content
Boost your campaign performance
Discover new audience you didn't know about
Enhance brand awareness and increase exposure
Identify relevant influencers
Measure the effectiveness of influencers' partnership
Measure your success, taking into consideration the time, money, and efforts spent
You get to know if you're on the right track
Finding your Perfect Match
Which analytics tool is the right one for you? – With so many great options, finding the perfect fit can be overwhelming. Because having the right tools is a must nowadays, you must identify which platform will be convenient. Whether you are looking for in-built or separate ones, these platforms will save your time and money. Considered as efficient social listening tools, they are a great step in the right direction. They are also in continuous development as the trends change, ensuring that you're always up-to-date. So, are you ready to make your decision now?!
At Social Receptionist, our professionals can conduct the perfect social media management plan for your company, achieving your business goals.
