Know What’s Working on Social Media: 24 Social Media Analytics Tools

Where do you turn for meaningful stats on your social media marketing?

I’m grateful for the insight from some truly incredible tools that help make sense of the actions I take on social media. How have my followers grown this month? Which posts seem to perform best? Which times make the most sense to post?

The answers are out there, and there are tools to help you find them. I’ve collected a bunch of my favorite ones in this post. Feel free to try them and see what insights you can find!

What are social media analytics?

First, before we jump into some of the awesome social media analytics tools available, I wanted to talk briefly about how we define social media analytics.

At Buffer, we see social media analytics as the gathering of data from social media platforms to help inform us and guide our marketing strategy. By paying close attention to social media analytics, you can measure your performance against your social media goals.

Social media analytics tools are usually used to complement social media management tools. The latter lets you plan and schedule your social media content, while the former lets you measure the performance and informs your strategy.

The top free and paid social media analytics tools for marketers

1. Buffer

Buffer offers detailed social media analytics for creators and brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling overwhelmed.

3 cool features:

• See how your accounts are performing according to key metrics like engagements
• Posting strategy recommendations
• Create professional reports in as few as two clicks

Pricing: Starts at $5 per month; 14-day free trial

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management and monitoring tool that provides a host of enterprise-level options. Its cross-channel social listening features you to perform a contextual and qualitative analysis of topics, hashtags, and keywords. You can tell how your content performs on various social networks from its visual and intuitive reports.

3 cool features:

• Analyze paid campaign performance across networks
• Get group report of your social media profiles
• Analyze your team’s performance (task performance, response rates, etc.)

Pricing: Starts at $249 per month; 30-day free trial

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great combination of social media management, listening, publishing, and analytics tools. It helps you ascertain what kind of content is working for you, increase the reach of your posts, improve the effectiveness of your ads, and get your whole social media team working in tandem. It has in-depth analytics features that give you a clear understanding of your performance across all social platforms.

3 cool features:

• Customize reports by choosing from over 200 metrics and export them in PDF, Excel, or PowerPoint formats.
• Measure your customer care team’s response and resolution time on Facebook and Twitter.
• Track brand mentions better by integrating with specialized tools like Brandwatch and Talkwalker.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month; 30-day free trial

4. Zoho Social

Zoho Social enables you to understand your social media audience and how they engage with you. You can listen to multiple channels from a single dashboard and respond in real-time. You can also dig deeper into each post to measure their reach and engagement.

3 cool features:

• Create intuitive reports from a huge list of pre-defined segments based on the demographics of your fans, influencers, or people reached.
• Get a breakdown of the content formats that your connections are engaging with and compare it to those that you publish.
• Compare fans vs. other people reached for every post.

Pricing: Starts at $10 per month; 15-day free trial

5. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management tool with considerable monitoring, listening, and reporting features. It gives you ready-to-use insights into post content and engagement, mentions, and audience profiles across digital channels. Sendible also lets you track what’s being said about your brand on various web and social platforms and identifies mentions that might need your attention or response.

3 cool features:

• Create presentation-quality reports with a drag-and-drop builder.
• Measure response times and track team performance in responsiveness.
• Get notified of reactions and engage with multiple social profiles across networks from a single dashboard.

Pricing: Starts at $29 per month; 14-day free trial

6. Keyhole

Keyhole offers various trackers that help you monitor your events, campaigns, influencer activity, brand mentions, and industry-specific social conversations. It lets you track hashtags, keywords, and accounts, providing a wealth of information such as reach, top posts, share of voice, and more for your brand or competitors.

3 cool features:

• Predict your campaign’s performance with machine learning and make changes accordingly.
• Analyze people’s sentiments when they engage with your posts.
• Manage influencers’ accounts and permissions, and track their performance from one place.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month; 7-day free trial

7. Rival IQ

Rival IQ lets you track several different companies and compare their performance across not only social media platforms but also SEO. It also analyzes Facebook and Instagram ads and features historical data for up to 24 months. This way, you can pinpoint the overall digital strategies that are working for your competitors and learn from their tactics.

3 cool features:

• Compare your profiles to others in your industry regarding social metrics, hashtags, and content quality.
• Integrate Google Analytics to get a complete understanding of your customer’s journey.
• Improve your Facebook and Instagram ad performance with automated insights.

Pricing: Starts at $239 per month; 14-day free trial

8. Emplifi

Emplifi is a collection of analytics tools that includes all the fundamental resources you might need—tracking multiple profiles, key performance indicators, competitive intelligence, and automated reports. Besides analytics tools, Emplifi also offers tools for publishing and optimizing your content, identifying influencers, digital persona mapping, and customer care on social media.

3 cool features:

• Analyze audience sentiment towards your campaigns from their reactions and interactions.
• Decide whether to boost Facebook posts or not based on predictive analysis.
• See how your performance compares to your competitors in the last 90 days on Instagram and Facebook.

Pricing: Starts at $240 per month; book a demo to get a free trial

9. Iconosquare

Iconosquare helps you track, grow, and report your Facebook and Instagram accounts’ performance. Agencies can manage multiple brands from a single dashboard and schedule reports to be sent directly to clients. The competitor tracking and benchmarking features help you compare your performance with other brands in your industry.

3 cool features:

• Discover photos, captions, and comments that tag or mention your brand.
• Track engagement on competitors’ profiles.
• Learn when your followers are online and engage them live.

Pricing: €59/$63 per month; 14-day free trial

10. Tailwind

Tailwind is a Pinterest and Instagram marketing solution that helps you schedule content, monitor conversations, and analyze performance. For Pinterest, its analytics gives you insights such as the number of pins with your domain, the potential impressions, and the number of followers for your boards. For Instagram, it shows basic metrics such as followers, posts, comments, and likes.

3 cool features:

• Identify the best hashtags on Instagram with the Hashtag Finder.
• Use the browser extension to create multiple posts from any site.
• Upload images in bulk using a drag-and-drop calendar to save time.

Pricing: Starts $19.99 per month; free tier available

11. Cyfe

Cyfe is a custom dashboard tool you can fill with integrated metrics from dozens of marketing tools. Its social media section lets you sync up all the major networks and pull overview reports for the accounts you manage and those you want to track. It offers 50 widgets for Facebook alone for tracking reach, impressions, clicks, check-ins, and posts.

3 cool features:

• A fully customizable dashboard
• Set up email and SMS alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are crossed.
• Monitor your brand mentions and competitors’ activity using the Twitter search widget.

Pricing: Starts at $19 per month; 14-day free trial

12. Quintly

Quintly is an enterprise-level analytics tool that monitors your engagement on all major social networks. You can mix and match dozens of customizable metrics and automate the deployment of flexible, shareable dashboards. By adding multiple pages belonging to you or your competitors, you can compare them against pre-set benchmarks or each other.

3 cool features:

• Choose from 350+ metrics to effectively set up and measure social KPIs.
• Export data in various formats, including CSV, XLSX, PDF, and PPTX and send automated reports.
• Use Quintly’s API to extract data into custom dashboards and integrate it with a BI solution.

Pricing: Starts at $449 per month

13. Followerwonk

One of our favorite Twitter tools, Followerwonk, shows detailed breakdowns of your followers and activity. Click on the Analytics tab, enter a Twitter username (yours or someone else’s), and view information on followers and following. See stats like when your followers are online, when you typically post, and how your followers fall into categories like social authority, activity, total tweets, and follower count.

3 cool features:

• Find targeted users by keywords used in their profiles or bios.
• Sort users or followers of an account by insightful factors such as influence or activity.
• Compare your stats to those of competitors or peers with the help of a visual graph.

Pricing: Start at $29 per month; free plan available

14. SparkToro

SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool founded by Rand Fishkin. It will eventually be a search engine that helps you identify the websites, publications, podcasts, and social profiles that appeal to your audience. At the moment, it is a collection of nifty tools that evaluate your Twitter handle and followers and give an objective assessment of your brand influence and authority on Twitter.

3 cool features:

• Audit your followers and know what percent of them are fake.
• See the specific topics that marketers are talking about on Twitter.
• Get a ‘SparkScore’ of your influence based on the performance of your tweets.

Pricing: Starts at $60 per month; free plan available

15. Audiense

Audiense provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of Twitter profiles. You can glean information about your followers’, peers’, or competitors’ location, language, interests, and influence. Audiense uses machine learning on social data such as affinities and demographics to help you understand your target audience. You can then engage these audiences directly at scale.

3 cool features:

• Create your own chatbot and engage customers via Twitter DMs.
• Analyze your followers in-depth and use these insights to build communities.
• Analyze historical and real-time conversations on Twitter.

Pricing: Starts at £39 per month; free plan available

16. Talkwalker

Talkwalker gives you unlimited free searches for hashtags and keywords across major social media platforms, news, blogs, and forums. It provides a wide range of data such as mentions, sentiment, distribution of conversations, top posts, and more. Overall, Talkwalker is a powerful brand monitoring platform that helps you measure sentiment and compare your performance to competitors’ across channels.

3 cool features:

• Monitor in real-time what customers are saying about your brands, products, events, earning calls, or campaigns.
• Map your mentions to a world map.
• Get demographic information such as age, gender, and occupation on your audience.

Pricing: Custom pricing for SMBs and enterprise companies

17. Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is built for analyzing website traffic down to the last detail, it is very useful for analyzing the impact of social media as a marketing channel and traffic source. Click through to Acquisition > Social > Overview, and you can check out how many visits your site receives from each of the major social networks. You can tie this back to your bottom line using goals and conversions.

3 cool features:

• Find social networks and communities where people are interacting with your content.
• Measure the value of social media as a channel by analyzing conversions and ecommerce transactions.
• See how users who come from social media navigate through your site.

7 social media analytics dashboards from the social media networks

All of the major social media networks have their own built-in analytics and dashboards that offer some great insights into your activity on the network. Here’s how to obtain the data and metrics offered by the social networks themselves.

1. Facebook Insights

Available for all Page admins, Facebook Insights shows you the full stats behind your posts, your fans, and your reach. Additionally, from the Insights tab, you can set up a list of Pages to Watch, which gives you information on the performance of other Facebook pages.

How to access: Click the Insights tab in the menu bar across the top of your Facebook Page.

Quick tip: You can click on the people reached number at the bottom of any individual post in your Page’s timeline to see a pop-up of the full stats for that post.

2. Instagram Insights

If you have an Instagram Business Profile, you can access Instagram Insights — Instagram’s native in-app analytics. It offers a comprehensive range of data about your profile, posts, stories, and ads. It also has detailed information about your followers, such as their most active times and days.

How to access: If you have a personal Instagram profile, you’ll need to convert into a Business Profile. Go to your profile page in the mobile app, tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner, and tap Insights.

Quick tip: In the Audience section, you get data on the average times when your followers are online. You can use this to determine your best time to post on Instagram.

Here’s a complete guide to Instagram analytics, covering the ins and outs of Instagram Insights.

3. Twitter Analytics

Twitter provides a 28-day summary of your profile and shows you how it has performed in terms of profile visits, follower growth, tweet impressions, and mentions. It also gives you an analysis of the impressions your tweets are getting, as well as details on engagement, i.e., retweets, mentions, favorites, and clicks. You can export all the data and run some pretty neat reports for yourself.

How to access: Log in to your Twitter account and go to analytics.twitter.com.

Quick tip: Clicking on the bar chart icon of any of your tweets will show a complete breakdown of the engagement on the tweet, including clicks on URLs, clicks on your username, clicks on images, and expanded details.

4. TikTok Analytics

TikTok provides up to a 60-day summary of your profile and shows you how it has performed in terms of views, follower growth, likes, comments and shares. It also gives you an analysis of the performance of specific videos. You can also export your data to run reports for yourself.

How to access on desktop:

• Log in to your TikTok account
• Hover your mouse over your profile picture on the top right side of the screen
• Click 'View Analytics'

5. Pinterest Analytics

One of the best sources for Pinterest analytics resides on Pinterest itself. The dashboard shows growth in impressions and followers, audience stats, and website engagement. You can click into more in-depth reports for each of these and see which posts and boards have performed the best.

How to access: Pinterest analytics is available only for business accounts. So, first convert your personal account to a business account (for free). Then make sure you’re logged in to Pinterest and go to analytics.pinterest.com.

Quick tip: There’s a new Audience Insights report, which shows a breakdown of your audience’s interests and demographic.

6. LinkedIn Analytics

For a Page belonging to your company or organization, you can track engagement with your updates as well as see various metrics about your followers and visitors. If you’ve enhanced your Page with LinkedIn Career Pages, you also have access to Talent Brand stats.

How to access: To access LinkedIn Page Analytics, sign in to your Page admin center, click the Analytics tab in the menu, and select Updates, Followers, or Visitors from the dropdown.

Quick tip: The Visitor metrics section for your Company Page shows a blue line representing desktop views and an orange line representing mobile views. Toggle the Aggregate mobile and desktop metrics option at the top right to see the combined results.

7. YouTube Analytics

YouTube Analytics is a comprehensive system for tracking the performance of your videos and channels. It reports on many metrics, including estimated traffic sources, watch time, views, earnings, ad performance, audience retention, and subscribers.

How to access: Sign in to YouTube and go to youtube.com/analytics

Quick tip: Click SEE MORE below the main dashboard and you’ll be taken to the detailed channel analytics page. Once there, click More > Playback location to see where people are watching your video – on your YouTube channel page, its regular YouTube URL (watch page), or embedded in another website or app.

That’s a wrap!

There are so many great social media analytics tools out there. I hope this list has given you a good overview of the tools available to help you with your decision-making process.

And once you’ve gotten a chance to research all your options, we’d love to help you analyze your performance on social media!