Social media analytics tools are indispensable to marketers given the complexity of social media marketing in 2021. New social channels (ie TikTok, Clubhouse, Dispo to name a few) and new media formats (ie LinkedIn Stories, Twitter Fleets, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, etc) are emerging all the time. Social media has been playing an increasingly important role in the overall marketing strategy of brands.
Some brands have already diverted the majority of their budget and effort to social channels. So with greater emphasis (and budget) on social media marketing comes the need for more advanced measurement and insights capabilities. Without in-depth measurement and analysis, it’s impossible to understand the ROI on social media marketing activities. This is where social media analytics tools come in!
11 Best Social Media Analytics Tools in 2021:
These 11 tools are some of the best options for social media analytics and reporting. Scroll down further to see summaries of each tool.
1. Social Status
2. Sprout Social
3. Hootsuite
4. Buffer
5. Socialbakers
6. Falcon
7. Sendible
8. Agorapulse
9. Rival IQ
10. Shareablee
11. Iconosquare
What Does A Social Media Analytics Tool Do?
Social media analytics tools provide marketers with a dashboard of insights that communicate overall performance at a high level with the ability to ‘drill down’ on various aspects of performance to isolate what worked best and conversely what didn’t work. Marketers talk about ROI (Return on Investment) all the time and this theory of effort and ad spend spent on social vs the actual results or tangible business value is critical for communicating to clients or bosses. These insights help shape future strategy and how the organization leverages social channels in the next month, next quarter or even next year.
Common Features of a Social Media Analytics Tool
There are several social media analytics tools on the market with different pros and cons depending on their focus and point of difference. Despite this, there are certain features and functionality that all social media analytics tools provide:
- A dashboard that gives you an overview of your social media performance
- Multi-channel support for all the main social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Export reports to presentable boardroom-ready formats like PDF, PowerPoint or Google Slides
- Export raw data as CSV or XLS for custom analysis in Excel or Sheets
- Data history to go back in time and analyze previous months or previous campaigns
- Competitor benchmarking to analyze competitor activity and compare performance
- Support for multiple users so you can collaborate and invite your team members
Benefits of Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media analytics tools aren’t the only way to track and report on your performance. You can do this manually by visiting the built-in Insights or Analytics features of each social media channel but this is very time consuming and there’s no way to combine all these insights into one consolidated dashboard.
Aggregate and Report on all your Social Media Marketing Activities
Aggregating social media channels and showing performance side by side enables you to gain insights about which channels performed better than others. You can also compare different parts of the funnel across multiple channels. For example, you can answer questions like: do your posts on LinkedIn organically reach more people than on Facebook? Do you have a higher engagement rate on Instagram compared to Facebook? Which channels drives the most link clicks organically? Which of your social profiles are growing followers the most? These questions are all able to be answered quickly with social media analytics tools.
Save Countless Hours
The thing to keep in mind is these tools provide a level of summary, aggregation and insights that will save you hours and hours of manual effort. Sure, you can export data manually and derive insights yourself in Excel or Google Sheets. But most marketers are already stretched and don’t have a lot of spare time! This is where social media analytics tools can save you hours while in most cases, yielding a better result than manual analysis.
Reduce Errors
Another problem with manual analysis is human error. When you’re dealing with lots of rows and/or columns of data, it can be easy to mis-click or mis-type something and suddenly, the data is compromised. The beauty of social media analytic tools is that the calculations and metrics are all generated by the software and this removes any manual errors that can take place.
Standardize Your Reporting
The final benefit of using a social media analytics tool is the ability to standardize the way you report to your stakeholders or clients. You can generally white-label and customize the reports so you can tailor different reports to different people. Having a “set format” is also a great way to help educate your stakeholders about what metrics mean and how your business values each metric.
11 Best Social Media Analytics Tools
Here’s our list of the best social media analytics tools for 2021:
1. Social Status
Social Status is the industry’s most complete social media analytics and reporting solution. The platform focuses purely on analytics and reporting so for this reason it is very thorough and provides analytics functionality for beginners all the way through to advanced marketers.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Export data to CSV and boardroom-ready reports to PDF, PowerPoint PPTX and Google Slides
- Benchmark key metrics against competitors
- Track and report on Facebook Ads Manager paid campaigns
- Track and report on influencers activity on social channels
Pricing: There is a Free Plan with paid plans starting at $29 per month and scaling to $1,499 per month.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the most popular social media management tools which provides lots of different functionality for managing, scheduling and publishing on social media. It also has analytics capabilities too which provide performance metrics across all your profiles connected in Sprout Social.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest
- Customizable dashboard to enable different views
- Compare activity in different time periods
- Track multi-channel stats in one view
- Benchmark performance against competitors
Pricing: Plans start at $99 per user per month and scale to $249 per user per month.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the biggest social media management platform in the world with over 20 million users. Like Sprout Social, it is an all-in-one tool which provides functionality for planning, scheduling, publishing, managing and reporting on all your social media channels.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest
- 360-degree view of results on all main social networks
- Customizable dashboards to report on ROI
- Get actionable insights on the best times to post
- Report on customer service and response times
Pricing: There is a Free Plan with paid plans starting at $69 /month and scaling to $785 per month.
4. Buffer
Buffer is a popular social media management tool which recently launched an Analyze product to help Buffer users better track their social media metrics and performance stats. Buffer is popular with small businesses and freelancers.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Access in-depth insights to grow your brand on social media
- See boosted post insights
- Access audience demographics
- Export reports to PDF
Pricing: Plans start at $35 per month and scale to $50 per month.
5. Socialbakers
Socialbakers was one of the first social media analytics tools on the market. Over time they’ve added a wealth of other features including publishing & scheduling, listening, management and customer care.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube
- Access audience insights and demographics
- Content performance insights
- Track conversions and ROI
- Competitor analysis and benchmarks
Pricing: Plans start at $240 per month and scale to $480 per month with custom pricing thereafter.
6. Falcon
Falcon is an emerging social media management tool that encompasses analytics & reporting. It also has functionality for social listening, scheduling and publishing.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
- See cross- channel insights at a glance
- Customize dashboards with widgets
- Create reports in platform or via API
- Export data to CSV or reports to PDF
Pricing: Plans start at $129 per user per month with custom pricing thereafter.
7. Sendible
Sendible is a full social media management suite featuring scheduling & publishing, collaboration tools, listening and analytics.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn
- One-click reporting for all social media channels
- Create custom reports for clients and email automations
- Connect Google Analytics to include website traffic
- Segment and gain deeper insights into social data
Pricing: Plans start at $49 per month and scale to $399 per month.
8. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management solution combining a social media inbox, publishing & scheduling feature, listening tool and analytics. The tool focuses on team collaboration and positions itself as a direct competitor to Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Detect what content is performing best
- Get recommendations for social content
- Measure customer service performance
- Identify major trends in activity
Pricing: There is a Free Plan with paid plans starting at $99 per month and scaling to $199 per month with custom pricing thereafter.
9. Rival IQ
Rival IQ is an on-demand social media analytics platform offering in-depth analytics on all mainstream social media channels.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn
- Produce head-to-head reports for all channels
- Perform competitor analysis
- Export social media reports to PDF, PPT and CSV
- Connect data to Google Data Studio
Pricing: Plans start at $199 per month and scale to $499 per month.
10. Shareablee
Shareablee offers social media analytics for media companies & publishers as well as industry reports, benchmarks and other resources.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube
- View cross-channel metrics and consolidated stats
- Extend functionality with widgets, charts and modules
- Share dashboards with team members or clients
- Drill down to channel-specific insights
Pricing: Pricing is custom based on requirements.
11. Iconosquare
Iconosquare is a social media analytics tool which has expanded to cover publishing and listening as well. Originally developed for Instagram, Iconosquare extended it’s functionality to Facebook and Twitter.
Key Analytics Features:
- Track Instagram, Instagram Stories, Facebook and Twitter
- Get actionable insights to optimize social strategy
- See in-depth engagement insights
- Access tags and mention analytics
- Track hashtags and automate reports
Pricing: Plans start at $59 per month and scale to $179 per month.
Over to you
As you can see there are several tools on the market and all focus on slightly different areas within social media analytics and reporting.
Which tools have you used? Let me know in the Comments!
