Wondering which of your social media tactics are working? Desire to meliorate focus your time, effort, and budget? Yous demand a social media analytics tool.

In this commodity, we'll cover some of the best free social media analytics tools available, forth with some paid options (for the true nerds who want to swoop deep on the data and run into real returns).

Then you'll be ready to acquire which social media metrics are important to track.

Not ready to start looking for at analytics tools? Get a primer on what social media analytics fifty-fifty is.

Bonus: Go a costless social media analytics report template that shows yous the nigh important metrics to track for each network.

Why you lot demand social media analytics tools

Social media analytics tools aid yous create performance reports to share with your squad, stakeholders, and boss — to effigy out what's working and what's not. They should also provide the data y'all need to appraise your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.

They can help you answer questions similar:

  • Is it worth it for my business organisation to keep posting on Pinterest?
  • What were our top posts on LinkedIn this yr?
  • Should we post more on Instagram next month?
  • Which network drove the most make sensation for our production launch?
  • What kind of posts do my followers similar to comment on?
  • And many more.

10 of the best social media analytics tools

Key benefits: Performance information from every social network in one identify with easy-to-empathize reports

Paid or free? Paid tool

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, marketing teams

Most social media direction platforms have built-in analytics tools. We hope you'll forgive u.s. for maxim Hootsuite's reporting capabilities are our favorite. But it's the tool we know and dear all-time.

viewing social media analytics on multiple networks in Hootsuite

Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete pic of all your social media efforts, and so yous don't take to check each platform individually.

It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.

Social posts metrics:

  • Clicks
  • Comments
  • Achieve
  • Engagement rate
  • Impressions
  • Shares
  • Saves
  • Video views
  • Video attain
  • And more

Profile metrics:

  • Follower growth over fourth dimension
  • Negative feedback rate
  • Contour visits
  • Reactions
  • Overall engagement rate
  • And more

Best time to postal service recommendations:

Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to take it fall completely flat? In that location could be a lot of reasons for that. But ane of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.

This is why our All-time Time to Publish tool is one of the well-nigh popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the nigh optimal times to post based on three dissimilar goals:

  1. Engagement
  2. Impressions
  3. Link clicks

Best time to publish feature in Hootsuite Analytics

Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on date. Or they'll utilize data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.

Other absurd things you can exercise with Hootsuite Analytics:

  • Customize report templates for simply the metrics you care about
  • Get reports on your competitors
  • Rails the productivity of your social team (response times, and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments)
  • Monitor mentions, comments, and tags related to your concern to avoid PR disasters before they happen

Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite professional person plan, which you tin can try for complimentary for 30 days.

Larn more in this video or sign upward for a Hootsuite Analytics free trial.

Try it for Free

Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels

Paid or free: Costless tool

Skill level: all skill levels

Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but especially those who work for a spider web-based business

Y'all've probably heard of Google Analytics already. That's because it's one of the best gratis tools to utilize to learn nearly your website visitors. And if you're a social marketer who likes to drive traffic to your website, then information technology's an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.

While it'due south not a social media reporting tool per se, you can utilize information technology to ready reports that will aid you:

  • See which social media platforms give y'all the most traffic
  • See what content drives the most leads and traffic on which social networks
  • Go to know your audience with demographic information
  • Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns

Google Analytics dashboard showing sources of traffic for a blog post

With these data points, y'all'll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google analytics.

Larn more: How to utilize Google Analytics to runway social media success

Key benefit: See how much spider web traffic and conversions your social media channels and campaigns generate (to be used with a web analytics platform similar Google Analytics).

Paid or gratuitous: Gratuitous tool

Skill level: intermediate

Best for: all social media managers

Example of a UTM parameter for sharing a Hootsuite blog post

UTM parameters are not a standalone social media analytics tool, but they are essential in helping you set up Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) to all-time measure social performance.

Put simply, UTM parameters are brusque pieces of code appended to the links you lot share on social media. They very precisely tell you how many people interact with your content and end upwardly on your website.

In the screenshot above, the UTM parameter is everything that comes after the question mark.

UTM parameters aren't essential if you're only concerned nigh reporting on social media performance in terms of engagement, followers, etc. But if yous want to accept it to the next level, UTM parameters + Google Analytics will give you more precise information on which social media content and channels drive traffic and conversions.

Pro tip: Yous don't need to know how to write code to include them on your social media posts. If y'all apply a social media management platform like Hootsuite, you can automatically generate UTM parameters in seconds.

Acquire more than: Using UTM Parameters for robust social media reporting

Social media analytics tool #4: Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch

Primal benefits: Analyze brand sentiment and customer demographics in existent time, alongside all your other social media performance data

Costless or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: Intermediate to advanced

Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small to big social media teams

Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.

It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and amend client experience.

Bonus: Get a complimentary social media analytics study template that shows you lot the most important metrics to track for each network.

Get the free template now!

Brand sentiment dashboard in Hootsuite Insights showing spike in negative sentiment

Information technology as well analyzes data about your audience demographics like gender, location, and linguistic communication. Yous tin can compare demographics across networks, or look at the amass picture of your audience for all networks combined.

This is a tool that really tells yous a lot about your audience — and how they experience about you. It can tell you whether a spike in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it can help you capitalize or avoid either one, respectively.

Request a Demo

Social media analytics tool #5: Brandwatch

Cardinal benefits: Track and analyze data from more than 95 1000000 sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social networks

Free or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring

Brandwatch is a powerful tool with 5 easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:

  • Summary: A high-level view of social conversations about your make, competitors, or keywords.
  • Trends: A written report on the conversations and accounts influencing a specific topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
  • Reputation: A checkup on sentiment trends you might need to monitor or address.
  • Influencers: A report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities relevant to your brand and analyze their action.
  • Competitor comparison: Benchmarking social media data for conversation book, sentiment, and share of voice.

Learn more than: Yous tin can add Brandwatch to your Hootsuite dashboard

Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential accomplish, comments, sentiment, and emotions

Free or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: intermediate to avant-garde

All-time for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers

Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social backdrop, including:

  • Mentions
  • Brand sentiment
  • Of import influencers
  • Author lists

Yous can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.

Talkwalker is peculiarly useful to spot activity peaks in conversations well-nigh your brand. This can help you make up one's mind the all-time times for your make to post on social media.

Acquire more than: Yous tin can add together Talkwalker to your Hootsuite dashboard

Primal benefits: Track how organic and paid social impact real business concern goals and get recommendations for how to improve

Free or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: intermediate to avant-garde

Best for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advertising teams

Hootsuite Touch on provides an in-depth look at the operation of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that functioning to specific business organization goals, similar sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to meliorate your results.

Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your advertizing accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture of your mail and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don't have to gather data from split up tools to create a social media analytics report.

Instead, you see exactly how much acquirement all your social efforts generate, and then you can prove your social ROI. Go along in mind that ROI is non just about sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula developed specifically for your concern. Seeing which of your efforts accept paid off has never been easier.

You'll also get a clear breakdown that shows you exactly how to replicate your successes and better in the areas where you're falling brusque.

Then there's the competitive benchmarks. To become the best insights from social analytics, yous need to understand how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Impact shows how your results stack up confronting your competitors, and so you tin can spot opportunities to better.

Watch this short video to see how Hootsuite Impact works:

Asking a Demo

Primal benefits: Clarify the YouTube performance of multiple channels

Free or paid: Paid tool (gratis for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: all skill levels

Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels

The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.

With this integration, y'all tin analyze your YouTube video and channel operation alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.

Easily encounter the following metrics in 1 place:

  • Views, engagement, subscription activity
  • Video traffic sources
  • Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more

Channelview Insights showing YouTube analytics traffic sources piechart

Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.

Complimentary or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

All-time for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.

Desire to get a big picture show view of what'south being said well-nigh your brand on the internet? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the world of social media monitoring — peculiarly if yous run a global business concern in more than 1 language.

Mentionlytics "Top Website Mentioners" chart

Other things you lot can practise with Mentionlytics:

  • Sentiment assay
  • Detect tiptop influencers that follow yous
  • Filter results by keywords
  • Reply to mentions directly

Key do good: tracks Instagram analytics, including Instagram Story analytics

Free or paid: Paid (or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: All skill levels

Best for: Instagram marketers

Alert all the Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite gratuitous users or pro users who want to get deeper insights on their Stories in particular. (Just download the app from our App Library).

Instagram Analytics in Panoramiq Insights

Among other things, Panoramiq Insights lets y'all:

  • Analyze follower demographics, including age, gender, country, metropolis and language
  • Monitor Instagram account action (for up to two accounts), including views and new followers
  • Detect your best posts with view and appointment analytics
  • Mensurate Story views and interactions

Free social media analytics report template

We've created a free social media analytics template yous tin can use to collect data about your performance on the various social networks. It's a great identify to start if you aren't ready to invest in a tool that will automatically collect data for you. Simply download information technology, make a copy, and start customizing it with your ain data.

social media analytics report template

Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.

For more than information on how to share your analytics information effectively, check out our mail service on how to create a smart and simple social media report.

Runway your social media functioning and maximize your budget with Hootsuite. Publish your posts and analyze the results in the same, like shooting fish in a barrel-to-use dashboard. Attempt information technology free today.

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All your social media analytics in 1 identify. Use Hootsuite to see what's working and where to amend performance.

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