These days, businesses in every industry are investing in social media marketing. But no matter how great your social media content is or how many people follow your accounts, you won’t be able to grow your audience, reach and presence if you don’t understand the data behind it.

In-depth knowledge of your social media marketing status and success will provide actionable insight into things such as which strategies should remain in place and what you should change or experiment with in order to grow. Social media analytics tools are able to help you.
In this post, we cover the following:
social media analytics
In this blog post, we’ll review the importance of social media analytics and some of the best options to help you measure your social media marketing success.
Get certified in social media strategy with this free course.
What is social media analytics?
social media analytics The process of collecting, analyzing and applying data, information and reports relating to your Social Profile and the content shared on the Social Profile itself.
Why use Social Media Analytics?
With social media analytics, you can:
- Understand the metrics that matter most to your team and business, such as engagement, reposts, shares, clicks, impressions, and sessions.
- Identify effective ways to boost brand awareness and reach.
- Resonate with your audience.
- Increase traffic to your other content and website.
- Increase conversions.
- Improve customer loyalty.
How to track social media analytics
Here are the steps involved in tracking social media analytics
- identify Which social media platforms You will be measuring influence on (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram).
- determine which metrics What you are doing to track (eg clicks, impressions, likes, shares).
- Select a time period to analyze (eg last quarter, last month, last week, duration of your campaign).
- Determine what tools you will use to track and measure success (we’ll cover your options in the next section).
- Review and analyze your data (depending on your tool of choice, there may be built-in features to help you understand and analyze your data — such as it’s with hubspot,
- Apply your findings and conclusions to improve future development.
Best Social Media Analytics Tools
- hubspot
- Sprout Social
- Falcon.io
- MailChimp
- social status
- databox
- Grow
- active campaign
- CoSchedule
1. hubspot social media software
Get Started with HubSpot Social Media Analytics
HubSpot provides a deeper look at how social media affects your bottom line and gives you the ability to report on social media ROI. View and compare performance across platforms, campaigns, and publication times — all from one tool.
Monitor your brand on social to understand how your target audience is viewing your business and content. Additionally, the YouTube reports provide insight into how your viewers and buyer personas engage with your videos. Finally, effectively reach certain audiences using data and context from Contact in you crm (which is seamlessly integrated with this social tool).
Feature Highlights: Social Campaign Publisher, Social Mention Monitoring, Social Report
Get certified in social media strategy with this free course.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media planning service with detailed analytics and reports that help you understand the performance of all your social accounts.
Configure and customize reports and metrics to help you grow your business presence on social. And if you’re a HubSpot customer, Integrate your CRM with Sprout Social All in one place to aggregate and view accurate reports.
Feature Highlights: Competitor comparison tools Integrated publishing and engagement tools Social listening
3. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence tool and social media management solution with analytics capabilities.
Social insights such as social listening and competitor benchmarking can inform your content creation. You can get a better understanding of the audience engaging with your social content with the Audience Profile card. View key data in one place with customizable dashboards.
Feature Highlights: Audience profile card, customizable dashboard
4. MailChimp
Mailchimp is a full-service marketing platform that provides analytics for social media ads. It’s easy to use for small marketing teams and requires little time to put together the analytics that accompany it.
With Mailchimp, you’ll have an audience dashboard, a page dedicated to understanding audience behavior. Additionally, the software provides tools to look into smart targeting and mobile integration. These tools can diversify a social strategy and deliver higher engagement numbers by helping you create content that specific audiences respond to.
Feature Highlights: Content optimizer with AI-backed suggestions, Content Studio for managing digital assets
5. social status
Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics tool with robust reporting features. The platform comprehensively covers Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Social Status Reports can be fully customized and white-labeled to make them perfect for agencies and brands with complex needs. Reports can be exported to PDF, PowerPoint and Google Slides. The tool also covers paid and organic performance, competitive benchmarking, and influencer campaign tracking in one powerful social analytics tool.
Feature Highlights: Social media reports across multiple channels, Influencer campaign tracking
6. databox
Databox is a comprehensive analytics platform that lets you set and track social media campaign goals. This is a good option for businesses that have many contacts, social accounts, campaign goals, and target audiences.
Customize your reports with the metrics that matter most to your campaign or social channels. Do you have any integration, like hubspotWill also be visible from your dashboard.
Feature Highlights: Dashboard Designer, Custom Metric Builder
7. Grow
Grow users on all social accounts get full visibility into engagement. integrates with tools hubspotSalesforce, Google Ads, Facebook, Marketo, and Microsoft Office so you can see all your data in one place.
Grow breaks down complex data into graphs and visuals, and your social reports are easily shareable, which is helpful when multiple people are working on the same project. Grow’s reports are built with user-selected metrics – meaning, you can customize the reports in a way that works for your needs.
Feature Highlights: Data Modeling, Dashboard
8. active campaign
Source
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software with social media features including reporting. You can connect with Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other platforms to collect performance related insights.
Since you’ll have both social media and email metrics in one place, this is a great option for businesses with a heavy email marketing focus. Additionally, ActiveCampaign’s reports track what contacts do after clicking through to your site. In addition, if you are a HubSpot customer, the software Integrates with your CRM,
Feature Highlights: Site Tracking, Landing Pages, Reports
9. CoSchedule
CoSchedule collects social network, campaign and engagement data for your profile and compiles that real-time data into reports.
On your dashboard, compare multiple campaigns to determine your evolving ecosystem of audiences. You’ll also be able to see the top fans of your social accounts, making it easier to create targeted content for them (and followers like them).
Feature Highlights: Content Organizer, Dashboard
9. hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media calendar and planner with analytics capabilities. In one streamlined space, you can measure and analyze performance across various social media platforms.
The report suggests the best times to post based on when your audience is most engaged and identifies top performing posts. Pre-built templates make reports customizable and easy to digest.
Feature Highlights: Customizable report template, recommended posting time
10. market voice
If you are a brand, social media is an important tool for e-commerce. According to HubSpot’s Social Media Report50% of survey respondents said that social buying is very important to their overall social media marketing strategy.
Bazaarvoice helps make your content shoppable with their link in bio solution called Like2Buy. You’ll be able to retarget customers who click on links by creating lookalike audiences and segmenting social campaigns. Tools like Showroom turn your content into a storefront. Bazaarvoice also helps measure ROI from your social commerce efforts.
Feature Highlights: Link in Bio Solution, Pop-up Shop
11. buffer
Buffer measures and analyzes how your content performs across different social channels. With Buffer, you’ll be able to gain insight into how your organic content compares to boosted posts, measure engagement for individual posts and stories, and find out the demographics of your audience.
You can also extract data to help you determine the best time to post and optimal posting frequency.
Feature Highlights: Custom reports, updated daily
12. buzzsumo
BuzzSumo helps with social content creation with tools like the Content Analyzer – Using the Content Analyzer, you will be able to find out which topics receive the greatest engagement, broken down by platform.
BuzzSumo can also analyze the social engagement your content has received. This way, you’ll be able to see the number of shares from each platform and use this insight to determine what content to focus on in the future.
Feature Highlights: Keyword tool Real-time view of trends Content analyzer
Choose a Social Media Analytics Tool
Ultimately, choosing the right social media analytics tool for your business shouldn’t be a stressful process. The tools should align with your business goals and provide the metrics you need to be successful. So review the above options and choose the right one for your business.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.