Best Social Media Analytics Tools in 2024

What Is Social Media Analytics Software?

Social media analytics software helps businesses in tracking their social media activities. It collects data from multiple social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more for analysis, which helps in making data-driven decisions and improving marketing strategies. It is mainly used by social media marketing and other digital marketing professionals for identifying engagement opportunities, understanding the target audience and demographics, and analyzing the effectiveness of a social media campaign.

The software can also do sentiment analysis and track the latest trends and interaction patterns as per customers' online activities and conversations. Moreover, data researchers and data scientists also use this software to collect information about regions, tendencies, and practices.

Why Use Social Media Analytics Software?

Here are four important reasons for using social media marketing analytics tools for your business.

• Finding the Best Time to Post: Using social media analytics to understand your target audience can help in devising better strategies. For instance, when you analyze your older posts, it can help you in analyzing the ideal time to publish content. If you post at a time when most of your followers are online, it'll drive more traffic, engagement, and conversions.
• Choosing the Right Social Media Channels: Just because Instagram has more than 1 billion users doesn't mean that it'll give you the desired results. It is possible that smaller social media channels like Flickr or Pinterest might give you a better outcome. This social media analytics software allows you to measure sales, traffic, and engagement. The data can be used to focus on those networks that are giving you the best outcome for your efforts.
• Creating Better Content: The data in hand can help you in understanding what type of content gives the best results. On channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, you'll be able to check which articles, posts, videos or links are working as per the expectation.
• Tracking Social Media Campaigns: Social media analytics software lets you analyze the performance of your social media campaigns. Once the campaign is launched, you can keep a tab on it to check if it's working according to your expectations. If things are not going as per the plan, you can modify.

How Does Social Media Analytics Software Work?

Social media reporting software works by collecting and analyzing data from several social media channels and providing in-depth insights about the performance of both organic and paid social media campaigns. It uses statistical models and algorithms to provide comprehensive insights to the users. All the data you get keeps you on track to achieve your social media marketing goals.

It also helps you see how your social media efforts are contributing toward your overall business goals. The platform allows you to monitor the social media handles for your brand mentions, check related keywords and track the likes, shares, comments, mentions, and discussions about your products and services

Key Features of Social Media Analytics Software

Here are some noteworthy features of Social Media Analytics Software:

• Live Monitoring: The first important feature of social media software is live or real time monitoring of social media channels. You can track keywords, hashtags, and any relevant mentions of your brand. This helps in staying updated with your social media campaigns and their performance. Moreover, it also allows you to send prompt replies to your target audience.
• Data Collection & Analytics: This software can collect data from multiple social media handles like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and more. Then the tool helps in creating performance reports as per different parameters so that you can find which campaign is working and which one needs to be stopped or modified.
• Data Export: Sometimes, you might want to include the social media data in an official presentation or share it with the top management via email or add it in a spreadsheet. The reporting functionality of social media analytics tool allows you to compile raw post data into boardroom-ready report formats or CSV to Google Slides, PowerPoint or PDF doc.
• Sentiment Analysis: The social analytics software gives you an opportunity to keep a tab on online conversations about your brand and your competitors. Owing to sentiment analytics feature, you can understand how people feel about your products & services. It also gives you an idea of how the online conversation by your team affects your audience's perception and their brand loyalty.
• Competitive Benchmarking: This method is used for social media benchmarking, where businesses analyse and compare campaign performance with other companies in the domain or even outside the industry. By using this feature, you can adapt or adjust your strategy according to your competitors. It also allows you to tap into their audience to increase engagement and followers.

Benefits of Using Social Media Analytics Software

Let's look at some prominent reasons for using social media analytics tools for your organization:

• Understand your audience: If you want to ensure the success of your campaigns, then it is extremely important to understand the behaviour and attitude of your business. You should also understand what your target audience wants and what type of social media posts grab their attention. When you use social media data analytics tools, you get detailed analysis that can be used to implement successful engagement strategies. You can also use the software to segregate your audience as per their demography, interests, hobbies, education, etc.
• Create strategies that work: It is almost impossible to formulate the best social media plan on the first attempt. However, with media analytics software, you can optimize social media strategies and eliminate the procedures that are not giving the desired results. The software also assists in gauging the impact of your organic and paid campaigns, and it lets you connect with the audience in a better manner.
• Improve engagement: Social media reporting tools provide comprehensive insights into what customers want from your company. You can use behavioural analysis to get a better understanding of how your social media effort is being received by the audience, which enables you to alter the campaigns as per requirement. This analysis is also essential for branding purposes and building the company’s reputation.
• Beat the competition: You need to check what your competitors are doing on various social media platforms and what consumers are saying about their offerings. Using the best social media analytics tools, you can find out why a specific software by one of your competitors is getting more popularity on social media platforms.This extensive information allows you to build a disruptive product or service to stay ahead of your competition. By being a disruptor, you'll not only beat your competition, but also create social media campaigns that will engage your customers.

Social Media Analytics Software Trends

• Integration with other tools: Nowadays, most mid-scale to large-scale organizations have been using multiple data social media analytics tools but want to unify their data findings with other key performance indicators. Therefore, in recent times data integration has become one of the most demanded features of analytics tools.
• Social media analytics with business intelligence: There is a drastic surge in the initiatives to integrate this form of marketing with business intelligence. Soon there'll be a time when BI will be able to train artificial intelligence and run boolean searches like many other social media tools are doing now.
• Social media analytics to improve SEO: Search engine optimization is one of the most critical digital marketing aspects as it allows your products and services to be visible on search engines. In recent times, SEO no longer depends on simple keyword research, but also requires various ranking strategies. By using social media tools, marketers can crawl social media channels as well as blogs, images, videos, articles or any other mentions of the brand on the entire web. You can also convert brand mentions into links.
• Social media analytics for brand reputation: Maintaining your brand reputation is directly correlated with the success of your business and its revenue, hence you must be aware of what social media users are saying about your brand. Customers today read product or service reviews before making a buying decision and prefer those brands that actively respond to customer reviews. With the help of a social media analytics tool, you can track comments, mentions, and good or bad reviews and immediately respond to have a positive impact on your target audience.

Sentiment analysis, AI-powered platforms and other comprehensive features of social media reporting tools allow you to effectively handle community management with aplomb.

10 Social Media Analytics Software

Software	Features	Best For
Social Status	nfluencer analytics, Social reports, Ad analytics	Social media analytics and reporting
Iconosquare	Page performance, Post performance, Historical data	Tracking all social media metrics in one place
Brand24	Influence score, Sentiment analysis, Mentions feed	Get real-time mentions of your brand and evaluate the results of marketing campaign
SocialInsider	Real-time insights, Downloadable reports, Google data studio integration	Getting a bird eye view of a brand’s social media performance across all platforms
CloudSocial	Social media calendar management, Ad manager, Exhaustive dashboard	Monitoring and managing all social networks in one place
Unmetric	AI Powered, Automated reporting, Competitive benchmarking	Comparing, analyzing and benchmarking of your social performance
Quintly	Advanced analytics, Easy integration	Measuring cross-network KPIs & campaigns
Sprout Social	Social data and analytics, Publishing and scheduling	Cross-channel social media analytics
social Blade	Campaign analytics, Engagement tracking	Provides Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch statistics
Viralyft	Page insights, Like rank score, Content portal page	For analysing and improving Facebook performance

How to Find the Best Social Media Analytics Software?

Results you want from your software

First, you should ask yourself the following questions. What do you want to accomplish with the help of social media reporting software? What goals do we need to fulfil? Do we want to increase engagement, brand awareness, and website traffic, generate leads or drive sales?

All these questions will give you a clear picture of your goals and the actual reason for buying software. It'll also help you in choosing the software that helps you in fulfilling your team's requirements.

All social media tools excel at certain things. And if you’re not sure what your goals are and what you want to accomplish, it may be a bit challenging to find the right tool for the job.

Social media listening and monitoring

Your social media tool should be able to track and analyse the buzz around your organization, brand, and competition. You must be able to listen in and look for the latest trends in the behaviours and moods of your audience. It should come with the ability to analyse hashtags, listen to your competitors, and track your influencers. Look for software that offers the feature to analyse data across various platforms and in various languages.

Main features of your software

The next step is to understand what features you need and which ones you don’t. Start with writing the top 20 most critical social media features you think might be required. Review your list and focus on the top 5 most essential features. This list will give you a clear idea of what to look for in social media software and it’ll also make it easier for you to compare different platforms.

Integration with other tools and applications

You should look check if you'll be able to integrate it with your current tools or applications and if there are any charges for integrating it with third-party software.

Dedicated social media marketing analytics

You'll never know if you're going in the right direction or not unless you measure your social media efforts. Therefore, you should consider choosing the software that shows statistics and trends for engagement, growth, follower count, and impressions. Content-specific analytics should be there to help you identify the most and least popular pieces of content.

It should also offer a publishing analytics feature to determine the best time to post your content so that you can get the best engagement or reach a larger audience. In addition, you should also be able to save or export the data for further analysis.