The following includes a list of free tools to analyze various aspects of social media posts. The tools listed here can be used to help you find out where your visitors are coming from and how well your marketing efforts are performing
Individuals, businesses, and universities can use professionally designed social media analysis tools for free. Just sign up for a free account, and you’ll have access to the web tool that generates reports based on metrics like sentiment score, gender distribution, and top hashtags. No credit card required.
Why you need social media analytics tools
Social media analytics tools help you create performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss — to figure out what’s working and what’s not. They should also provide the data you need to assess your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.
They can help you answer questions like:
- Is it worth it for my business to keep posting on Pinterest?
- What were our top posts on LinkedIn this year?
- Should we post more on Instagram next month?
- Which network drove the most brand awareness for our product launch?
- What kind of posts do my followers like to comment on?
- And many more.
Hootsuite Analytics
Key benefits: Performance data from every social network in one place with easy-to-understand 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 management platforms have built-in analytics tools. We hope you’ll forgive us for saying Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are our favorite. But it’s the tool we know and love best.
Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.
Social posts metrics:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Reach
- Engagement rate
- Impressions
- Shares
- Saves
- Video views
- Video reach
- And more
Profile metrics:
- Follower growth over time
- Negative feedback rate
- Profile visits
- Reactions
- Overall engagement rate
- And more
Best time to post recommendations:
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one 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 Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Link clicks
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:
- Customize report templates for only the metrics you care about
- Get reports on your competitors
- Track 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 business to avoid PR disasters before they happen
Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite professional plan, with you can try for free for 30 days.
Buffer Analyze
Buffer Analyze is our social media analytics tool for online brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling overwhelmed.
3 cool features:
- Instagram Stories analytics
- Posting strategy recommendations
- Create professional reports in as few as two clicks
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Overview and charts for key metrics
- Posts and Stories analytics
- Audience insights
- Answers
- Easy-to-use report builder
Pricing options: $35 and $50 per month
Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that automatically collects social media data & creates reports for you. It excels at four key things:
- Getting you inside the minds of your customers.
- Simplifying your reporting — so you can easily share results with your team.
- Showing you what attracts your consumers’ attention.
- Saving you a huge amount of time — as you don’t have to crawl different social platforms looking for and reporting your social analytics.
These are critical features to look out for when making social media analytics software comparisons.
As Neil Patel says, “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”
The tool shows you when your users are most active, so you get to see your audience’s best engagement days and times.
Using Keyhole, you can find, identify, track, and reach out to your influencers:
You can also conduct a detailed and in-depth sentiment analysis of social media posts over time:
With Keyhole, you get to see the number of impressions, reach, posts, and engagements that certain accounts or hashtags are getting. You are also able to identify key influencers who get the highest engagement rates and the number of followers in specific industries and reach out to them right from the tool.
And if you ever want to know the demographics of your hashtag users or account interactors or followers, Keyhole shows you those as well — including the percentage of positive and negative sentiments of your followers.
Also, Keyhole customers can publish and schedule unlimited posts each month from all the accounts included in their plan. Managing anywhere from 3 accounts to unlimited accounts depending on your needs.
Pricing: Custom pricing for businesses of all sizes.
Agorapulse
AgoraPulse is one of the greatest social media analytics tools that helps you identify your best content and see what users need. And we all know that social media sucks time like a plague… But AgoraPulse is good medicine for it.
This tool is a huge timesaver for social media marketers. It helps you execute virtually all your social media tasks in one place.
Pro: You’ll be impressed by Agorapulse’s Twitter reporting functionality. The tool generates specific reports for your Tweets, mentions, retweets, and favorites as well as other engagement stats. This makes social listening pretty easy for you.
You can also post or schedule content across all your profiles at once. Plus, the tool’s chrome plugin helps you do all this at once — saving you time.
Con: Agorapulse’s listening is only available for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. So, if you’re interested in tracking LinkedIn and Pinterest you’ll have to use another tool.
Pricing ranges from $99 – $199 per month.
Oktopost
Oktopost is focused on helping B2B brands manage, monitor, and measure all of their social media activities from a single platform.
Do you have global social media teams? Manage social media teams in more than one country all from one platform.
Social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions are some of Oktopost’s best features.
You can measure your social media marketing performance and optimize your efforts accordingly.
Pro: One huge Oktopost plus is that you can integrate other applications such as Google Analytics to access even more detailed social media marketing insights.
Also, did you know Oktopost has recently partnered up with Keyhole? Powered by Keyhole, Oktopost now offers advanced social listening capabilities as well as in-depth research and analytics required to remain competitive.
Con: Unfortunately, the platform does not have the ability to cross-post between networks.
Price: Contact Oktopost for pricing.
Snaplytics
The popularity of ephemeral content on social media speaks for itself.
Snaplytics focuses solely on analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The platform looks at metrics such as open and completion rate, allowing brands to see where story engagement peaks and likewise at what point viewers drop off.
The need to optimize story-based content is something that modern brands should overlook at their own peril.
Although Snapchat might have fallen out of favor for some brands, bear in mind that the network still boasts hundreds of million active users among millennials and Gen Z.
Meanwhile, Stories represent one of the most-engaged methods of Instagram promotion. Going beyond native analytics is a smart move for brands who want to craft more compelling Stories or eventually run story-based ads.
Brandwatch
Data is huge these days and BrandWatch is all about it. They set you up with the right industry data to make smart marketing decisions.
Monitoring your brand online has never been easier. BrandWatch provides you with in-depth insights into your target customers’ thinking per time, which makes it super easy to sell to them.
Pro: You can search the Internet for specific conversations about your brand, segment those conversations into categories, and analyze them to spot out critical information. Additionally, they have an image analysis tool that can uncover logos.
Con: Brandwatch can be quite technical for someone new to brand monitoring tools and the query structure can be tedious. However, for someone with medium to expert experience, this is one of the best tools to monitor online brand mentions.
Pricing begins at $1,000 according to PC Mag
Curalate
More and more brands are trying their hands at direct social selling.
Platforms such as Curalate serve as a hybrid storefront and analytics tool for companies looking to maximize their sales from Instagram
Chances are you’ve seen a branded or unbranded “Like2Buy” link in the wild. Major brands like Bose take advantage of Curalate for social sales – take a peek at their Instagram bio.
Upon clicking through, we’re led to a social storefront where users can shop directly.
Curalate’s platform empowers businesses to understand which products score the most clicks and sales. This can directly inform your future campaigns and product strategy as you learn which sort of posts click with customers.
Additionally, Curalate tracks product tags and mentions, making it a cinch to spot and analyze the performance of user-generated content campaigns.
Conclusion
The Brandwatch React platform enables you to track online conversations and analyze them in a variety of ways. There are social media analytics tools that do an excellent job pulling together information from multiple sources and showing it visually.