There is a popular saying “Practice makes men perfect”. Let’s add another phrase to it. The access to the right and relevant information at the right time makes practice perfect. Both the statements are complementary to each other and always go hand in hand.
It does not matter how hard your social marketing team work day in day out, without a proper data-driven strategic decision making system in place, achieving success in a social media campaign is difficult. As a marketer, you not only need to excel in dynamic analysis of a pool of marketing data, but also have an easy and regular access to the KPIs for continuous follow ups.
Visual representation of social KPIs, trend charts and custom reports, therefore, are of paramount importance to social media marketers today.
How confident are you about excavating relevant social media data with minimum effort and using them to your business benefits? Are you using the right social media analytics tools that track, evaluate and improve your social media performance? The success or failure of your social media presence depends on certain key factors as follows:
- The features and capabilities of social analytics tools you use for your campaign
- Identification of the right social KPIs and metrics that you want to measure and improve
- Constant monitoring, benchmarking and competitive analysis of tool generated data
In this article we outline some useful social media analytics tools that can manage the end-to-end analytical job for your social media accounts. Feel free to give these bunch of tools a try and let’s see what great insights you can find using them.
Quintly
The more we know about the analytical capability of this tool, the better. Quintly specializes in professional social media analytics and it does only that – to the best of your requirements for social KPIs measurement. With quintly you can manage all your social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google Analytics, Instagram as well as your blog together and track their social performances over a period of time.
The custom dashboard section of quintly makes it a powerful reporting and visualization interface to social media account managers. Quintly’s extensive range of built-in KPIs and metrics (more than 250 metrics) makes it a widely accepted analytics platform for measuring social performance across a variety of networks.
Another useful feature of this tool – competitive benchmarking allows you to strategize the areas of improvement and helps you learn what works and what doesn’t for your campaign. There is a bunch of other key features of this tool which you will learn by signing up for a free account with them.
Simply Measured
This powerful social analytics tool excels in competitive analysis and benchmarking of social performance data derived from different social channels. The derived data helps you compare your account performance against that of competitors. With influencer and trend analysis reports from Simply Measured, you can find out the key influencers that you need to connect to and converse with. Their reporting engine produces excellent excel reports that are not simply graphs exported to an excel file. Each report contains multiple sheets containing the underlying data that back up the graph. This signifies that you can further drill down the graphs, change the existing data in them and generate predictive results for decision making.
Marketers can also benefit from other features of this tool such as scheduled email alerts for brand, keyword and hashtag monitoring, automated reports delivery and multi-channel account analysis.
Hootsuite
Similar to quintly, Hootsuite is another favorite social media management tool to many. Over 10+ million professionals trust Hootsuite. The tool enables you to manage all your social accounts in a central place, schedule posts for publishing as well as gives you actionable social media insights. With Hootsuite it is easy to measure clicks, retweets, various social mentions and social influencers by their demographic details. On top of it, the marketers can tag certain messages to specific social campaigns and analyze the value, volume, and sentiment attached to their content through custom reports.
Google Analytics
Whatever good we say about Google Analytics, is always less than what it can actually do. It is one of the most widely used and free social analytics tools that measures the value of traffic coming through various social channels and tracks every aspect of users’ behavior on your site. Once you are in the GA dashboard, navigate through Acquisition > Social menu and then dig out the visit details from each of the major social networks. With GA tracking enabled you can also experience the direct impact of social media activities on your conversion goals and paths.
SumAll
With SumAll you can connect all your major social accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn together in a single platform and track each of the accounts’ performance in a web based dashboard. This analytics tool allows you to see your social media followers, understand your followers and target them using intuitive interface. The best part is that you get scheduled daily or weekly emails with resourceful insights. Their reporting and insights features boast of actionable and data-driven guidelines that help improve your campaign results.
Oktopost
Oktopost helps you measure everything, from clicks to conversions, and beyond. With its social acquisition dashboard you can easily identify which channels prove more effective, why so, and what type of messages drive better results for your business. The engagement dashboard of Oktopost allows you to view engagement metrics through visually appealing charts. This helps you build attractive content for your followers and thus gain traction for your growing audience. The great thing is that you can export all the engagement metrics in an easy-to-use format for additional analysis, whether through an excel report or enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) solutions.
Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard application that connects several marketing tools to provide you with actionable statistics. Their social media analytics section enables you integrate all the major social networks and derive individual reports for all the social accounts you manage or follow. The tool gives you a quick snapshot of all social accounts and their performance chart over time.
Socedo
Socedo is more popular as a social media prospect filtering tool to marketers. It allows you to add custom criteria for qualifying social leads through predefined engagement workflow. The bottom line is that, with Socedo, you can find active social prospects who match with your desired criteria of lead conversions, and then build a pool of it for further nurturing and growth monitoring.
Keyhole
With Keyhole you can measure social impact of a brand on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Using Keyhole’s intuitive dashboard you can easily track keywords, hashtags, and URLs real-time, and monitor key performance indicators of your campaign such as audience reach, impressions, and period of high interactions. To leverage the benefits of this tool, identify the best-performing social accounts in your industry, monitor their content type by analyzing keywords and hashtags and re-create and re-share the content through your network.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers acts like a social media suite comprising of an analytics section, social media management features, and monitoring functionalities. Their analytics module also facilitates in competitive benchmarking across a range of popular social platforms. You can add top performing Facebook or Twitter social media pages to your Socialbakers account and drill down to view analytics for each social account of the brands.
The intuitive dashboard allows you to track your competitors’ profiles, their performance on social media channels and then produce graphical reports in PDF format. You will be amazed to know that Socialbakers track over 8 million profiles every day and over 86 billion social connections across all profiles.
Conclusion
This post doesn’t aim at rating any particular tool as all of them are good to their own abilities. However, you, as a marketer deserve to try at least 6 to 8 different tools before coming to the final verdict. As your focus to analytics data becomes more targeted and you find results are forthcoming, some platforms will automatically emerge as your favorites. Until then, keep exploring the uniqueness of those tools and see them contributing to your analytical job.
A Note for Your Consideration
Preparing the entire list of social analytics tools out there in the web is next to impossible for anyone, I believe, and so is showing them altogether in a particular post. However, after using the above popular and useful social analytics tools, I expect you will not ask for anything more. You are still welcome to add names of any new analytics tools that you have used for your brand or have heard of in the comments section below. Any suggestion related to choosing good social analytics tools from the audience is highly appreciated.
Images: ”Author’s Own“
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