The 8 Best Social Media Analytics Tools for Marketers in 2020

These days, businesses across 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 all.

In-depth knowledge about the status and success of your social media marketing will offer actionable insight into things like 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 with just that.

Social Media Analytics

In this blog post, we’ll review the importance of social media analytics and some great options to help you measure your social media marketing success.

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What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics is the process of gathering, analyzing, and applying data, information, and reports related to the content shared on your social profiles and the social profiles themselves.

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.
• Boost 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

1. Identify which social media platforms you’ll be measuring impact on (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram).
2. Determine which metrics you’re doing to track (e.g. clicks, impressions, likes, shares).
3. Choose a time period to analyze (e.g. last quarter, last month, last week, duration of your campaign).
4. Determine which tools you’ll use to track and measure success (we’ll cover your options in the next section).
5. Review and analyze your data (depending on your tool of choice, there may be internal features to help you understand and analyze your data — such as this one with HubSpot).
6. Apply your findings and conclusions to improve growth in the future.

1. HubSpot Social Media Software

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HubSpot provides a deep look into the way social media impacts your bottom line and gives you the ability to report on social media ROI. View and compare performance across different platforms, campaigns, and publishing times — all from a single tool.

Monitor your brand on social to understand how your target audience perceives your business and content. Additionally, YouTube Reports provide insight into how your audience and buyer persona’s engage with your videos. Lastly, effectively reach certain audiences by using data and context from the Contacts in your CRM (which this social tool integrates seamlessly with).

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2. Sprout Social

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Sprout Social is a social media planning service with expansive analytics and reports that help you understand the performance of all of your social accounts.

Configure and customize reports and metrics to help you scale your your business’s presence on social. And if you’re a HubSpot customer, integrate your CRM with Sprout Social to collect and view accurate reports all in one place.

3. Falcon.io

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Falcon.io is a social media marketing platform for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram with analytics and community engagement capabilities.

Create an overview of cross-platform metrics and KPIs to determine which of your strategies are working best. Customizable dashboards update in real-time to give insight into your performance on your profiles. And with pre-existing templates, these customizable dashboards are easy to create and implement.

Lastly, integrate Falcon.io with your HubSpot CRM to sync customer data for your social campaigns, create custom and lookalike audiences, and offer customer service all via the tool.

4. Mailchimp

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Mailchimp is a full-service marketing platform that offers analytics for social media ads. It’s easy to use for small marketing teams and requires little time to pour over the accompanying analytics.

With Mailchimp, you’ll have an audience dashboard, which is a page dedicated to understanding audience behavior. Additionally, the software offers tools to look into smart targeting and mobile integrations. These tools can diversify a social strategy and deliver higher engagement numbers by helping you create content that specific audiences will respond to.

5. Databox

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Databox is an expansive analytics platform that lets you set and track social media campaign goals. It’s a good choice for businesses that have many contacts, social accounts, campaign goals, and target audiences.

Customize metrics that matter most to your campaign or social channels for your reports. Any integration you have, such as HubSpot, will be visible from your dashboard as well.

6. Grow

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Grow users gain full visibility into engagement on all of the social accounts. The tool integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook, Marketo, and Microsoft Office so you can view all data in one place.

Grow breaks down complex data into graphs and visuals, and your social reports are easily sharable which is helpful if multiple people are working on the same project. Grow’s reports are built with metrics chosen by the user — meaning, you can customize reports in a way that works for your needs.

7. ActiveCampaign

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ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software with social media features including reporting. You can connect Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other platforms to gather insights related to performance.

Since you’ll have both social media and email metrics in one place, this is a good option for businesses with a heavy email marketing focus. Additionally, ActiveCampaign’s reports track what contacts do after they click through to your site. Further, if you’re a HubSpot customer, the software integrates with your CRM.

8. CoSchedule

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CoSchedule gathers social network, campaign, and engagement data for your profiles and compiles that real-time data into reports.

On your dashboard, compare multiple campaigns to determine the 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).

Choose a Social Media Analytics Tool

Ultimately, choosing the right social media analytics tools for your business shouldn’t be a stressful process. The tools should align with your business goals and deliver the metrics you need to be successful. So review the options above 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.

Originally published Nov 9, 2020 10:00:00 PM, updated November 10 2020