11 Best Tools to measure social media engagement
Do you want to allocate your time, resources, and money more wisely as a social media marketer? New social media analytics tools are long overdue!
Social media is now an essential component of marketing plans for both individuals and companies in the current digital era. But it’s not enough to just be present on social media; you also need to know how well your content connects with your audience. This is the point at which participation on social media matters. By assessing engagement, you can determine how effective your content is and use that information to inform data-driven decisions that will enhance your social media strategy.
If your social media agency manages several clients and encourages frequent posting, there’s a possibility you won’t meet your return on investment goals. It won’t help much to post content mindlessly without first examining the insights into the behaviour, preferences, and trends of your audience. To make data-driven decisions and gain a better understanding of your audience, you need social media analytics tools.
What is the need for social media analytics software?
Software called social media analytics tools is made to assist you in analysing the information obtained from social media platforms in order to further your business objectives. These tools let you keep an eye on your engagement levels, identify trends, and calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your social media marketing initiatives.
Using social media analytics tools, you can identify what’s and isn’t working for your team, stakeholders, and boss by creating performance reports. They ought to offer you the historical information you require in order to evaluate your social media marketing plan on a macro and micro level.
Tools for social media analytics can assist you in addressing queries such as:
- Does continuing to post content on Pinterest make sense for my business?
- Which LinkedIn posts were the most popular this year?
- What should we post on Instagram the following month?
- Which network helped our product launch generate the most brand awareness?
- Which posts are most popular for my followers to leave comments on?
and a tonne more.
For example, see how the Hootsuite team uses social media analytics on a daily basis by watching this video:
Top 10 Best Tools to measure social media engagement
1. | Locobuzz |
2. | Google Analytics |
3. | Hootsuite |
4. | Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch |
5. | Rival IQ |
6. | Mentionlytics |
7. | Panoramic Insights |
8. | Channelview Insights |
9. | Talkwalker |
10. | Keyhole |
11. | Brandwatch |
Locobuzz
Main advantage: To assist you in reaching your social media objectives and enhancing the visibility of your brand, Locobuzz offers extensive social media listening and monitoring features.
Free/Paid | Free for 14 days |
Cost per month | – |
Proficiency level | All skill levels combined |
You can use this tool for:
- Real-time listening on various platforms
- enhanced knowledge of audiences and influencers
- Measurement of social media campaigns
- Utilise competitive benchmarking to stay one step ahead.
- Adapt your international business plan.
Locobuzz uses advanced machine learning algorithms to enrich every single conversation in real-time with a series of attributes like an influencer, topic, location, gender, sentiment, priority, toxicity, etc. Locobuzz helps you get instant powerful analytics for any topic filtered by language, influencers, demography, location etc. The real-time powerful insights help you to identify thought leaders, brand ambassadors, and detractors, and allows you to develop a complete understanding of your brand’s social health.
Using cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, Locobuzz adds a variety of attributes—such as an influencer, topic, location, gender, sentiment, priority, toxicity, etc.—to each and every conversation in real-time. With Locobuzz, you can instantly obtain insightful analytics on any topic, filtered by factors like location, language, influencers, and demographics. You can identify thought leaders, brand ambassadors, and critics with the real-time powerful insights, which also give you a comprehensive picture of your brand’s social health.
With the help of this platform’s sophisticated social media analytics reports and automated alerts, you can enhance your real-time social media marketing and engagement strategy. Analyse your social media campaigns with ease.
Elevate your social media game and track essential metrics effortlessly with Locobuzz
Google Analytics
Main advantage: Track the amount of leads and traffic that arrive at your website from your social media accounts.
Free/Paid | Free |
Cost per month | – |
Proficiency level | Google Analytics should be known to all social media professionals, but it’s especially important for those who work for online companies. |
This tool isn’t just for social media; it can give you detailed information about all the sources of traffic to your website, including social media referrals. You can monitor user activities like page views, time spent on the site, and conversions from social media.
Most likely, you’ve already heard of Google Analytics. This is due to the fact that it’s among the greatest free resources for gathering visitor data for your website. Additionally, it’s a very useful tool to have on hand if you enjoy using social media to promote your website.
Although it’s not specifically a social media reporting tool, you can use it to create reports that will be useful to you to:
- Check out the social media sites that bring in the most traffic for you.
- Examine which content on which social networks generates the most leads and traffic.
- Identify your target with the help of demographic data.
- Determine how much your social media campaigns are worth.
You’ll be able to plan ahead and maximise the impact of your social media campaigns with the help of these data points. Without Google analytics, no social media strategy is comprehensive.
Hootsuite
Principal advantages: Performance information from all social networks in one location with clear reports
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | $13 |
Proficiency level | Beginner to Intermediate |
Ideal for: Marketing teams, small-to medium-sized business social media managers, and business owners who manage their own social media accounts
This comprehensive tool for managing social media provides analytics capabilities to monitor engagement metrics on multiple platforms. Post scheduling, conversation monitoring, and the measurement of important metrics like likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates (CTRs) are all possible with it.
Additional cool features of Hootsuite Analytics include:
- Tailor report templates to the metrics that are important to you.
- Obtain information about your rivals.
- Monitor the response and resolution times for assigned posts, mentions, and comments to get an idea of how productive your social team is.
- Keep an eye out for mentions, comments, and tags pertaining to your company to prevent PR catastrophes before they occur.
In addition, Hootsuite was named the winner of the 2022 MarTech Breakthrough Award for Best Social Media Management Platform Overall!
Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Key benefits: Analyse brand sentiment and customer demographics in real time, alongside all your other social media performance data.
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | $ 739 |
Proficiency level | Intermediate to advanced |
Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small to large social media teams
Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.
It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve customer experience.
Additionally, it examines demographic information about your audience, including language, location, and gender. You can look at the overall audience picture for all networks combined, or you can compare demographics between networks.
This tool provides you with a wealth of information about your audience and their perceptions of you. It can determine if an increase in mentions signals success or failure. And it can assist you in taking advantage of or avoiding each, as appropriate.
Rival IQ
The main advantage is fully customisable reporting that pulls information from all of the main social media platforms.
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | $ 239 |
Proficiency level | Intermediate to advanced |
Ideal for: administrators of social media
With Rival IQ, social media managers can become data scientists without having to worry about obtaining a certification. Major social media platforms’ analytical data, alerts, and customised reports are delivered on-demand by Rival IQ.
With Rival IQ’s comprehensive reporting, performing a competitive analysis or a thorough social media audit is simple. Even better, you can use fully customisable charts, graphics, and dashboards to present your findings to your director, stakeholders, and marketing team directly.
But finding the big picture isn’t the only use for Rival IQ! Extensive social media post analytics enable you to determine which posts are most effective on each platform and why. Find out precisely which factors contributed to success: the hashtags, the post type, the time of day, or the audience on which network. After you have that knowledge, go all in for even greater success!
Mentionlytics
This tool tracks brand mentions on social media sites to give you insight into how your target market views your company. By keeping track of mentions, you can interact with your audience in real time, building a stronger sense of community and increasing engagement overall.
Main advantage: Monitor sentiment, keywords, and mentions on social media and other online platforms in several languages.
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | $69 |
Proficiency level | Beginner to intermediate |
Ideal for: small- to medium-sized business researchers, product marketers, PR and communications teams, and brand monitoring teams.
Do you want to see a broad overview of online conversations surrounding your brand? Mentionlytics is an excellent way to get started with social media monitoring, particularly if you manage a multilingual, international company.
Additional uses for Mentionlytics include:
- Sentiment analysis
- Locate influential people who follow you.
- Use keywords to narrow down results.
- Respond directly to mentions
Panoramic Insights
main advantage: keeps track of Instagram analytics, including data from Instagram Stories.
Free/Paid | Free for Hootsute enterprise users |
Cost per month | – |
Proficiency level | Everyone |
Ideal for: Marketers on Instagram
Notify every Instagram marketer. For Hootsuite users who wish to gain a more in-depth understanding of their Stories in particular, Panoramiq Insights is ideal, whether they are pro or free users.
Among its many features, Panoramiq Insights allows you to:
- Examine the age, gender, country, city, and language of your followers.
- Track the activity of up to two Instagram accounts, such as views and new followers.
- Discover your most popular posts using view and engagement metrics.
- Analyse the interactions and views of the story.
Channelview Insights
Principal advantages: Evaluate various channels’ performance on YouTube.
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | $8 |
Proficiency level | All skill levels combined |
Ideal for: Social media managers who oversee multiple social media accounts, YouTube marketers, and creators
The Hootsuite dashboard now includes YouTube analytics thanks to the Channelview Insights App.
You can evaluate the performance of your YouTube videos and channel in addition to all of your other social media accounts with this integration. Additionally, you can plan for regular, automatic reports.
View the following metrics conveniently in one location:
- Engagement, views, and subscription activity
- sources of video traffic
- Demographic, geographic, acquisition, and other audience insights
Talkwalker
Principal advantages: Track discussions from over 150 million sources to evaluate participation, prospective reach, remarks, attitude, and feelings
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | Custom |
Proficiency level | Intermediate to advanced |
Ideal for: researchers, product marketers, brand monitors, PR and communications teams, social media managers, and
Talkwalker provides social conversation analytics that go beyond the social properties you own, such as:
- Mentions
- Brand sentiments
- significant import influencers
- Writers’ lists
Among other things, you can filter by device, demographics, location, and kind of content.
Talkwalker is particularly helpful for identifying activity peaks in conversations pertaining to your company. This can assist you in figuring out when posting on social media is most beneficial for your brand.
Keyhole
Comprehensive automated social media reports and dashboards for all platforms are the main advantages.
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | $99 |
Proficiency level | Intermediate to advanced |
Ideal for: Businesses and organisations at the enterprise level
- You can report on social media campaigns, brand mentions and interactions, hashtag impact, influencer campaign results, and more with Keyhole. Still, that’s not all!
- You can examine your impressions, reach, share of voice, and even the social media tactics used by your rivals in detail.
- Keyhole’s reporting features enable you to find the right influencers to collaborate with if influencer marketing is a component of your plan.
- The best of all? With Keyhole, you can essentially stop using spreadsheets altogether.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an effective social listening tool that examines conversations surrounding your brand and measures engagement. Understanding the attitudes, fads, and influencers affecting the online presence of your brand is helpful.
Principal advantages: Monitor and evaluate information from over 95 million sources, encompassing social networks, blogs, forums, and review sites.
Free/Paid | Paid |
Cost per month | Custom |
Proficiency level | Beginner to intermediate. |
Ideal for: Public relations and communications departments; social media marketers that prioritise engagement and brand tracking
With these 5 simple-to-use social media analytics report templates, Brandwatch is a potent tool.
- Summary: A high-level perspective of social media discussions pertaining to your company, rivals, or search terms.
- Trends: An analysis of the accounts and discussions driving a particular hashtag or topic, including mentions hourly or minutely.
- Reputation: An assessment of any sentiment patterns you may need to keep an eye on or deal with.
- Influencers: An analysis of their activities and identification of brand-relevant influencer marketing prospects are provided in this report.
- Comparing competitors: Measuring social media data for sentiment, share of voice, and volume of conversation.
Conclusion
Tracking social media activity is essential to evaluating the effectiveness of your website and content marketing plan. These resources provide insightful information that can help you maximise your social media efforts, improve audience interaction, and eventually accomplish your marketing objectives.
It’s best to combine more sophisticated analysis and insights from your competitors’ strategies with more straightforward metrics like reach and impressions that can be gleaned from native apps in order to track social media analytics efficiently.
We’ll go over some of the top free and paid social media analytics tools in this post (for the real nerds who want to delve into the data and see tangible results). Try out these tools to see which ones work best for you and give you the ability to decide on your social media strategy with knowledge.