Wondering which of your social media tactics are working? Want to better focus your time, effort, and upkeep? You need a social media analytics tool.

In this article, nosotros'll cover some of the best free social media analytics tools available, along with some paid options (for the true nerds who want to dive deep on the data and run across real returns).

Then you'll be ready to learn which social media metrics are of import to track.

Non ready to starting time looking for at analytics tools? Get a primer on what social media analytics even is.

Bonus: Go a gratis social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.

Why you demand social media analytics tools

Social media analytics tools help y'all create performance reports to share with your squad, stakeholders, and boss — to figure out what's working and what's non. They should also provide the information you lot need to appraise your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.

They tin help you answer questions like:

  • Is it worth it for my business to keep posting on Pinterest?
  • What were our pinnacle posts on LinkedIn this year?
  • Should we post more on Instagram next calendar month?
  • Which network drove the about brand awareness for our product launch?
  • What kind of posts do my followers similar to annotate on?
  • And many more.

ten of the all-time social media analytics tools

Key benefits: Performance data from every social network in one identify with piece of cake-to-understand reports

Paid or free? Paid tool

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Best for: Business organisation owners who run their ain social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, marketing teams

Most social media management platforms accept 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.

viewing social media analytics on multiple networks in Hootsuite

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, and so you don't accept to check each platform individually.

It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.

Social posts metrics:

  • Clicks
  • Comments
  • Reach
  • Appointment 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 fourth dimension to post recommendations:

Ever spend a agglomeration of time writing and designing a social post only to accept 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 fourth dimension. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are non online or not interested in engaging with you.

This is why our Best Fourth dimension to Publish tool is i of the near popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to mail service based on three different goals:

  1. Engagement
  2. Impressions
  3. Link clicks

Best time to publish feature in Hootsuite Analytics

Most social media analytics tools volition only recommend posting times based on date. Or they'll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique functioning history.

Other absurd things you tin practise with Hootsuite Analytics:

  • Customize report templates for only the metrics you care about
  • Get reports on your competitors
  • Rail the productivity of your social team (response times, and resolution fourth dimension 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 tin try for gratuitous for thirty days.

Learn more in this video or sign up for a Hootsuite Analytics free trial.

Endeavor it for Gratis

Key do good: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels

Paid or free: Free tool

Skill level: all skill levels

Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but particularly those who work for a spider web-based business

You've probably heard of Google Analytics already. That's because it'south ane of the best complimentary tools to utilise to learn about your website visitors. And if you lot're a social marketer who likes to bulldoze traffic to your website, then it's an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.

While it'southward not a social media reporting tool per se, you lot can use it to set up reports that volition aid you:

  • See which social media platforms give y'all the virtually traffic
  • Encounter what content drives the almost leads and traffic on which social networks
  • Get to know your audience with demographic data
  • Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns

Google Analytics dashboard showing sources of traffic for a blog post

With these information points, you'll be able to get the almost out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google analytics.

Learn more than: How to use Google Analytics to track social media success

Key benefit: Come across how much spider web traffic and conversions your social media channels and campaigns generate (to exist used with a spider web analytics platform like Google Analytics).

Paid or gratuitous: Free tool

Skill level: intermediate

Best for: all social media managers

Example of a UTM parameter for sharing a Hootsuite blog post

UTM parameters are non a standalone social media analytics tool, but they are essential in helping you prepare up Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) to all-time mensurate social performance.

Put simply, UTM parameters are short pieces of lawmaking appended to the links you share on social media. They very precisely tell y'all how many people interact with your content and finish up on your website.

In the screenshot in a higher place, the UTM parameter is everything that comes after the question mark.

UTM parameters aren't essential if you lot're simply concerned about reporting on social media performance in terms of engagement, followers, etc. Just if you want to take it to the next level, UTM parameters + Google Analytics will give you more precise data on which social media content and channels drive traffic and conversions.

Pro tip: You don't need to know how to write code to include them on your social media posts. If you use a social media management platform like Hootsuite, you tin automatically generate UTM parameters in seconds.

Larn more: Using UTM Parameters for robust social media reporting

Social media analytics tool #4: Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch

Key benefits: Clarify brand sentiment and customer demographics in existent time, alongside all your other social media functioning data

Free or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: Intermediate to advanced

Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small-scale to large social media teams

Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.

Information technology goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so yous can mensurate social sentiment and improve customer experience.

Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows y'all the most of import metrics to track for each network.

Go the complimentary template at present!

Brand sentiment dashboard in Hootsuite Insights showing spike in negative sentiment

It also analyzes data nearly your audience demographics like gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics beyond networks, or await at the amass moving picture of your audience for all networks combined.

This is a tool that actually tells yous a lot about your audience — and how they experience near you. It can tell y'all whether a fasten in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it tin assist yous capitalize or avoid either one, respectively.

Request a Demo

Social media analytics tool #v: Brandwatch

Central benefits: Track and analyze data from more than than 95 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well every bit social networks

Free or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on appointment and brand monitoring

Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five like shooting fish in a barrel-to-use social media analytics written report templates:

  • Summary: A loftier-level view of social conversations about your brand, competitors, or keywords.
  • Trends: A report on the conversations and accounts influencing a specific topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
  • Reputation: A checkup on sentiment trends you might need to monitor or address.
  • Influencers: A written report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities relevant to your brand and analyze their activeness.
  • Competitor comparison: Benchmarking social media information for conversation volume, sentiment, and share of voice.

Learn more: You can add Brandwatch to your Hootsuite dashboard

Fundamental benefits: Monitor conversations from more 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions

Complimentary or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: intermediate to avant-garde

Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers

Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:

  • Mentions
  • Make sentiment
  • Important influencers
  • Author lists

You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.

Talkwalker is particularly useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the all-time times for your make to post on social media.

Learn more: You can add Talkwalker to your Hootsuite dashboard

Central benefits: Track how organic and paid social bear on real business goals and go recommendations for how to meliorate

Complimentary or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: intermediate to advanced

All-time for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advert teams

Hootsuite Affect provides an in-depth await at the performance of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that performance to specific business goals, similar sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to improve your results.

Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture show of your postal service and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don't have to assemble data from separate tools to create a social media analytics written report.

Instead, you lot run across exactly how much revenue all your social efforts generate, so you lot can prove your social ROI. Keep in listen that ROI is not simply well-nigh sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula adult specifically for your business. Seeing which of your efforts accept paid off has never been easier.

You'll also get a clear breakup that shows you lot exactly how to replicate your successes and ameliorate in the areas where yous're falling short.

Then in that location'southward the competitive benchmarks. To become the all-time insights from social analytics, you need to sympathize how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Touch on shows how your results stack up against your competitors, so you can spot opportunities to meliorate.

Lookout man this short video to see how Hootsuite Impact works:

Asking a Demo

Key benefits: Clarify the YouTube performance of multiple channels

Complimentary or paid: Paid tool (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: all skill levels

All-time for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel aslope other social channels

The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.

With this integration, you tin can clarify your YouTube video and aqueduct performance alongside all your other social media channels. You lot tin also schedule automatic, regular reports.

Easily see the post-obit metrics in one place:

  • Views, engagement, subscription activity
  • Video traffic sources
  • Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more

Channelview Insights showing YouTube analytics traffic sources piechart

Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment beyond multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.

Free or paid: Paid tool

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

All-time for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at pocket-size to medium-sized businesses.

Desire to get a big picture view of what's being said about your brand on the internet? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the earth of social media monitoring — peculiarly if you run a global business in more than one language.

Mentionlytics "Top Website Mentioners" chart

Other things you lot can practice with Mentionlytics:

  • Sentiment analysis
  • Find top influencers that follow yous
  • Filter results by keywords
  • Reply to mentions directly

Central benefit: tracks Instagram analytics, including Instagram Story analytics

Free or paid: Paid (or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: All skill levels

Best for: Instagram marketers

Alert all the Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite free users or pro users who desire to get deeper insights on their Stories in particular. (Just download the app from our App Library).

Instagram Analytics in Panoramiq Insights

Amidst other things, Panoramiq Insights lets you:

  • Analyze follower demographics, including age, gender, land, urban center and language
  • Monitor Instagram business relationship activeness (for up to two accounts), including views and new followers
  • Find your best posts with view and engagement analytics
  • Measure Story views and interactions

Free social media analytics written report template

We've created a complimentary social media analytics template you can employ to collect information virtually your performance on the various social networks. Information technology'due south a cracking place to showtime if you aren't ready to invest in a tool that volition automatically collect data for you lot. Simply download information technology, make a copy, and kickoff customizing it with your own data.

social media analytics report template

Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows y'all the most important metrics to track for each network.

For more data on how to share your analytics data effectively, bank check out our mail on how to create a smart and simple social media report.

Track your social media functioning and maximize your upkeep with Hootsuite. Publish your posts and analyze the results in the same, like shooting fish in a barrel-to-apply dashboard. Endeavour information technology free today.

Get Started

All your social media analytics in ane place. Employ Hootsuite to come across what's working and where to better performance.

Try it for Free