So, you’re spending hours every week on your social media strategy — crafting clever posts, cringing over hashtags, and desperately trying to prove that one funny TikTok somehow ties back to business results. And yet… you’re lost. You’re drowning in likes and shares with no clue if they actually mean anything (other than validating your pet meme obsession). 🐾💼
A social media strategy is critical because, without one, navigating what’s out there is like trying to steer a ship through a super sucky storm. It keeps your brand’s messaging consistent, efforts focused, and goals measurable. Having a strategy means you’re not throwing content into the void but custom tailoring it to your target audience, timing it for optimal impact, and engaging in ways that build long-term relationships. That’s brand awareness, baby.
For businesses, a well-planned social media strategy identifies where your audience is, how they like to engage, and what resonates most. This translates to stronger brand visibility, a clearer voice, and a better understanding of how to stand out among competitors. It’s not about being on every platform — it’s about being on the right platforms, saying the right things, and doing so with purpose.
Without a solid strategy, you’re not just risking wasted time and resources — you’re putting your brand on a treadmill with no clear direction. You might end up posting content that doesn’t move the needle, overlooking prime chances to connect with your audience, or muddling your brand’s identity with disjointed messaging. But with a strategy in place, you’re in control. You’re proactively aligning your content with business goals, targeting the right audience at the right time, and fine-tuning your approach based on measurable results. Instead of scrambling to keep up with trends, you become a trendsetter, building a brand presence that’s cohesive, impactful, and built to stand out in a crowded social landscape.
Table of contents:
- What do social media analytics tools measure?
- How do you use social media analytics?
- The 11 best free and paid social media analytics tools
What Do Social Media Analytics Tools Measure?
Social media analytics tools measure a variety of key metrics that reveal how your content performs, who your audience is, and how effective your engagement strategies are. These tools typically track:
- Reach & Impressions: The number of people who see your posts and how many times they see them.
- Engagement: The interactions your content receives, including likes, comments, shares, and saves. It’s a measure of how much your audience is connecting with what you’re posting.
- Follower Growth: How your audience size changes over time — who’s following, unfollowing, or staying consistent.
- Audience Demographics: Insights into the ages, genders, locations, and interests of your followers. This helps you tailor content to resonate with your key demographic.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on a link in your post or bio, indicating how well your content drives traffic.
- Conversion Rates: The percentage of users who take a desired action — like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter — after engaging with your content.
- Top-Performing Content: Analysis of which posts, Stories, or videos generate the highest engagement or reach, helping you understand what’s working.
- Hashtag Performance: Data on how well your hashtags are doing in terms of boosting reach and engagement.
- Sentiment Analysis: Gauge the tone and emotion of user interactions with your content — whether the comments are positive, neutral, or negative.
All these insights help you refine your strategy, optimize future content, and ultimately, better connect with your audience.
It’s worth noting that the exact metrics depend on the social media channels you’re using. Each platform calls similar metrics a different thing, and some KPIs are native to that platform (like Twitter’s retweets, for example).
But on the whole, they’re the basic metrics you’ll find inside a social media analytics tool.
How Do You Use Social Media Analytics?
It’s more complicated than it may seem. Once you understand the basics and use the tools, you’ll feel empowered to make informed decisions and optimize your social media strategy. For many reasons, you would want to use a tool to dig into social media data.
So, let’s check it out; let’s take that deep dive into how to get social media performance rocking.
Find your top-performing content
You share content on social media to meet a marketing goal, such as reach, link clicks, or follows. But do you know which type of content meets those goals more frequently?
Use your social media analytics platform to see what your top-performing content has in common and replicate it. For example, if tweets with videos get double the link clicks than one without, create custom graphics for every new tweet.
It’s an easy way to refine your social media guidelines and ensure that each post is optimized for your goal.
Post at the best time of day
Social media marketing analytics tools show more than just data about your posted content. A handful of platforms also explain who your audience is and when they’re online.
This historical data allows you to create a customizable social media posting schedule for your exact audience. You’ll know the same times to post to get maximum engagement. After all, there’s not much value in posting content when your audience is offline.
Prove social media’s return on investment (ROI) to your team. It can be challenging, but with the right tools and understanding of social media analytics, you can confidently demonstrate the value of your social media efforts to your team or CEO. It’s hard to prove social media’s ROI since it can take followers months before they actually buy from you, and they often need to see a lot of content in their News Feeds before they begin to trust (or engage with) your brand.
However, metrics showing the reach of your content help show ROI for your marketing efforts. That, combined with the engagement you’re getting, should help establish why team members (or your CEO) should take social media managers seriously.
The 11 Best Paid & Free Social Media Analytics Tools
Ready to unlock more insights into your social media accounts? Here’s a curated list of 11 top-notch social analytics tools, catering to every budget.
- Twitter Analytics
- Instagram Insights
- Talkwalker
- Hootsuite Analyze
- Sprout Social
- Buffer Analyze
- Zoho Social
- Rival IQ
- Tailwind
- Databox
- Manychat
Twitter Analytics
First up is Twitter Analytics, a powerful tool developed by Twitter itself and available to all Twitter users. It provides a comprehensive 28-day summary of your tweet and profile performance, including key Twitter-specific metrics like mentions, follower growth, and profile visits.
Inside the platform, you’ll see a 28-day summary of how your tweets (and profile) have performed. All metrics native to Twitter marketing are included, too, such as the number of mentions you’ve received, your follower growth, and how many people have visited your profile.
What’s great about Twitter Analytics is that it shows your top-performing tweets each month. You can analyze these results to see what type of content your audience wants to see and continue posting it.
Price: free.
Instagram Insights
This social media analytics tool works only for Instagram. It’s not available to everyone by default, and you need a business account to use the platform.
Instagram Insights shares critical stats about the posts you’re sharing, including how many people saw, liked, commented, or bookmarked your posts.
Plus, you can track how followers engage with your Instagram Stories. The audience insights tab will show how many people viewed the Story and how people interacted with it, such as by replying to it or visiting your profile.
After viewing that post, you can see how people engage with your Instagram profile. That’s a great way to judge whether your Instagram posts resonate with your audience enough for them to take action.
Price: free with a business account.
Talkwalker
You likely want to learn more about your social media strategy than the metrics surrounding the content you post.
Talkwalker helps you go beyond your content to find brand mentions and discussions about your industry. All you need to do is add your brand’s name or industry into the tracking field, and you’ll be able to monitor who and what is being said about the topic.
The social media monitoring tool also shows you sentiment analysis for those social media mentions, like whether it’s a positive or negative post. The result is a solid understanding of what’s happening on social media beyond your branded profile.
Price: starts at a cool $9,600/year.
Hootsuite Analyze
Hootsuite is generally known as a social media tool for scheduling content. But in addition to helping you manage your posts, its Analyze feature lets you see data from several social media platforms on a single screen.
Hootsuite Analyze works with the more popular platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Pages, YouTube, and Instagram. What’s interesting about this social media analytics tool is its impact metric. It provides insights into the ROI of each social media post, which is extremely helpful for proving ROI to your team.
Price: from $29/month.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a powerful social media management tool that offers great insight into how your social media campaign ideas are performing.
It integrates with paid and organic social media channels and has a bonus feature connecting social results to business events. This means you can see which campaigns — such as a summer sale or Black Friday launch — worked best on social based on your most important engagement metrics.
Sprout Social also has a competitor analysis tool for comparing recent posts against a competitor’s. Knowing the number of published posts, most-used hashtags, and engagement can help you use data to get a headstart on your competition.
Price: starts at $99/month.
Buffer Analyze
Here’s another social media analytics tool that shows data from various social platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook Pages, and Twitter.
Buffer Analyze is an add-on to its standard scheduling tool. With Buffer’s add-on, you’ll have access to overall statistics about your social media strategy, with the option to break down your data by channel.
Yet, unlike the other tools we’ve shared here, Buffer Analyze offers suggestions for improving your social content based on your analytics. You’ll see personalized recommendations based on your data set, helping you to make minor (but effective) tweaks.
The best part is that you can integrate Buffer with Manychat via Zapier.
Price: starts at $35/month.
Zoho Social
The social media analytics tools highlight essential data about your content or industry. But what’s interesting about Zoho Social is that it shows who your audience is, not just how they engage with your social media content.
Inside the dashboard, you’ll see a breakdown of your audience’s location, age, gender, and language. The more you know about your audience, the more chance of creating content they’re likely to be interested in.
Zoho Social also includes a social listening feature to track brand mentions. You can use the tool to find instances where people are talking about your brand and hop into or respond to the conversation without leaving the tool.
Price: starts at $10/month.
Rival IQ
Competitor analysis is a tactic that lets you examine your competitor’s social media strategy “under the hood.” Rival IQ is a tool that can help you do this.
Its software allows you to put your and a competitor’s social media platforms head-to-head and see how you compare in different metrics, ultimately allowing you to improve and surpass your competitor in those metrics.
Rival IQ also shares industry benchmarks for certain industries on social media. You’ll see critical data on strategies for influencers, airlines, sports teams, and more. The goal is to help you know whether you’re on par with (or beating) the broader competition.
Price: starts at $199/month. Free head-to-head analysis.
Tailwind
Does your social media strategy include Pinterest? While the native Pinterest Analytics feature is great, Tailwind’s social media analytics software offers all that data and more.
Tailwind highlights basic data about your Pins, including the number of likes, repins, and followers you received from each Pin. Plus, it can help schedule future pins without you manually creating them.
It’s a great choice for any visual marketer because of its integration with Instagram. It has superb tools to help you grow your Instagram profile, such as hashtag suggestions and smart scheduling, to ensure your visual content gets the attention it deserves.
Price: starts at $9.99/month.
Databox
Databox differs from the other social media tools we’ve mentioned. It’s more of a marketing campaign reporting software than an analytics tool that pulls data from different social networks and displays it all on one page.
It’s a marketing tool you should have access to if you’re trying to prove the value of social media and explain how it connects with your other marketing strategies.
They have pre-made templates that pull critical metrics from different tools — including your CRM and Google Analytics — onto one screen. This means you’ll see real-time data from your social media campaigns and each campaign’s impact on other marketing channels, including SEO and content marketing.
Price: starts at $49/month. Free plan available.
Manychat — of course we were going to mention ourselves
Do you run Facebook Ads for your business? The native Facebook Ads Manager (and Facebook Analytics) tool shares vital information about your campaign performance.
Manychat has an analytics dashboard that gives you actionable insight into your campaigns. You can collect social channel audience data, build Facebook Custom Audiences, and improve campaign ad targeting. Our integration pulls your most important data and allows you to create customized reports. It’s a must-have for any social media creator looking to share those reports with its clients.
If you’re an Instagram user, Manychat is like having a digital assistant who never sleeps, never needs coffee, and always knows exactly what to say. Imagine setting up auto-responses for every “What’s the price?” or “Do you ship internationally?” while you’re busy filming your next Reel or, let’s be real, (get it?) watching cat videos. You can use it to send reminders for Instagram Lives, auto-reply to Story mentions, and even run DM-based giveaways without lifting a finger. We know, we’re a little biased.
And there you’ve got it, the best social media analytics tools for the most popular networks.
We’re here to help, even if you’re unsure of what to pick for your content strategy. Whether you’re doing competitive analysis or just tracking your brand’s social media performance, it’s worth having a handful of these tools in your arsenal because they can tell you how much engagement your content is getting, what your competitors are doing, and what your top-performing content has in common; all of which is bound to help you refine your social media marketing strategy and report the results back to your boss.
