12 of the best social media analytics tools for marketers

If you’re running your brand’s social media presence, you need the ability to understand when your content or campaigns are or aren’t performing well.

Social media analytics help brands gauge key metrics like reach, followers, engagement, clicks and conversions. And while many platforms have their own built-in insights, using a social media analytics tool can help you collect all of that data in a single, easy-to-use dashboard.

In this article, we’re going to cover 12 of the best social media analytics tools marketers should consider in 2023.

The importance of a social media analytics tool in 2023

It’s essential to invest in a tool that’s going to give you deeper insights into how your social media strategy is performing. Posting content and not paying attention to its reach, engagement and other metrics make it extremely difficult to understand your audience and create a targeted strategy.

Using a social media analytics tool, however, helps make sure you’re consistently creating and publishing content that actually resonates with your target audience. You can get insights like:

• How many people are your posts reaching
• How often do people like or interact with your content
• What kind of growth rate your social media following has
• How many sales and conversions your social media posts are generating

And so much more. Having these details helps you get a better idea of what content to publish, when and where so that you’re not just screaming into the void with your marketing strategy.

Top 12 social media analytics tools to track your social presence

1. Sprout Social
2. HubSpot
3. IZEA
4. BuzzSumo
5. Google Analytics
6. Followerwonk
7. Rival IQ
8. Iconosquare
9. Tailwind
10. Audiense
11. quintly
12. SparkToro

1. Sprout Social

The need for cross-channel social media analytics makes Sprout Social’s analytics tools an easy choice for number one on our list.

Whether you want to dive deep into your performance on a single network or quickly compare results across multiple networks at once, Sprout has you covered.

Track Facebook Page impressions, tally up Twitter link clicks, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement, assess content performance on Pinterest and much more, all from the same location.

Then quickly organize and share your data with easy-to-understand, presentation-ready reports. Or take it a step further with Premium Analytics and create your own custom report, tailored to your organization’s KPIs.

Sprout comes complete with both templated and customizable reporting options, meaning you have multiple ways to not only gather essential social metrics, but truly understand what they mean and easily present them to others. You can easily include only the metrics you care about most to reduce the noise.

From tags to trends and everything in between, Sprout puts powerful analytics at your fingertips. Take this case study from the University of North Dakota, where Sprout Social helped streamline and optimize social media performance and tracking. You can even access data related to internal team performance and competitor activity to help you improve customer care or benchmark your brand against others in your industry.

But that’s only scratching the surface.

Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data surrounding audience demographics, industry influencers, campaign performance, share of voice and consumer sentiment.

No matter your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout has been built from the ground up to give you a fast, user-friendly way to display social insights.

2. HubSpot

With HubSpot’s analytics tools, you can tie your social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, publishing using other tools (like Sprout Social) or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. You can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.

HubSpot’s social media analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths, and impressions.

What’s important to highlight is that HubSpot’s social analytics tools is part of its Marketing Hub, an all-in-one inbound marketing software.

This means that when using the platform, you’ll gain insights into the entire customer journey—not just social media-specific metrics. You’ll be able to see which marketing tactics are working best for your business, how they’re impacting your bottom line and learn more about your social media campaign’s ROI.

That makes HubSpot an excellent choice for businesses whose marketing teams want to keep all campaign functions in one place.

3. IZEA

The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically-tailored for influencer campaigns.

Enter IZEA, an analytics platform which removes many of the what-ifs related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.

IZEA’s Flex software also enables brands to get a look into potential influencers’ audience demographics, influencer campaign performance, conversion rates and so much more.

Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be a black hole of ROI. Using a tool like IZEA to not only find but track influencer partnerships is a great way to monitor success.

4. BuzzSumo

Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is an awesome resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.

If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.

Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your own content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.

5. Google Analytics

While it’s not solely a social media analytics tool, Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track social media campaigns and even help you measure social ROI.

You may already have an account set up on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic right now. But did you know you can access and create reports specifically for social media tracking, too?

For instance, you can see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network, or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns.

Just make sure that if you already have a Google Analytics account, you’ve migrated to the new GA4 interface (seen above). Access to the old interface will be shut down and switched over to GA4 by July 1, 2023.

6. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter-specific analytics tool that can help brands search relevant Twitter bios to find users to engage with, compare users, analyze accounts, track followers and more. Users can get access to valuable insights and help with their Twitter strategy using a completely free Followerwonk account.

Followerwonk was recently acquired by Tweepsmap, a social media software that is working to improve the Twitter analytics tool’s dashboard and analytics capabilities even more.

7. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a social media analytics tool that can help businesses track their success across a number of channels—YouTube included. With features like competitor analysis, basic social analytics, social listening, reporting and social media audits, Rival IQ is a great option for businesses with a widespread online presence. It can also be a huge help for agencies working with multiple clients.

Build out custom dashboards for each client based on their specific goals with social media marketing. Then easily download reports to share in a number of formats, like PPT, PDF, PNG or CSV. Rival IQ also offers influencer tracking and hashtag analytics to help you monitor influencer campaigns and choose the best hashtags for your content.

8. Iconosquare

Iconosquare started as a basic Instagram analytics tool years before the platform started offering its own built-in insights. At the time, this tool was one of the only ways to effectively monitor your Instagram efforts. However, as platforms adapt and change, analytics tools must do the same.

Now, Iconosquare is a robust social media analytics tool that lets users monitor 100+ different metrics across various social media platforms. Supported social media platforms include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok.

Create custom dashboards that allow you to see your most important metrics at a glance, like follower growth, audience demographics, post engagement, reach and more. Iconosquare also offers publishing capabilities, collaborative content creation and approval, social listening and community management.

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is another social media analytics tool that has changed and evolved over the years. What started as a Pinterest scheduling tool called Pin League has quickly evolved into a sophisticated social media management and analytics tool.

The biggest caveat to Tailwind is that it supports a limited number of social networks. While users can connect their Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest accounts, Tailwind’s features are best catered to the visual platforms of Pinterest and Instagram. However, brands with a heavy focus on those platforms can get real use out of this tool’s capabilities.

Get Pinterest and Instagram insights, create and schedule posts, find the best hashtags, access a seamless link-in-bio tool and more with Tailwind. Brands can easily monitor the performance of their visual social media profiles with this platform’s visually appealing and easy-to-use dashboard.

10. Audiense

Audiense is an audience building tool that helps brands monitor their performance across a number of social media platforms. That being said, Audiense is also a very Twitter-minded tool, making it an ideal option for brands who put a major emphasis on their Twitter audience and performance.

Source

With Audiense, brands can easily create customer personas based on their target audience demographics, gather sources of influence that their audience likes to get content from, find the best influencers to work with and more. However, Audiense’s Twitter marketing tools enable brands to also get a deep dive into their Twitter analytics.

11. quintly

quintly is another advanced social media analytics tool that supports a number of social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok—and even YouTube and Snapchat. The platform also offers analytics specific to Instagram Stories so brands can ensure their audience is properly responding to the stories they post.

Brands can build out dashboards using more than 350 different metrics so they can choose which KPIs mean the most to them. quintly allows brands to build multiple dashboards, even offering templates to help them get started, so they’re only given the most comprehensive look at each platform’s data.

12. SparkToro

SparkToro is similar to Audiense in that it’s also an audience intelligence platform. While this tool doesn’t necessarily provide you with data and analytics from your own social media performance, it’s perfect for giving brands insight into their audience, competitors and other profiles within their networks.

Use SparkToro to find out where your customers spend their time online (so you know where to advertise to them), uncover audience demographics (so you can improve your ad targeting), pinpoint what your audience is talking about right now (so you can create catered content) and even get insight into your own account’s influence and authority online.

How can you use social media analytics tools to grow your business?

The takeaway from all of these tools? Marketers need to own their data. Doing so is the difference between running data-driven campaigns that result in a positive ROI versus just winging it.

Choose from the above tools based on what will work best for your business—but if you’re still unsure of how to gather the best insights, we can help by starting a free 30-day trial.

You can also download our free social media analytics spreadsheet template to get an idea of which metrics to track, must-use formulas and more.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are social media analytics tools?

Social media analytics tools are essential for measuring the performance of social media marketing campaigns. By leveraging a tool, businesses can make informed decisions about their social media strategies at scale, such as what content to create and when to post it.

What can social media analytics tools help you measure?

Social media analytics tools enable businesses to track and measure important key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, reach, and impressions.

What are the benefits of social media analytics for business?

Social media analytics provide businesses with valuable insights into their performance across major social media networks, allowing them to track their progress, measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, and optimize their strategies.

In addition, these tools enable businesses to understand their audience better, gain competitive intelligence, and make data-driven decisions. Ultimately, social media analytics can help achieve better results and stay ahead of the competition.