10 Social Media Analytics Tools That Do the Math for You [2023]

Want to know which of your social media tactics are working? Want to better focus your time, effort, and budget? You need a social media analysis tool.

In this article, I’ll cover some of the best free social media analytics tools available, as well as some paid options (for the real nerds who want to dive into the data and see the real payoff).

Then you’ll be ready to learn which social media metrics are important to track.

Not ready to start looking for analytics tools? Learn what social media analytics is.

Why you need social media analytics tools

Social media analytics tools help you create performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss to find out what’s working and what’s not. They should also provide the historical data you need to evaluate your social media marketing strategy at both the macro and micro levels.

They can help you answer questions such as:

• Should my business continue to post on Pinterest?
• What were our most popular LinkedIn posts this year?
• Should we post more on Instagram next month?
• Which network generated the most brand awareness when we launched our product?
• What posts do my followers like to comment on?
• And much more.

10 Best Social Media Analytics Tools for 2023

#1: Hootsuite Analytics

Key Benefits: Performance data from every social network in one place with easy-to-understand reports.

Paid or free? Paid tool

Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Best for: Business owners who manage their own social media, social media managers in SMBs, marketing teams.

Most social media management platforms have built-in analytics tools. I hope you’ll forgive me for saying that Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are my favorite. But it’s the instrument I know and love best.

Try it free for 30 days

Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, and LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media activities so you don’t have to check each platform individually.

This saves time by making it easier to compare results across different networks.

Social media posting metrics:

• clicks
• Comments
• Achieve
• Engagement rate
• Impression
• Stock
• Saves
• Video views
• Video coverage
• And more

Profile indicators:

• Subscriber growth over time
• negative feedback
• Profile visits
• Reactions
• General engagement rate
• And more

The best time to post recommendations

Have you ever spent a lot of time writing and designing a social media post only to have it completely fail? There may be many reasons for this. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. Aka Posting when your target audience is offline or not interested in communicating with you.

That’s why our Best Time to Post tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique social media historical data and recommends the best time to post based on three different goals:

1. engagement
2. Impression
3. Clicks on links

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Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they will use data from universal tests instead of your unique performance history.

Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:

• Customize report templates only for the metrics you are interested in.
• Get reports on your competitors
• Track the productivity of your social team (response time and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions and comments).
• Track mentions, comments, and tags related to your business to avoid PR disasters before they happen.

On top of that, Hootsuite won the 2022 MarTech Breakthrough Award for Best Overall Social Media Management Platform!

And at least according to reviews, social media analytics tools played a big part in that win:

“Makes social networking so much easier!

The ease of scheduling posts is amazing. The analytics for the reports are incredible. You can create your own personalized reports.”

– Melissa R. Social Media Manager

Industry benchmarking

Need help setting realistic goals? Or maybe you are not a supporter of manual data collection for audits and SWOT analysis?

With Hootsuite social media benchmarking, you can learn how others in your industry are doing on social media and compare your results in just a few clicks.

To obtain industry benchmarks, follow these steps:

1. Login to your Hootsuite Dashboard and go to Analytics.
2. In the menu on the left side of the screen, scroll to Benchmarking and click Industry.
3. Choose the industry that best describes your business.

That’s all! Now you can see how your results compare to the average performance statistics in your industry. You can set your own time frames, switch between networks – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok – and look for benchmarks for the following metrics:

• Profile Impressions
• Profile coverage
• Followers
• Audience Growth Rate
• Engagement rate
• Video playback
• Publication frequency
• clicks
• Stock

… and more.

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You’ll also find resources to improve the performance of your content right in the summary section:

And, if you need to present your results to your team, boss, or other stakeholders, you can easily download the comparison report as a PDF file.

Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite Professional plan, which you can try for free for 30 days.

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

#2: Google Analytics

Key Benefit: Find out how much traffic and leads are coming to your site 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 especially those who work in online businesses.

You’ve probably already heard of Google Analytics. This is because it is one of the best free tools to study your website visitors. And if you’re a social marketer who enjoys driving traffic to your website, then this is an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.

While it’s not a social media reporting tool per se, you can use it to set up reports that will help you:

• See which social media platforms are giving you the most traffic
• See what content is driving the most leads and traffic on which social networks.
• Know your audience with demographics
• Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns

With these data points, you can get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google Analytics.

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

#3: Opponent IQ

Key benefit: Fully customizable reports that can pull data from all major social networks.

Paid or Free: Paid Tool

Skill Level: Intermediate

Suitable for: social media managers

RivalIQ was designed to enable social media managers to be data scientists without annoying certifications. RivalIQ provides on-demand insights, alerts, and custom reports from major social media platforms.

Easily conduct a competitive analysis or complete social media audit with RivalIQ’s detailed reports. What’s more, you can present your results directly to your director, stakeholders, and marketing team with fully customizable charts, graphs, and dashboards.

But RivalIQ isn’t just about finding the big picture! Comprehensive social media post analytics allows you to pinpoint which posts work for each platform and understand why they work. Find out exactly if it was the hashtags, the time of day, the type of post, or which network’s audience led to success. Then take that knowledge and double down for more success!

Pro Tip: Become the property of competitors? With RivalIQ, you can find all the same information as above but from their social media accounts. If you can’t beat them, join them (and then beat them at their own game)!

Find out more: try the demo or start your free trial with RivalIQ

#4: Brandwatch Hootsuite Insights

Key Benefits: Analyze real-time brand sentiment, customer demographics, and all other data about your social media performance.

Free or Paid: Paid Tool

Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Best for: Social media professionals, public relations and communications professionals, small to large social media teams.

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

It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics by tracking your earned social media mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve your customer experience.

It also analyzes data about your audience demographics such as gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics across networks, or see the big picture of your audience across all networks combined.

This is a tool that really tells you a lot about your audience and how they feel about you. It can tell you if a burst of mentions is a win or a disaster. And it can help you benefit from or avoid any of them, respectively.

#5: Brandwatch

Key Benefits: Track and analyze data from over 95 million sources, including blogs, forums and review sites, and social media.

Free or Paid: Paid Tool

Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Best for: PR and communications departments, social media marketers who focus on brand engagement and monitoring.

Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:

• Summary: An overview of social conversations about your brand, competitors, or keywords.
• Trends: A report on conversations and accounts that influence a particular topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
• Reputation: Check for sentiment trends that you may need to monitor or address.
• Influencers: A report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities related to your brand and analyze their activity.
• Competitive Comparison: Benchmark social media data on call volume, mood, and voice share.

Learn more: You can add Brandwatch to your Hootsuite dashboard

#6: Phrasebook

Key Benefits: Track conversations from over 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment and emotion.

Free or Paid: Paid Tool

Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Best for: Social media managers, public relations and communications professionals, brand watchers, marketers, researchers.

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

• Mentions
• Brand mood
• Important Influencers
• Authors lists

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

Talkwalker is especially useful for identifying peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best time to post your brand on social media.

Learn More: You Can Add Talkwalker to Your Hootsuite Control Panel

#7: Keyhole

Key Benefits: Detailed automated social media reporting and dashboards for all platforms.

Free or Paid: Paid Tool

Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Suitable for: Enterprise-level enterprises and organizations.

Keyhole lets you report on everything: social media campaigns, brand mentions and interactions, hashtag influence, and even influencer campaign results. But that’s not all! You can explore your experiences, reach, share opinions, and even analyze your competitors’ social media strategies in detail.

If you’re using influencer marketing as part of your strategy, Keyhole has reporting capabilities to help you identify the ideal influencers for the job.

The best? Keyhole lets you never work with a spreadsheet again. Beautiful!

#8: Channel View Statistics

Key Benefits: Analyze the performance of multiple YouTube channels.

Free or Paid: Paid Tool (Free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: all skill levels

Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel along with other social channels.

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

With this integration, you can analyze the performance of your YouTube video and channel along with all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic regular reports.

Easily view the following metrics in one place:

• Views, engagement, subscription
• Video traffic sources
• Audience statistics by demographics, geography, customer acquisition, etc.

#9: Mentions

Key Benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment in multiple languages ​​on social media and elsewhere on the web.

Free or Paid: Paid Tool

Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Best for: PR and communications professionals, brand monitoring teams, marketers, researchers in SMBs.

Want to get a general idea of ​​what is being said about your brand online? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the world of social media monitoring, especially if you run a global business in more than one language.

Other things you can do with Mentionlytics:

• Sentiment Analysis
• Find the best influencers who follow you
• Filter results by keywords
• Reply to mentions directly

#10: Panoramiq Insights

Key Benefit: Tracking 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

Warn all Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is ideal for free Hootsuite users or professional users who want a deeper understanding of their stories in particular. (Just download the app from our app library).

Among other things, Panoramiq Insights allows you to:

• Analyze subscriber demographics, including age, gender, country, city, and language.
• Track Instagram account activity (up to two accounts), including views and new followers.
• Find your best posts with views and engagement analytics
• Measure views and interactions with stories

Free Social Media Analytics Report Template

We have created a free social media analytics template that you can use to collect data about your performance on various social media. This is a great place to start if you’re not ready to invest in a tool that will automatically collect data for you. Just download it, make a copy and start customizing it with your data.

For more information on how to effectively share your insights, check out our article on how to create a smart and simple social media report.

Frequently Asked Questions about Social Media Analytics

What is meant by social media analytics?

Social media analytics is the collection and analysis of performance data that helps you measure the success of your social media strategy. It includes tracking metrics like engagement, reach, likes and more across all your social channels.

What is the best social media analytics tool?

Hootsuite Analytics is one of the best social media analytics tools on the market. It helps social media managers, marketers and business owners track metrics from all major networks (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube) in one easy to use dashboard. Hootsuite users can also create beautiful custom results with just a few clicks.

What are the benefits of social media analytics?

Social media analytics tells you if your tactics and social strategies are working and helps you better focus your time, effort, and budget for the best results.

What is the best way to track social media analytics?

Most social networks have free analytics tools built in, but the easiest way to track social media analytics from multiple accounts and networks in one place is to use a social media management tool like Hootsuite.