Social media plays an important role in the business world. It is a great way of widening the customer reach of your business as almost ninety percent of the world’s population is active on different social media platforms. Any business enterprise that is not making use of social media platforms to reach out to its customers is certainly lagging behind its rivals in a lot of aspects. But merely making use of social media platforms is not sufficient. One needs to make the right use. Social media analytics can help businesses in making the most of their social media marketing.

Social Media tools help in businesses in gathering meaningful information from social media platforms and using the same in making business decisions to enhance their marketing strategy. The underlying idea behind using social media analytics is to understand customer sentiments and improve customer service activities.

But social media analytics is not only confined to gathering social media data from social platforms but across other web portals as well to have an overall comparison of the online content of a brand or business. Social Media analytics can take many forms, but it is always about acquiring relevant social insights to devise or alter business strategies accordingly.

Why do you need social media analytics?

Social Media Analytics offers many advantages to businesses. Some of them are explained below:

1. It helps businesses in providing exceptional customer care and services to their existing and prospective customers. Customers are the top assets of an organization. Keeping them happy and satisfied is crucial for the success of any business.
2. It helps in discovering new customer segments, which sometimes are difficult to identify through other means.

3. The right application of social media analytics helps in Identifying unmet or new customer needs way ahead of your competitors, thus helping you capture a large chunk of market share before them.

4. Social media analytics helps businesses in responding timely to a crisis or any activity that might harm the reputation of your business across social media platforms. In short, it helps in effective damage control.

5. Helps in tracking the newest trends in the market related to your brand and business. Identifying new products and services to offer to your customers.

6. It helps in understanding your customer experience with your content and products through meaningful data so that you can effectively plan your next move to enhance their experience.

7. Social media analytics also help to keep a track of your competitors’ performance and learning their strengths and weaknesses. With their weaknesses, you can concentrate on coming up with effective measures to win their dissatisfied customers.

8. Helps in boosting your brand’s social media marketing campaigns with innovative and engaging ideas.

9. Helps in identifying potential influencers and brand ambassadors, with whom you can collaborate to enhance your brand’s awareness and reach.

Stages of social media analytics:

Social Media Analytics mainly has three stages:

1. Identifying the primary business goals.

The first stage involves deciding the primary goal. There could be a number of primary goals behind social media analytics such as increasing leads, increasing downloads, knowing your rivals, building a positive brand image, learning new trends in the industry, customer management and so on. It is important to first set out business objectives gives to conduct your social media analytics activities properly.

2. Determine social key performance indicators that you should track and monitor

There are a number of key performance indicators that help in determining the success or failure of your social media campaigns. These key indicators vary from business to business. Businesses should determine the KPIs that will be applicable to their brands before proceeding with social media analytics. 

3. Analyze Social Data.

Once you decide on the above-mentioned factors, the next step includes analyzing the actual data with the help of social media analytics tools. These tools will help in generating the required information and taking appropriate actions.

But how would you gather such meaning information for your social media marketing? Thanks to the world of mobile applications or the availability of innumerable tools and apps that help serve as an effective social media analytics system.

Some of the best free and paid social media analytics apps for marketers are mentioned as under:

1. Keyhole

This app has a lot to offer to its users. It simples the reporting process, which results in easy sharing of the results. It shows you when your customers are most active on your website thus letting you know the time when your customers’ engagements are at peak. Thus it lets you get inside the minds of the customers and know the prime factor behind customer attraction. It helps you see the number of impressions, posts, reach an account or hashtag is getting.

2. Rival IQ

Yet another great social media analytics app for tracking social media performances. As the name suggests, this app helps in keeping a track of your rivals’ activities. It notifies you with real time information when any new content is posted by your rivals in social media platforms. Thus it helps you take appropriate decisions or steps as a response to your rivals’ posts. With the right decision at the right time, you save yourself from losing your market share. It also helps you analyze what is trending and customers are looking forward to seeing. Thus it becomes easier for businesses to discover fresh and significant content for promoting their products and services.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a great social media analytics app for reporting and management of social media activities. It helps you generate your own social media calendar and schedule your posts as per the most suitable time to capture your customers’ attention. It also helps you listen to relevant social media conversations regarding your brand and learn about what is keeping your customers happy and satisfied. This app is being used by some top brands like Adidas, Edelman, etc.

4. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is another powerful social media analytics app that helps in a wide range of social media management tasks such as brand monitoring, reputation management, competitor spying, and business intelligence. You can monitor your brand’s performance and impact and manage its reputation through different social media platforms. It helps you learn how your competitors are performing in the market. And it also provides useful information regarding the success of your brand awareness campaigns. It keeps its users updated with real-time notifications.

5. Reputology

This app, as the name suggests, helps you in maintaining a good reputation of your brand or company. But how? We know what role do reviews and ratings play in promoting our business. A single bad review of your business can spread like fire and ruin your reputation in front of other customers. With Reputology, monitoring and analyzing your reviews become much easier before it gets spread. Moreover, it also helps in promoting your positive reviews to your customers. With this app, all your reviews can be handled through a single platform instead of visiting and checking every other platform. Thus the work becomes easy and less time-consuming.

6. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a social analytics tool that is designed for marketers to help them in identifying their best content to know what to serve their clients with. With this app, all your social media activities can be monitored seamlessly through one platform thus saving a lot of time. Besides monitoring your activities, you can post your content on all social media platforms at once. It also helps in auto-publishing your content to help it reach more and more target audience.

7. TapInfluence

In today’s time, Influencer marketing has become an effective way of promoting your products and services to target customers and widening your reach. But it is important to first measure the impact they are actually able to create on their audience. Spending on the wrong influencers will prove to be costly for your business as they won’t be able to deliver the desired results. Choosing the right influencer as per your business type is crucial. The app TapInfluence helps businesses in finding the right influencers for their business. It provides important about all your potential influencers like their reach and impact, their charges for promotion and so on. Thus it makes it easier to connect with the right influencers, which otherwise takes a lot of time and effort.

8. Socialbakers

Socialbakers lets keep a track of your entire social media activities by measuring your social media performance and benchmarking your results against the performance of your rivals and other industry players. This is an AI integrated app. AI technology helps in identifying your brand’s target audience on social media platforms, the type of content that interests them and most loved influencers. With all this helpful information, it helps you make your marketing strategy effective.

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is a social analytics app for managing your Pinterest and Instagram accounts. It helps you understand how your posts are performing in terms of reach and engagements, lets you discover relevant content that interests your customers and increase your reach, monitor conversations about your brand and take decision for corrective measures. This is a one stop solution for analyzing your performance on Instagram and Pinterest. Through this app, you can upload images in bulk and also schedule your posts for publishing the same at the users’ most engaging times. If you thinking about iOS so here is the way how to create a second Instagram account for business.

10. Brandwatch

In a dynamic business world, relevant market Data plays a key role in devising a proper marketing strategy for your business. But how will you gather such data? BrandWatch is the answer to this question. This app simply provides you with the right industry data to make smart marketing decisions. With in-depth insights into your target customers’ minds, it becomes super easy to come up with products and services that can be easily sold. This app also helps its users in identifying important online conversations about your brand that your customers are engaged in and analyze the same to gather critical information to enhance the customer experience.

11. TweetReach

TweetReach, as the name suggests, is an app for analyzing helpful metrics for your Twitter posts. Twitter is one of the most important social media app having a worldwide presence. TweetReach helps its users in knowing how far their tweets have traveled. With this, you can see the number of impressions, reach and overall engagement received by your tweets. It helps in monitoring the top influencers of your brand. It provides real-time metrics thus facilitating faster decision-making.

12. SNAPLYTICS

This app is for the popular social media platforms Instagram and Snapchat.

It helps lets you see the number of engagements your Snapchat and Instagram posts and stories are receiving. With its analytics report, it can help in determining the content type that can create the most and everlasting impact for your brand on these platforms. This tool also allows its users to schedule posts for you to automatically go live when you’re not looking.

13. TwitBlock

This app is designed with the purpose of eliminating spam from your Twitter stream. The app keeps track of all your Twitter followers to look for characteristics associated with junk Twitter accounts. This helps in identifying the spam accounts and blocking them from your twitter stream at the right time.

14. NetBase

This app helps in tracking social media conversations about your brand and make important marketing decisions based on the same. Users can keep a real-time track of the performance of their brand campaigns and identify top-performing campaign elements. This helps in identifying content that can keep your target audience engaged. This app is used by brands like Coca Cola, Taco Bell, etc.

15. Oktopost

This app provides three powerful solutions through one platform, namely, social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions. Through its social media management functions, businesses can publish their content on social media; engage with their audiences and track valuable insights and metrics. Employees can share your brand’s content on their personal social networks and widen your content’s reach. It helps you in generating interactive social media marketing campaigns to increase your lead generation.

16. Brand24

Brand24 keeps a track of all the mentions about a keyword, product or a brand name on the web, analyze the same and provides a comprehensive analysis to the users. With the help of its analysis, one can learn where their keyword or product or brand name has been mentioned, the ratio of positive and negative sentiments associated with it, the top users of the same, and related terms around it, if any.

17. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a Social Media Management tool. It helps its users to keep track of and manage their social network channels through one platform. It lets you monitor different conversations about what people are having about your brand on online spaces and help you respond to them instantly. Be it Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or any other social media platform, you can view streams from all these platforms and post updates directly through this app. In today’s time, social media has become one of the best ways of marketing your products and services. And with so many social media platforms making their presence on the Internet, Social media management tools like Hootsuite have become the need of the hour to monitor your brand’s activities on all every network.

18. Quintly

This app helps businesses in social media management, client management, centralized social media analytics, monitoring influencer performance and ranking. You can measure your brand’s online performance against its rivals. It helps in tracking conversations regarding your brand. It helps you keep a track of the success of your social media marketing campaigns.

19. Minter.io

Minter.io is meant for keeping a track of your Instagram analytics. It lets you monitor the reach and engagements of your posts and hashtags to have a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs. Users can see when their audience is most engaged so that they can post their updates at the best time. It also offers reports in PDF formats to have a better understanding of the results.

There’s no one-word answer for the best social media analytics app. All these apps have their own merits and demerits. Some might prove highly beneficial for certain businesses while being not very useful for another. Hence before proceeding to use it, businesses and brands should look at its features carefully and determine if the same will fulfill their goals. The best way is to prepare a comparison chart and determine the app that best suits the needs and requirements of a certain brand.