Top 13 Free Social Media Analytics Tools for Success

Social media has quickly become the inner vein of operations between businesses and target audience persuasion to sale closure in today’s digital world. However, the presence of a social media account alone is not enough, companies have to apply social media marketing services and use social media analytics tools to know how their content does, who their audience is, and how they can mend their strategies.

Social media marketing agencies are there to be used by businesses, and they have an option between those that are for free and those that are paid. With the advanced features, generally, the paid tools are coming hand in hand, while offering more data on offer and further customizing leads. Free tools bring immense value for the small business person and those not wanting to ascertain the cost initially. Free tools give essential analytics capabilities in checking key metrics that aid those in business to understand audience behavior and refine their social media strategy.

Table of Contents

• Understanding Social Media Analytics
• Criteria for Choosing Social Media Analytics Tools
• Top 13 Free Social Media Analytics Tools
• How to Choose the Right Tool for Your Needs
• Maximizing the Impact of Social Media Analytics
• Common Mistakes to Avoid

Understanding Social Media Analytics

• One of the very important roles played by Social Media Marketing Services is in driving marketing strategies through insights that drive action. For example, if the result of analytics shows that more views come on videos than on images, a Social Media Marketing Company would gradually tend to start focusing on more videos.
•  Similarly, if you find that your engagements are higher a few days of the week or at some hours, Social Media Marketing Services in Delhi will adjust the time and frequency of posting accordingly. You can improve your profile, increase engagement, and get better results with data-informed decisions on social media. 
• Measuring ROI is very important in social media analysis. Businesses spend much time and effort on social media, with the help of Social Media Marketing Services, people can know whether they are getting any return on investment or not. Keeping a check on metrics such as conversion rates will be a result of social media campaigns influencing lead generation and sales.

Selection Criteria of Free Social Media Analytics Tools

• As such, the critical features that free social media analytics tools should have include multi-metric tracking and several supportive social media, monitoring analysis in real-time and customized reporting.
• Usability is a very strong determining factor behind the choice of a specific set of tools for social media analytics.
• This becomes very crucial for their usage because they may be handled by people without a strong background in data analysis. Analytics are an easier and time-saving process with a well-designed tool.
• Informed decisions will require accurate data. Ensure that the tool you go for gives reliable, up-to-date data. Strong reporting is also paramount. 

Top 13 Free Social Media Analytics Tools

Knowing what platforms are supported by each tool is important. There can be tools that focus on a social media site as its niche, but surely there are tools that would serve on a multi-platform basis in service of analysis. 

Google Analytics

• While Google Analytics is the premier tool for website traffic analysis, it is quite formidable when it comes to social media analysis.
• The business should be able to set up social media tracking to realize how many users do come from social media, which one of the many platforms is the most potent, and how they act once users arrive by using Google Analytics.

Facebook Insights 

• On the other hand, it has much on the performance of your posts across the platform. This broadly includes post reach, engagement in terms of likes, comments, and shares, along with page views and growing followers. It also includes demographics such as age, gender, and location, thereby letting a business know who its content is reaching.
• The content will be utilized very well if one continues to make changes to better Facebook Insights with the types of content, posting times, and ways to have the audience involved and engaged. Moreover, adapting the content accordingly will also make use of the insights gained about the audience’s preferences.

Twitter Analytics

• The Twitter Analytics dashboard is intuitive and packed with all the major insights related to tweet impressions, engagement rates, link clicks, and growth in followers. The dashboard then underlines for you what your highest-performing tweets were and gives you a summary of account performance every month.
• What Twitter Analytics is great at is providing insights in real-time. Businesses can track the types of content that generate the most engagement, such as retweets, replies, and likes. 
• More than any other network, if there is a network that desperately requires real-time analytics, it is Twitter. The great thing about Twitter Analytics is the nature of it to be focused temporarily. 

Instagram Insights

• Instagram Insights quantifies all the elements of business content on impressions, reach, and engagement of posts, stories, and reels. It also offers reports on demographic data showing the age, gender, and location stats of the followers.
• This makes Instagram Insights carry the power of watching out trends formed in the kind of content or themes that tend to attract maximum engagement with the brand via each new post or story.
• But again, similar to any other free tool, it remains short of some functionality. However, it is platform-specific; for a more organized and in-depth report regarding performance across several platforms other tools have to be used.

LinkedIn Analytics

• From the analytics, it give you information about your content’s performance and performance of the company page. Some of the most important are post impressions, clicks, and engagement rate, as well as follower demographics, professional titles, industries, and sizes of companies since the last three data can come in especially handy from LinkedIn.
• Since businesses aim to leverage LinkedIn Analytics to its best use, they should understand where sharing professional audience content would work out, making the content types reflect sharing industry insights, thought leadership pieces, and case studies.

YouTube Analytics

• What YouTube Analytics provides you with is the general viewership performance of your video, like views, watch time, audience retention, and engagement statistics, such as the number of likes, comments, and shares. 
• Additionally, businesses can get to know which videos create more engagement, thus having a view of coming up with other strategies that could be applied to produce more content that their audience prefers.  
• However, like the other native tools, it is only limited to YouTube, which most of the time businesses might require other analytic tools to keep tacking on other social media performances.

Pinterest Analytics

• Pinterest’s analytics feature gives an insight into the number of people your pins are reaching with your impressions. Also, the data obtained from Pinterest gives a detailed report on how your pins are faring, via impressions, saves, and click-through rates among other relevant metrics.
• Regularly checking the performance of the pins would enable one to know what content is that which works best. Therefore, businesses can adapt their strategy and gain more traffic to their website.
• It is particularly helpful for fashion, home decor, and food businesses, which are visual-content based industries. 

Buffer

• The free version of Buffer gives you analytics for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, recording the basic reach of your posts, including engagement and follower growth. Multi-platform support then means a business user can view this performance across several accounts with one glance.
• Buffer’s free plan, is particularly suggested for businesses looking for basic analytics on every platform. It’s easy for beginners to use.

Hootsuite Free Plan

• The social monitoring and reporting work in the free plan of Hootsuite to equip businesses with core KPIs in the form of engagement, follower growth, and mentions. The social monitoring and reporting tool includes a dashboard that allows one to manage the performance of all accounts in the media.
• Research and insights from the free analytic tools on HootSuite provide users with indicators of performance, so one can continuously readjust their strategies.
• The free plan of Hootsuite enables one to monitor easily and exercise some of the basic features of reporting on social media.

TweetDeck

• This is a free tool developed to maintain and keep track of Twitter accounts. The following are its many features: real-time management of mentions, hashtag, and list tracking, and posting scheduled tweets, to name a few.
• TweetDeck is a very versatile business tool used for credible management and monitoring of accounts on Twitter for businesses. 
• Therefore, when the business is actively involved with the other available social media platforms, there has to be a need for the installation of other monitoring tools that are highly critical to achieving a comprehensive analysis.

SocialBee’s

Free plans offer a good alternative to a business looking to get basic analytics across all the platforms. However, like all other software that comes with a free tag on it, much of what the metrics can show is compromised. For advanced requirements, a business may look at upgrading the offer or other tools besides SocialBee for their analytics needs.

Followerwonk

• Another social media-free tool for carrying out follower analysis is Followerwonk. This, though, aims at focusing on the followers. It provides demography and the social graph of followers and thus helps businesses analyze information on their group of followers.
• Followerwonk is an excellent tool for an in-depth understanding of the target Twitter audience. It is a limitation only within Twitter itself, so a business that requires marking through other social media needs to support other tools for a full analysis.

Zoho Social: Free Plan

• Zoho Social offers a variety of free analytics to measure what is working on social media for your business, such as engagement metrics, follower growth, and reach of posts.
• The free Zoho social plan can be relevant for any business whose need for analytics is at the basic level on several platforms.
• However, it can be considered sufficient for most advanced analytics needs. For using such features, companies with more advanced needs may have to consider taking either an upgrade or a supplemental service with Zoho Social.

How to Select the Best Tool for Your Use

• Social media analytics tools should be chosen concerning how well the expressed business requirements are matched. For instance, a Social Media Marketing Company would give more importance to a tool that is tracking the sentiment and monitoring the brand. In case there is an expressed desire for increased traffic to a website, click-throughs and conversions are tracked.
• Here are the factors that you should consider especially when choosing a social media analytics tool, Be more like a business, for sure, and use all of the free social media analytics tools available to their full extent by correcting and double-checking the data and initiate strategic changes as much as necessary when you review the insights at regular intervals, that will help you to get more impact out of your social media activities.

Maximizing the Value from Social Media Analytics

• For a comprehensive analysis, a business ought to incorporate varied tools for the analysis of social media.
• Social media analytics will therefore inform your content strategy. By always checking how well your posts are doing, you will see what types of content are performing well and which are not with your target audience.
• Success on social media is all about continuous improvement. Keep analyzing your data. Such decisions will always need to have corrective strategies as time goes by to improve your previous ones.

Common Mistakes People Should Avoid

• This tendency to over-rely on the metrics without looking at the greater picture often takes many companies down a slippery road. 
• It all matters when taking a broad view and finding where your social media performance falls in line with your overall marketing strategies. 
• It’s also important to make sure the strategy is right for the specific given platform and how your audience is looking for content on that certain platform.

Conclusion

Over and above, paid tools give a hands-on advanced feature with the ability to tailor to otherwise specific requirements. Still, free social media analytics tools often provide great value to a small business or one that has just started. We encourage business executives to begin exploring and implementing free analytics that various social platforms offer so that they can have a clearer view and understanding of social media performance while using Social Media Marketing services tools.