#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 run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses, marketing teams
Most social media management platforms have built-in analytics tools. I hope you’ll forgive me for saying Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are my favorite. But it’s the tool I know and love best.
Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, TikTok analytics, Pinterest analytics, and LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.
Social media post metrics:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Reach
- Engagement rate
- Impressions
- Shares
- Saves
- Video views
- Video reach
- And more
Profile metrics:
- Follower growth over time
- Negative feedback rate
- Profile visits
- Reactions
- Overall engagement rate
- And more
Best time to post recommendations
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.
This is why our Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Link clicks
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:
- Customize report templates for only the metrics you care about
- Get reports on your competitors
- Track the productivity of your social team (response times, and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments)
- Monitor mentions, comments, and tags related to your business to avoid PR disasters before they happen
On top of all of that, Hootsuite won the 2022 MarTech Breakthrough Award for Best Overall Social Media Management Platform!
And, according to reviews at least, the social media analytics tools were a big part of that win:
“Makes social media so much easier!
The ease of scheduling posts is amazing. The analytics for reporting are incredible. You can create you own personalized reports.”
– Melissa R. Social Media Manager
Competitive analysis
Hootsuite Analytics does Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter competitive analysis for you. You can track up to 20 competitors per network, and get a clear view of your strengths and weaknesses — plus actionable insights on the top posts, hashtags, and content formats in your niche.
Follow these 4 simple steps to track competitors with Hootsuite:
- Sign in to your Hootsuite account and pick Analytics from the main menu on the left side of the dashboard.
- Then, click on Competitive Analysis in the Benchmarking section.
- At the top of the page, use the dropdown list of your social profiles to select the one you want to compare to competitors.
- Then, pick the competitors you want to measure your performance against. To do that, go into the second dropdown list and check the boxes next to the competitors you want to view. To add competitors, click Manage Competitors at the bottom of the dropdown box.
Then, type the name of a competitor into the search bar and select the correct profile from the dropdown list. Depending on your Hootsuite plan, you can add between 2 and 20 social accounts per network (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) to your watchlist.
And that’s it! Now you can browse several competitive reports, including:
Overview, where you can see the number of posts you and your competitors posted in the selected timeframe (that can be adjusted in the top right corner of the dashboard) as well as every account’s posting frequency, average engagement, number of followers, and audience growth rate.
Post-performance, where you can review your and your competitors’ top posts and sort results by likes, comments, and engagement — and quickly fetch inspiration for what to publish next.
Performance by post type, where you can find out what types of posts — photos, videos, carousels, or Reels — are most popular with each brand’s audience. Results can be sorted to show which post types get the most likes, comments, or engagement.
Post-performance (by comments, likes, or estimated engagement), where you can see how you and your competitors did every day within the specified timeframe — all in one easy-to-read graph. You can drill down results by post type, or stick to the overall view.
Trending hashtags… which speak for themselves.
Post length, where you can find out how many characters and hashtags, on average, your competitors use in their posts.
Industry benchmarking
Need help setting realistic goals? Or maybe you’re not a fan of manually collecting data for audits and SWOT analyses?
With Hootsuite’s social media benchmarking, you can find out how others in your industry are doing on social and compare your results with just a few clicks.
To get industry benchmarks, follow these steps:
- Sign in to your Hootsuite dashboard and head to Analytics.
- In the menu on the left side of the screen, scroll to Benchmarking and click Industry.
- Pick an industry that best describes your business.
That’s it! Now you can see how your results compare to average performance stats within your industry. You can set up custom timeframes, switch between networks — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok — and look up benchmarks for the following metrics:
- Profile impressions
- Profile reach
- Followers
- Audience growth rate
- Engagement rate
- Video plays
- Posting frequency
- Clicks
- Shares
… and more.
You will also find resources to improve your content performance right in the summary section:
And, if you need to present your results to your team, boss, or other stakeholders, you can easily download your comparison report as a PDF file.
#2: Google Analytics
Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website 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 for a web-based business
You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics already. That’s because it’s one of the best free tools to use to learn about your website visitors. And if you’re a social marketer who likes to drive traffic to your website, then it’s 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 give you the most traffic
- See what content drives the most leads and traffic on which social networks
- Get to know your audience with demographic data
- Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns
With these data points, you’ll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google Analytics.
#3: RivalIQ
Key benefit: Fully customizable reporting that can draw data from all major social media networks.
Paid or free: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate
Best for: social media managers
RivalIQ was designed to let social media managers be data scientists, without the pesky certification. RivalIQ delivers on-demand analytical data, alerts, and custom reports from major social media platforms.
Easily conduct a competitive analysis or a complete social media audit with RivalIQ’s in-depth reporting. Better still, you can actually present your findings directly to your director, stakeholders, and marketing team with fully-customizable charts, graphics, and dashboards.
But RivalIQ isn’t just for finding the big picture! Comprehensive social post analytics lets you see exactly which posts work for each platform and identify why they work. Know exactly whether it was the hashtags, time of day, post type, or which network’s audience led to success. Then take that knowledge and double down for more success!
Pro tip: Getting owned by the competition? With RivalIQ you can find all the same info above but from their social media accounts. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em (then beat ’em at their own game)!
#4: Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Key benefits: Analyze brand sentiment and customer demographics in real-time, alongside all your other social media performance data
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Intermediate to advanced
Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, and small to large social media teams
Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.
It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve customer experience.
It also analyzes data about your audience demographics like gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics across networks, or look at the aggregate picture of your audience for 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 whether a spike in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it can help you capitalize on or avoid either one, respectively.
#5: Brandwatch
Key benefits: Track and analyze data from more than 95 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social networks
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring
Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:
- Summary: A high-level view of social conversations about your brand, competitors, or keywords.
- Trends: A report on the conversations and accounts influencing a specific topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
- Reputation: A checkup on sentiment trends you might need to monitor or address.
- Influencers: A report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities relevant to your brand and analyze their activity.
- Competitor comparison: Benchmarking social media data for conversation volume, sentiment, and share of voice.
#6: Talkwalker
Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers
Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:
- Mentions
- Brand sentiment
- Important influencers
- Author lists
You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.
Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.
#7: Keyhole
Key benefits: In-depth automated social media reports and dashboards for all platforms
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: Enterprise-level businesses and organizations
Keyhole lets you report on everything: social media campaigns, brand mentions and interactions, hashtag impact, and even influencer campaign results. But that’s not all!
You can drill down into your impressions, reach, share of voice, and even analyze your competitor’s social media strategies.
If you’re utilizing influencer marketing as part of your strategy, Keyhole has reporting capabilities that will let you identify the ideal influencers to work with.
Best of all? Keyhole allows you to effectively never work in a spreadsheet again. Nice!
#8: Channelview Insights
Key benefits: Analyze the YouTube performance of multiple 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 alongside other social channels
The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.
With this integration, you can analyze your YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.
Easily see the following metrics in one place:
- Views, engagement, subscription activity
- Video traffic sources
- Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more
#9: Mentionlytics
Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, and researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.
Want to get a big-picture view of what’s being said about your brand on the internet? 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 top influencers that follow you
- Filter results by keywords
- Reply to mentions directly
#10: Panoramiq Insights
Key benefit: tracks 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
Alert all Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite free users or pro users who want to get deeper insights into their Stories in particular.
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