12 best social media analytics tools in 2023

Social media is serious business. A lot of influencers and companies are becoming more intentional about how, what, and when they post. And to understanding your audience and the platform algorithm requires good analytics. Here's a list of the best tools available.

These are tools compatible with businesses of all sizes and are being used by some of the fastest-growing brands.

You’ll be learning about their features, pricing, and why the following tools might be a great fit for you. By the end, I am sure you’ll have picked the best social media marketing analytics tools for your business.

That being said, let’s start from scratch to make sure we are on the same page.

What are social media analytics tools?

Social media analytics tools are software that helps us keep track of all our social media performance and draw insights that can help us improve.

These tools help in managing the content that is published on the platform, they help us understand how the audience engaged and what steps can be taken to improve performance in the future.

Other than the following third-party tools, each social media platform has its own analytics dashboard like:

• Facebook & Instagram Manager
• Twitter Analytics
• Pinterest Analytics
• LinkedIn Analytics
• YouTube Studio

And while the platforms do share the data, they still lack the insights that we can get from the third-party tools.

Why is social media analytics tool important for your business?

When it comes to success on social media, a lot of it depends on the ability to understand what works for you, and what kinds of content you should stop publishing.

For example, if your goal is to increase impressions during a certain time of the day, you can look at the social media analytics tools to understand what is the best time to post. Filter your content with high impressions, and understand what type of content and hashtags lead to success.

Creating and sharing content based on analytics exponentially increase the possibility of achieving your goal to get as much impressions as possible and to build an engaged audience.

Some other notable benefits of using social media analytics tools are:

• Visualize data effectively

• Track growth across platforms

• Build a personal or company brand

• Save time when creating and distributing content

12 best social media marketing analytics tools

Shield

Shield is a LinkedIn analytics tool that is designed for creators and influencers. A tool that keeps track of content, its performance, and all the metrics that one needs for insights to build an audience.

LinkedIn is a professional platform but is now emerging as one of the most valuable networking sites for creators of all industries.

Shield ensures that you can understand your audience, and most importantly their engagement with your content more thoroughly and visually.

Features

• Allows you to label your content and organize it into categories for rich insight on performance.
• Word cloud feature helps in learning about the words you use most across content and the time.
• Shield analytics also shows your posts that are still in the feed, which means are reaching your audience, even a long time after posting.

Pricing: Starting at $8 per month, free trial available

Statusbrew

Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management and analytics tool. With over 180+ metrics available, you can get insights on every single comment, like, view, message, and more. It integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google My Business, Line, Google Play Store, and App Store, allowing you to generate multi-platform reports. 

Statusbrew's in-depth reporting feature allows you to understand the impact of your every social effort. So you don't have to scramble from platform to platform to gather insights as it's all available in a single dashboard. You can visualize your data in a way that makes the most sense to you.

Features:

• Several ready-made reporting templates to save your time and prepare instant reports with a few clicks.
• Build your own reports with endless customization options using widgets.
• Every report and widget can be exported in a PDF or CSV format. 
• Schedule reports to arrive in emails as per your preferred time.
• Create shareable dynamic reports links to be shared with people that don't have access to Statusbrew. 
• Every widget can be resized, reordered, and repositioned simply by dragging and dropping.

Pricing: Starts at $69 per month, with a 14-day free trial.

Vaizle 

Vaizle is a comprehensive marketing analytics platform designed to streamline data-driven decision-making for businesses.

It offers a suite of tools that provide insights into social media analytics, performance marketing, and competitive analytics. The platform enables users to import their marketing data from various sources into a single location, such as Google Sheets, with just a few clicks. Vaizle also offers features for team management, quick insights, and report generation. It’s designed to improve productivity and efficiency by reducing the time spent on data analysis, thus enabling faster and smarter decisions.

The platform also provides free ad analysis tools for various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Features: 

• Comprehensive social media analytics
• Competitive analysis
• Real-time monitoring
• Customizable reports
• Audience Insights

Pricing - Regular Plan starts from $22 / Month

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a complete suite of features and tools to help manage your social media marketing performance. It is a tool that you can use for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Across all the platforms, Hootsuite allows you to get very real-time reports. And when I say “real-time”, I mean to the last minute.

The analytics of the tool exceeds most of the platforms as it allows you to filter using 200 different metrics, arrange, and sort your data.

In addition to that, it also helps track your response rate from your team for customer support purposes. You may explore the Hootsuite pricing options and select the features that suit your requirements.

Features

• Helps creating customized and up-to-date reports with over 200 metrics and various filters to draw out better conclusions.
• Keeps track of tags, mentions, comments, likes, and followers of the accounts.
• Helps improving the social media customer support by sharing insight on response time and customer inquiry solving rate.
• Hootsuite also helps managing the social media team and assigning posts or comments to other team members.

Pricing: Starting at $39 per month, with freemium available

Keyhole

Keyhole is the next pick for the best social media marketing analytics tool for business. Why? Because of ease of use. It is a platform that is designed to deliver high value in a simple and easy format.

Keyhole presents an easy-to-understand insights of the performance of content and your accounts. It also works with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Linkedin, and Youtube.

The tool also helps manage influencers which takes off a lot of additional work from marketing managers. The tool is also able to predict campaign performance and peoples' sentiment about your content based on past similar content.

With better insights, you can create content that aligns with your audience every single time.

Features

• One of the most notable features of Keyhole is the ability to track sentiment of your posts.
• The tools allow you to draw out deeper and more valuable insights that you might usually overlook.
• Keyhole also allows you to manage your influencers from the same dashboard.
• Simplifies the  social media reports and tracking of the content, to easily share it with management and clients.

Pricing: Talk to sales, free trial available

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a social media marketing analytics tool by Zoho, which is best know for its CRM software. Hence, it naturally collaborates with the main CRM software to manage relationships better.

Zoho Social works with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram. With all the major social platforms, Zoho allows you to learn about your audience in a more comprehensive way.

You can easily learn about what type of content to post and when, and what is your typical response time to interact with your customers through the different platforms.

One interesting part of Zoho Social is that it allows you to distinguish between the followers and the fans, ie people that simply follow your content vs the group of people who love what you share and engage with more frequently.

Features

• Creates reports based on the social media insights that can be segmented with various filters such as demographic and follower types.
• Understand what type of content drives results and builds a better and more engaging connection with your followers.
• Helps identifying brand advocates and fans from the followers to build higher brand value.
• Integrates with Zoho CRM software to manage customer relationships in a much more efficient way.

Pricing: Starting at $15 per month, free trial available

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media marketing analytics tool powerhouse. The insights are comprehensive and give a deeper understanding.

From content to the audience, Sprout Social helps understand what works best, how the post performed, and understand what your competitors are doing.

If you get started with influencer marketing, the tool also helps you drive insights about the demographics of the audience, industry influencers, and previous campaign performance. This data helps in making sure that your efforts are diverted in the right direction and that you achieve your goals.

The tool combines Linkedin analytics, Twitter analytics, Pinterest analytics, Facebook, and Instagram analytics all in one place for efficient marketing.

Features

• Comprehensive social media marketing analytics report for a better understanding of the content and the followers.
• Interaction management to ensure your followers are answered every time in the comments and your inbox.
• Easy-to-understand, shareable, and presentable social media reports for businesses to share with management and clients.
• Real-time brand monitoring and engagement reporting for up-to-date reporting.

Pricing: Starting at $99 per month, with free trial available

Agorapluse

Agorapluse is among the emerging social media marketing analytics that has gained some attention in recent years. The platform primarily focused on planning and scheduling posts, but it also has some solid insights.

The tool allow you to track conversations about your brand and understand what people have to say about you in more detail.

In addition to that, Agorapluse also helps you identify your top performing content along with the hashtags that drive the most engagement. This valuable insight makes social media marketing much easier and action-driven.

Features

• Shares the social media analytics of competitors as well to keep track and improve your strategy.
• Keep track and helps in managing the community and conversion through your social media accounts.
• Reporting is much easier and can be segmented with the help of a labeling feature.
• All your social media messages land in one inbox for better one-on-one interaction with the customer.

Pricing: Starting at $79 per month, with freemium available

Brandwatch

Brandwatch’s USP is data. The tool provides industry insights and competitor analysis that help you understand your niche better.

It also keeps track of conversations about your brand and helps you with data about your audience. This offers insights into what your customers like and how can you use this data to achieve your social marketing goals.

Using Brandwatch, you can essentially learn about people's sentiment and conversations. In addition to that, you can categorize or filter conversations to learn exactly what you are looking for to create better content.

Features

• In-depth consumer intelligence to help you better understand your followers and plan your strategy to engage them.
• The tool also helps in managing your social media and delivering insights on social listings, historical data, benchmarks, and more.

Pricing: Starting at $108 per month, with free trial available

Sendible

Sendible is another popular pick for the best social media marketing analytics tool. It is a tool that is designed to help you manage your presence on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube.

The tools help in publishing, tracking, and collecting insight from all the mentioned platforms and creating presentable reports with them.

Its drag-and-drop report building features help to create beautiful reports which are ready to share.

Features

• Drag-and-drop report building helps in sharing the data more efficiently.
• Sendible also helps in managing the workflow and delegating work among the team members.
• Keeps track of what people are saying about your brand and notifies you when something needs immediate attention.

Pricing: Starting at $29 per month

Social Pilot

Social Pilot is another emerging social media marketing analytics tool, that has performed exceptionally well on various benchmarks.

With this tool, you can manage to post your content on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Linkedin, Instagram, Google Business, VK, and Tumbler.

With such a large array of platforms to manage your brand presence, you can make sure you reach your audience on every platform. The tool allows you to manage, schedule, post, and track your content and performance all from one dashboard.

Features

• Keeps track and analyze all the content to understand what performs the best and draw insights from them for further success.
• Helps better understand the audience by visualizing growth patterns.
• Helps finding the best influencers in the industry to improve influencer marketing.
• Create and share a report directly with the client for ease of doing business and managing clients effectively.

Pricing: Starting at $30 per month, with free trial available

Brand24

Brand24 is a social media marketing analytics tool created to help you identify the opportunities for growth.

The tool collects all the data related to your brand and your product keywords to draw insights from the web.

You can then use the data to further learn about what your customers wants and what sentiment they hold regarding any topic. This information helps you keep track of customer insights and grow along with new trends.

Features

• The tool alerts you whenever there is a discussion about your brand helping you keep up with the conversation about your brand.
• Shares insights to help you find and choose the best social media influencers to achieve your goals.

Pricing: Starting at $59 per month, with free trial available

Choosing a social media analytics tool

Choosing the best social media marketing analytics tool is a tricky business. Each comes with unique features but still overlap in a lot of ways.

How to choose?

The best way to go ahead is to understand your pain points and the features that you are looking for in your social media marketing analytics tool. The biggest differences relate to:

• multi-platform support
• data reporting and creating filters
• whether the tool also includes content planning and scheduling
• pricing, especially freemium offers
• influencer marketing support

Sometimes you might want to have your own extensible dashboard and combine data and insights from several tools and piece it together with a tool like Supermetrics.

The best part is that most of the tools shared here offer a free trial. So shortlist your picks, take their free trial and find the best social media marketing analytics tools for your business.

If you we're looking for a Linkedin analytics tool, chances are you might like this post on Linkedin automation tools as well.