With over 4.5 billion social media users across the globe, it's no wonder businesses need to be active on social media to connect with their audience.
However, simply existing on social media isn't enough; marketers need to use social media analytics to ensure they post content with the highest ROI.
Social media analytics and reporting give your business the best chance to produce engaging content that positively impacts your bottom line consistently.
Social media analytics provides insight into several essential factors directly tied to your marketing efforts and business success.
Here’s a list that explains the importance of social media analytics:
Social media analytics reports provide an overview of specific metrics and data points — such as engagements and impressions — related to the content you share on various social media platforms.
Simply put, reports are how you’ll review your social media analytics.
Social media analytics tools (which we’ll review next) make the creation of reports simple — some of these resources provide reports from one social platform at a time. In contrast, others offer reports from multiple social media.
Either way, social media analytics reporting tools are typically customizable — meaning you can view and pull the data and reports that matter most to you and your business.
With the tools we will review below, reports can be automatically made and shared for you. But here are some of the unique aspects of social media analytics reports that you can typically customize:
Learn how to create impactful monthly reports to show ROI on your social media efforts.
As stated, your reports will be unique based on the analytics software or tool you use. However, let’s look at some of the most common social media analytics reports you may come across or create at some point.
Let's look at HubSpot's social media analytics reporting options to give you some different reports available in commonly-used tools .
The Audience report displays your current number of followers for each social account compared to the number you had in a previous period.
The Published Posts report shows the number of social posts published across your social accounts during a specific period.
The Interactions report displays the number of likes, reactions, and comments on your posts across multiple platforms.
The Clicks report displays how many clicks you get on your social posts published through HubSpot.
The Shares report displays the number of posts your audience members shared.
The Impressions report shows the number of views that posts on your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram pages received.
The Sessions report displays how many web sessions on your site took place within a given period driven by social media.
The New Contacts report displays how many new contacts have been created in HubSpot due to web sessions driven by social media within the selected period.
Now you may be wondering what tools are available to help you pull these reports and data — next, we’ll cover some of your options.
There are many social media analytics tools available today, which is why identifying the right one for your business can seem daunting. We’ve compiled the following list of seven of our favorites to help get you started.
HubSpot Social Media Software gives insight into the customer journey through integrated analytics tools.
These help you understand which marketing tactics work best among your audience, determine how your marketing efforts impact your bottom line, and learn about your search engine optimization (SEO)-related ROI.
Try HubSpot's social media tools free for 30 days.
In addition, HubSpot’s Social Media Software has several a resources available for you to implement in your strategy.
These resources include social media analytics report templates, free social media analytics tools, and social media courses.
Note: HubSpot also integrates with other analytics software, like Oktopost.LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are powerful platforms HubSpot can integrate with.
To learn more about HubSpot integration, visit our integrations marketplace.
TweetDeck is an analytics tool used for Twitter. It works in real-time to help you view and analyze your Tweet engagement, organization, management, and tracking on the platform.
Buffer provides an in-depth look at how you can strategize to grow your brand on social media.
The software does this by measuring your performance on various social platforms, creating detailed reports about the data points that matter to you, and recommending ways to improve your reach, engagement, and more.
Mentionlytics is an all-in-one social media monitoring tool that helps businesses understand how audiences feel about their brand, competitors, or industry.
The AI-powered software tracks mentions on social media platforms and provides in-depth sentiment analysis in all languages. Their Social Intelligence Advisor, SIA transforms countless volumes of data into straightforward insights, giving recommendations for social media growth, like best posting times.
Mentionlytics allows you to measure your online brand performance and your marketing campaign performance effortlessly, using critical metrics like reach, engagement, and follower growth. Keyword and hashtag analysis, share of voice, and market trends analysis give you a clear overview of your online presence and help you take actionable steps to improve it.
Meltwater is a powerful social media analytics tool that helps organizations monitor and analyze online engagement and brand presence across multiple platforms. It provides real-time insights, enabling businesses to monitor trends, measure campaign performance, and better engage with their audience. By leveraging Meltwater’s data and advanced analytics, companies can make informed decisions and optimize their social media strategies for better engagement and growth.
Rival IQ is all about bringing a competitive lens to your social media analytics, helping you benchmark against your main competitors or even your whole industry on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
AI insights and post tagging make it easy to adapt your social strategy in real time and create bespoke analysis.
You can explore Rival IQ’s powerful competitive social media analytics without leaving HubSpot using Competitor Streams.
Hootsuite allows you to create customized social media reports using over 200 metrics across your social channels and campaigns.
These reports are easily shareable with members of your team and your clients to keep everyone on the same page and prove ROI.
Sprout Social provides a look into your customers' needs through the conversations your customers and followers are having on social media.
The software also measures your specific content and campaign work across various platforms and channels to determine what’s working best among audience members and what should be improved upon.
(Note: Sprout Social is another social media software integrates with HubSpot.)
Mention is a tool that allows your company to monitor, listen, and analyze your posts and your interactions with and among audience members via different social channels and platforms.
The software also makes creating automated reports to share this data with fellow employees or clients easy.
Next, look at applying these tools and resources in your day-to-day work by reviewing the steps in tracking social media analytics (also known as your social media analytics strategy).
Work through the following steps to begin tracking your social media analytics and gaining a better understanding of which parts of your processes are working and which need to be modified. Again, you can think of this as your social media analytics strategy.
Create and set SMART goals to help you achieve your social media analytics goals.
By ensuring your goals are SMART, they’ll be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound and you’ll be able to focus your strategy to reach or even exceed your expectations efficiently.
First, ask yourself, “What do I want to learn from my social media analytics?” Then, dive into each part of the SMART goal. Here’s an example of a SMART plan related to your social media analytics strategy for reference.
Use a free template to help you create SMART goals and achieve them.
Now it’s time to decide which social media metrics you will track. There are several commonly-tracked social media metrics for your consideration.
Metrics may vary by social platform and which analytics tool you choose. But here are some all-encompassing metrics applicable to virtually every social channel and analytics tool to get started.
Next, determine which social media analytics tools you’ll use — we covered some popular choices above, but you can always review other options through a simple Google search.
Before deciding on which tool or tools you’ll use, think about the following questions:
Once you implement your social media analytics software, you’ll be able to measure the success of your efforts.
To do this, you'll need to use the analytics tool you implemented. Depending on your software, you can create customized reports and dashboards or pull the specific details about data points you care most about.
In addition to applying your tools to help measure your success, you may also consider your answers to the following questions:
Once you measure the success of your social media analytics efforts, you’ll be able to determine whether or not any part of your strategy needs to be changed or updated.
Maybe you realize one of your data points isn’t providing the level of insight into your marketing efforts across social platforms, so you need to identify a new one to measure.
Maybe your software doesn’t allow you to customize cross-channel reports how you want to, so you must implement a new tool.
Or, if you’re happy with how your social media analytics reporting and strategy is working, be sure to revisit your system in the future to ensure it continues to meet your expectations.
By tracking and applying social media analytics to your strategy, you’ll be able to reach your audience more effectively.
And when you do this, you’ll see improvements in factors directly tied to your ROI, like engagement, conversions, loyalty, and more.
Consider which tools and software are best for you and determine how you’ll track your social media analytics to create deeper relationships with your customers and followers.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.