57 social media analytics tools [+ GUIDE]
What are people saying about your brand on social media? Are they happy? Angry? Using social media analytics tools, you can gather this social data, analyze it, and make informed business decisions. Sounds good, no? Increased revenue. Reduced customer service costs. Priceless product feedback. Online reputation management. Crisis management. Do you want to see how? Follow me and find out…
Ok, the social media analytics tools. 57 in total!!!
Do you know what to measure? How to find and analyze social data that’ll enable you to make smart business decisions? Having a social media analytics strategy will help you identify trends, sentiment, new opportunities, potential crises. You’ll understand what’s working and what isn’t. Benefits include:
- Prove your ROI
- Create winning social media campaigns
- Find the best influencers for your brand
- Benchmark against your competitors
- Identify trending topics
Using social media analytics yet?
Table of contents
- Definition of social media analytics
- Example of social media analytics tool
- Why do you need to use social media analytics?
- What are social media analytics tools?
- How do I choose the right social media analytics tool?
- How are you going to use your social media analytics tool?
- Social media analytics tools
Definition of social media analytics
The process of finding, collecting, and analyzing hidden insights from social data — structured and unstructured — to help informed decision making. Mining sentiment analysis is collected to support marketing and customer services activities. Includes online media channels — news sites, blogs, forums, review sites…
Why?
To increase revenue, streamline customer services and reduce costs, identify new product feedback, and improve brand reputation.
Example of social media analytics tool
Social media analysis of your social media networks compared with those of your competitors, will demonstrate how you rank against other brands in your industry. You’ll find key metrics on their product positioning, what messaging works for them, and customer feedback.
Why do you need to use social media analytics?
Back to the social data
Every time someone posts on social media, social data is generated. Comments, sentiment, likes, retweets, shares, etc.
Said it before, but I’ll say it again.
You need to find social data and analyze it, to steer your social media marketing campaigns. To check that what you’re doing is working. To boost your online reputation. To identify an oncoming crisis.
Social media is one of the world’s biggest focus groups. Consumers are talking. About you. Your products. Your industry. Your competitors.
You have to listen. Or be in the dark.
You want more? Okay…
Here’s why social media analytics is a must:
Understand your audience
- When are they online?
- What languages are they’re speaking?
- What are their interests? Could your content be more relevant?
Are you using the right social networks for your targeted audience?
- Where’s your audience? If your targeted audience are on Twitter, and you’re posting on Facebook… c’mon!!!
- Are you using the best channel for your product? A pretty product begs for Instagram. Flashy sports cars, beauty products, fashion…
Competitive benchmarking
- Do you know what your competitors are doing on social, and whether they’re performing well? If their latest campaign is a flop… DON’T GO THERE! If they’re having a big win… can you replicate?
I’ve a little something that you’ll find useful… my Competitive Analysis Guide shows you in detail, how to find out what the pesky competition are up to.
Create the best content
- What are your followers into? Text, video, images, podcasts… ? Identify what they like, and give it to them.
Brand reputation
This is a biggie… damage it, and your revenue will suffer.
- Understand how your brand is perceived. Across social media networks, blogs, review sites, forums. Use social media analytics tools to learn what they’re saying about you. What they think of you.
Protect your brand assets
- Image and video analytics will show you how brand assets such as your logo are being used, exploited, abused. Up to 80% of images posted online featuring a brand logo, don’t mention the brand name in the text.
That’s huge! Video and image analytics reveals the big picture… your brand text, images, and videos.
Monitor and test social campaigns
- Monitor your social media marketing campaigns and check that they’re working. Any improvements you could make? Results what you expected? Should you knock it on the head? Use sentiment analysis to identify how consumers feel about your campaign. Your brand. Your products. Your industry.
What are social media analytics tools?
Web application analysis software used to monitor, assess, analyze, and improve a brand’s social media performance.
Bit of a mouthful, no?
Okay, let’s try again… social media analytics tools allow you to…
- Gather and translate social data that users leave behind on social media sites. Allowing you as a brand, to understand the performance of your social media strategy
- Understand what consumers think of your brand, products and services
- Identify what they think of your customer service
- Listen to feedback about your latest product launch
- Determine how well your social media marketing campaigns are going
- Find the positive, and the negative, of the sentiment expressed by users
Impressive, no?
How do I choose the best social media analytics tools?
Follow my social media analytics tools checklist. It includes features that I consider essential. Without them you’ll miss vital social data that could be make or break for your brand.
Features
What features do you need?
- A platform with comprehensive filtering and search query creation options (Boolean operators)? Typically, you’ll need this if your plan to go beyond analyzing brand/competitor mentions.
- Do you want to be able to analyze images and video, as well as text?
- Are you looking to integrate other data sources such as broadcast or print media?
- What level of customer support do you need?
- Do you need to be able to create reports quickly and without hassle?
All the features in one tool, is the ideal…
- Real-time alerts — Talkwalker Alerts — yep, even better than Google Alerts — is a quick, easy, and free way to monitor for potential crises, brand mentions, competitor and industry news.
- Image recognition — 80% if images shared online, don’t name visible brands in the accompanying content. That’s huge, no? You’re potentially missing brand mentions — positive and negative. Brand boosting. Brand damaging. Talkwalker’s proprietary image recognition technology finds these posts. Recognizes your logo, so you can protect your trademark against misuse and abuse. Or, jump in on a conversation about your brand and exploit it.
- Video analytics — Yes it’s here. Yes it’s real. We can now find your logo in video. Amazeballs, indeed. By 2021, 80% of all online traffic will be made up of video. 80%!!! You ready for that? Talkwalker’s AI-powered video recognition lets you find up to 3x the number of brand mentions. Your brand will be protected 100%.
- Sentiment analysis — Opinion mining identifies what consumers think of your brand, product, service, event. What they really think. Our sentiment analysis technology captures consumer sentiment with up to an average 90% accuracy, understanding the meaning behind content. Determining attitude and contextual reactions in tweets, comments, posts, articles. Hey, it even understands sarcasm and irony.
- If you want the complete picture of your brand online, we need to go global. Your social media analytics tool has to support multiple languages. 187 at Talkwalker is awesome. And, I’m including emoji in there.
- Automated reporting of business impact metrics. It’s all very well tracking and analyzing social data. But, you have to be able to share the results with your team. Check out the kind of reporting we can give you.
- Virality map. This is and always will be my favorite. A virality map will show you how a post/story has travelled online. It’s start point. With all the pit stops on the way — social media, blogs, news sites, broadcast, etc.
Reuters posted an article covering Oprah’s speech at the Golden Globes.
Talkwalker was referenced as tracking the social media mentions surrounding her speech.
Told you it’s awesome!
How do you want to use your social media analytics tool?
Your purpose…
- Measuring your social media performance?
- PR monitoring?
- Product insights and consumer feedback?
You have to decide what you want your tool to do, before you choose. Choose blind, and you’ll end up wasting money.
What’s the scale of your social media analysis?
- Is it just for your marketing team’s analytics, or across your business in multiple departments?
- Will you be searching for general industry terms, such as digital marketing. Or will you be targeting specialist keywords and phrases, such as social listening, social media analytics, your brand and competitors?
- How many topics do you need to monitor — 2 or 3, or 100s? The more basic SMA tools limit the number of searches possible.
- Do you want to collect data from across the board — social media, news sites, forums, review sites, broadcast, press? Again, the more basic tools have restrictions that will limit data coverage.
I’d strongly recommend you sign up for demos, before handing over your cash.
Talkwalker’s free demo is a click away…
How much does a social media analytics tool cost?
If you’ve not determined what you need from your SMA tool, it’s too soon to talk money. You’ll be flushing it down the pan. Chances are, you’ll have to buy another social analytics tool in the future, when you discover vital features missing from your choice.
Obvs maybe, but low cost and free social media analysis tools bring fewer features, lower data volume and quality, and less customer support.
Think about it.
Social media analytics tools
Woohoo, let’s go. The best 57 social media analytics tools on the market…
It’s a great long list. Click on over to the original blog post for more all the deets…
Takeaway
If you’re not using social media analytics tools to monitor and measure your social media campaigns, you’re missing so much. Give some of the tools a whirl.
In the meantime…
Don’t be overwhelmed by social media. Download my free social media checklist!. It’ll help you increase engagement, awareness, credibility, conversion. Reduce your stress levels, while you maximize your brand’s success.
Originally published at https://www.talkwalker.com on August 30, 2019.
