Social media analytics software provides functionality for gathering and reporting on data related to social media accounts. Social media analytics products are used by social media, marketing, and communications teams that use social analytics tools to identify successful practices, target demographics, and analyze real-time consumer practices. Data scientists and researchers may also utilize social media analytics tools to gather information about regions, practices, and tendencies. Social media analytics tools allow businesses to gain a greater understanding of customer desires and responsiveness. The products aim to grow businesses by measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns. With increased awareness of customer sentiment and business practices, teams can strategize to create more effective campaigns while improving customer satisfaction and brand awareness. Social analytics products often provide information that benefits social media monitoring software. Monitoring functionality can also be found within social media management software as a feature or social media suites as either a feature or standalone product.
To qualify for inclusion in the Social Media Analytics category, a product must be able to:
Create business goals that can be measured with data indicators
Provide tracking and sharing data
Evaluate audience size, engagement, and demographics
Aggregate social media statistics
Compare data from individual campaigns, posts, or pages
Social Media Analytics Software Features
Analytics tools are meant to make the understanding and analysis of data easier; social media analytics software has the same purpose, but with features that are specific to measuring social media data. These features include:
Competitor analysis — Many social media analytics products allow users to track the performance of not only their own social media campaigns, but of their competitors’ social media accounts as well. This is beneficial for social media managers who want to increase followers or interactions in relation to competitors, or use rivals as a benchmark for overall performance. It may be advantageous to tap into a competitors’ audience to grow followers and engagement.
Follower analysis — The ability to glean insights into how your followers interact with your posts is important, but social media analytics software also provides insights into followers’ demographics and location. This can be valuable for understanding how certain demographics interact with specific pieces of content or posts. By having a better knowledge of followers, social media managers can target and personalize content for higher levels of engagement.
Content engagement analysis — Similar to follower analysis, knowing who engages with certain pieces of content is valuable because it helps inform content marketing teams. Social media analytics solutions can offer insights into which headlines attract the most followers, likes, or engagements. Personalization is a major aspect of social media strategies, so pinpointing how content performs allows for a more targeted approach to audience engagement. This is also important for paid social ads to determine what is worth spending money on to grow followers and audience.
Influencer identification — Some social media analytics offerings may provide the ability to identify which followers have the largest networks. Once these followers are identified, marketers, social media managers, or even C-level employees can target these influencers as potential brand advocates to promote company content or posts. Tapping into followers’ networks is an efficient way to increase one's own following and audience.
Attribution — Marketers are constantly utilizing attribution solutions to ensure they are properly tracking lead generation. Social media analytics tools provide attribution capabilities to make sure social media managers or other marketers are tracking which customers were converted from social channels. Understanding the click path of users that eventually converted into customers enables repeat strategies or campaigns to hopefully replicate the end result.
Reporting — Reporting is always a challenge, but analytics tools help improve the reporting process by providing a dedicated reporting tool instead of using spreadsheets. Social media data is easily organized and exported from social media analytics software so that it can be presented in a clean and easily understandable fashion. This is particularly useful when showing key metrics from social media data to higher-level employees.