Monitoring your social media analytics can make the difference between the success or failure of your social media presence.
Are you using the right social media analytics tools to monitor, assess and improve your social media performance?
In this article we outline 7 very useful social media analytics tools.
1. Simply Measured
Simply Measured provides a very comprehensive social media reporting platform that supports a broad range of social networks.
How much will it cost you?
To give you a taste for the platform you can start off using the free reports, which are quite useful.
To access the paid reports, pricing starts at $500 per month for 10 social profiles with an audience of up to 250k. After this the pricing is tiered e.g. $1,500 per 20 social profiles, $2,500 for 50 social profiles. If you are an agency you will need to get a quote.
What are the main features?
Supports – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn
Wide range of standard reports are available for each platform
Web traffic and conversion analysis – You can connect to Google Analytics and view detailed information
Competitive analysis and benchmarking – Run reports against your competitors to review your performance
Influencer and Trend Analysis – Figure out who are the key influencers that you need to connect with and track trend
Brand, Keywords and Hashtag monitoring – Get email alerts based on criteria you set
Professional reports, all of which are available in Excel and Powerpoint
Multi-channel analysis so you can compare many accounts at the same time – for example, compare multiple Twitter accounts
Scheduled reporting – Get reports delivered to you automatically.
How does it work?
When you connect your social profiles you have a choice of a wide range of standard reports. On the left hand side select the category you want. For example, select Twitter if you only want to view reports that are relevant to Twitter.
Select the menu on the left and then pick the appropriate report
As an example, when I selected the Twitter Account Report, it brings me to a screen where you provide details of your Twitter account. You can then name this ‘collection’ and assign any tags that further describe what the report is about.
Specify the details of the report
You then specify the type of report you want to run. You’ll see there’s also a menu option for alerts. This allows me to set up monitoring on this account and get alerts.
Specify the alerts you want to recieve
There is good configuration on the alerts where you can set up options such as only deliver alerts based on someone having a high number of followers or Klout score.
When you run a report you can either view it online or as an Excel report. The reports are very visually appealing, well designed and full of great content.
If you don’t like the black background there is also a light colored theme.
An example of part of a report
What I love most about the Excel reports is that it’s not just the graphs that are exported to Excel. It also creates multiple sheets within which contain all the data that back up the graph.
Having the data means you can analyze it even further and maybe start changing the data to predict future results.
There are many sheets of data provided for each report
As well as social media accounts you can also run off reports from your website. For example, this is one of the charts in a report that shows you the Twitter users who are driving the most traffic to your site. This is very useful to know as these are people you need to engage with more.
View detailed reports on website activity as a result of social media activity
Overall Opinion
Simply Measured is a really powerful social media analytics platform that provides an extensive range of really nicely designed reports that are available either online, or through Excel and Powerpoint.
Their free reports are a great starting point and definitely worth using.
The fact they support such a broad range of social media platforms, together with their high starting price point, means that it’s really suitable for the larger brands, and they do have some very large brands already as clients.
2. Rival IQ
Rival IQ is a platform for competitive intelligence. You create one or more landscapes of competitors or clients and track their performance across both social media and the web.
The platform is really nicely designed and easy to understand so you’ll get benefit from it very quickly.
How much will it cost you?
Pricing starts at $99 with support for Facebook and Twitter plus competitor analysis for 1 landscape (a landscape is a way of grouping companies you want to monitor). At $199 you get support for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and 2 landscapes. At $399 you can expand your competitor analysis from 2 to 5 landscapes.
What are the main features?
Supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+
Track multiple markets or clients through the use of landscapes
Monitor social metrics across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+
Analyze data relevant to SEO
Monitor and improve on social bio information
Monitor the best performing content shared by you or your competitors
How does it work?
When you login to Rival IQ you are asked for the website address of the competitors you want to track. This forms your ‘landscape’ which will probably consist of you and a group of competitors.
Add up to 5 competitors (depending on licensing)
You can click on any competitor and view information related to that competitor. For example, here we can see the content getting the most engagement that was shared by Social Media Examiner over the last 7 days.
This displays detailed analytics for each competitors
You can also view other information such as:
What changes have been made to their website
A link to all their channels
Statistics on performance of each of their channels
Similar companies to Social Media Examiner you might want to track
You can also view information based on your landscape. For example, when you are viewing a landscape select the Social menu option followed by Twitter.
You will then see Twitter analytics for the last 7 days for each of your competitors. On the left hand side you can see a list of the other reports that are available. Click on any of them to see a similar graph for that statistic.
The graph can be exported to a PDF or PNG file.
You can drill down further to view many different reports
If you select the Positioning menu option you can see the bio’s and tag lines that each competitor is using and you can track what has changed. This is an important area which is often overlooked.
One of the positioning sections showing Facebook descriptions
The SEO section provides some basic information related to SEO. While this is certainly not a replacement for an SEO tool, it does provide you with some valuable high level information.
Any of the reports can also be exported to a Powerpoint presentation, enabling you to produce some great management reports that contain nice graphs and statistics for each of your competitors.
Overall Opinion
This is a very intuitive platform with good social media analytics. I’d like to see integration with Google Analytics as it would also be great to see the traffic generated and results achieved from your social media interaction. I’d also like to see more detailed SEO analytics, for example, being able to drill down on the most popular external links from competitors. This is a nice to have feature as opposed to an essential feature!
If you are a very large brand you are likely to require support for platforms other than the big 4 (Twitter, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn). You may also like more detailed social media analytics which is provided by other platforms, however, it does also provide some great functionality not provided by the pure analytics providers.
3. Google analytics
Google Analytics is a very comprehensive web analytics tool that most of us are familiar with to some degree, but it also provides some social media analytics that we quite often overlook and don’t spend enough time on!
How much will it cost you?
This tool is completely free.
What are the main features?
Here are some of the main features in relation to social media analytics.
Track traffic from social platforms – You can drill down by referrer and look at the traffic generated from each of the social platforms. If you use a custom URL you can track traffic generated from a specific link you shared.
Isolate traffic using a segment – If you want to drill down on traffic for a particular channel you can create a segment and view information just related to that channel.
Social media dashboard – create a graphical dashboard which shows a summary of your social media activity and results of traffic generated.
View real-time traffic – When you share out content on social media you can view your website traffic in real-time. While you’re not going to do this all the time, you may have an important campaign that you have want to track more closely in the early stages, and monitoring the real-time statistics can be useful.
Social media conversions – You can set up goals and track the conversion rates of these goals broken down by social channel.
How does it work?
Assuming you already have Google Analytics installed, the only additional set up is as follows:
Create your goals – If you want to track conversions across social channels then a good way is to set up a goal. For example, I have set up a goal for e-mail subscribers, so that when someone new signs-up we can see which channel the subscriber came from.
Custom Links – If you want to track the traffic that is generated for specific links you can use Google URL builder to create a custom link and then track activity on this link in Google Analytics (see How to track links shared on social media)
Select the Channels option followed by Social.
Select the social section to view social media traffic
In this section you will see the traffic generated as a result of your social media activity. If you have goals set up you can also see the conversion from each of these social media channels.
Here is an example showing conversions for newsletter sign-ups based on each channel.
View the conversions across each of the platforms
If you want to set up a social media analytics dashboards, here’s one provided by Koozai.
In the Acquisition > Social section there are other social media analytics worth considering. For example, in the Data Hub section you can view the conversations related to your content that happened on various social channels.
View conversations which can be filtered by social network
There are other areas within this section that are also worth looking at.
Overall Opinion
As well as tracking the activity on social media channels you also need to track what happened when the traffic came back to your website. Google Analytics is a useful tool for this.
4. Zuum
Zuum is a tool used for benchmarking performance against competitors,finding the most engaging content and identifying key influencers.
How much will it cost you?
Pricing starts at $250 per month which gives you access to all platforms up to 350k fans and up to 5 brands ($315 for 10 brands). Price goes to $350 for up to 1 million fans etc.
What are the main features?
Analytics support for Facebook, Twitter and limited support for Instagram, YouTube and Google+ (additional support being rolled out next week)
Compare your posting activity with your competitors
Leaderboard showing your performance in comparison with your competitors
Discover the posts driving the highest engagement so you can determine the topics you should be writing about
Reports exportable to CSV (not Excel or Powerpoint)
Influencer report showing the most influential users which can be sorted by likes, engagement, shares etc.
Integration with Google analytics
Set up daily,weekly or monthly email reports
How does it work?
When you login the menu on the left allows you to select the social media channel and area you want to view analytics for. The initial screen shows a dashboard showing fan/follower count for each competitor across all channels supported. This leaderboard table is available for all platforms supported.
View an overview of performance
If we take Facebook as an example this is broken down into the following:
Benchmarking - See how your brand is doing in relation to your competitors – fans, engagement, share of voice, trending content, etc. Here’s an example of the share of voice section.
View how your brand is doing against competitors on Facebook
Publishing – What content is working, when is it working, what is getting the most likes/comments/shares? Here is an example of Twitter posting volume. The larger circles indicate when most activity occurred. This is a view for a particular brand but you can also view overall stats which shows you and your competitors all on the same chart.
View an overall chart or drill down on a particular brand
Community – This shows you the most engaging content shared by fans, the key influencers, what the community are talking about, the content fans are posting, etc.
For Twitter analytics benchmarking and publishing analytics is supported but there is no option for ‘community support’ feature. For YouTube channels only the benchmarking analytics is supported. For Google + and Instagram the only supported functionality is leaderboard analytics.
Overall Opinion
Zuum provides you very good Twitter and Facebook anlaytics that allows to figure out what is working/not working on your accounts. Good detailed analytics that is very easy to use.
Currently there is less support for YouTube, Google+ and Instagram but this is currently being added (I have a release that will be out next week that now has this functionality).
5. Socialbakers
Socialbakers provide a suite of modules including analytics, social media management, ad analytics and monitoring.
Their analytics module provides industry and competitive benchmarking across a range of platforms.
How much will it cost you?
Pricing starts at $50 per month for one profile (e.g. a Facebook account), $100 for 3 accounts, $200 for 7 accounts, and $400 for 20. This pricing is just for the analytics, however Socialbakers does provide other modules (e.g content management platform, monitoring solution and ad analytics) at an additional cost.
What are the main features?
Supports Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google+
Industry Benchmarking – Provides country and brand level reporting
Customized reports exportable to PDF
Competitive analysis – compare your page against your competitors
Key influencer reports – identify the people engaging with your content the most
How does it work?
When you go to Socialbakers there is some analytics available for free that allows you to look at the performance of brands across countries, and categories (e.g. media). If there’s an interesting brand you can drill down and view more information. Some of this is available for free and some with a paid account.
Here is an example report showing the top performing pages in the media category for Twitter.
This is the media category in Twitter
If there’s anything of particular interest you can drill down and view analytics for each brand.
The dashboard is where you track the information related to your brand or the competitors that you follow. Once you connect up your social profiles you’ll see a dashboard similar to the following.
The initial dashboard on login
When you are viewing data you can choose to view your competitors alongside yours or just view your own. For example, the Content Newsfeed displays the latest content on your page and your competitors and gives an indication of how well it is doing. Here’s an example showing RazorSocial and Social Media Examiner.
This is a breakdown of recent posts
Here is an example of a couple of graphs available for your brand.
View detailed analysis for your page
Here is an example of part of the PDF report that you can produce.
Example PDF report
Overall Opinion
Socialbakers provides very comprehensive industry benchmarking analytics and good competitive analysis, along with a wide selection of analytics specific to your page.
6. Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster is an analytics tool for Facebook and Twitter. It provides analytics with recommendations on how to make improvements including the timing of when you should send your updates. It also provides the facility to share scheduled content across the platforms.
How much will it cost you?
Prices start at $9 per month for one Facebook page and Twitter account with up to 50,000 fans/followers, which is quite reasonable. The prices go up to $49 for 10 social media accounts and $119 for 30. Enterprise pricing is also available for bigger accounts.
What are the main features?
Find your best content – Analysis on what is the best content you have posted
Alerts and recommendations – It will track any spikes or unusual activity and also give recommendations based on the analytics collected. For example, suggestions on the best times to post.
Automatically schedule content – You can publish content to Facebook and Twitter and let Crowdbooster automatically schedule the content
View the users that are interacting with you the most e.g. comments, likes etc.
View analytics on each individual tweet or Facebook update
How does it work?
When you connect up your Facebook or Twitter accounts you immediately see data about your accounts. In the following example it gives an overall view of Twitter activity for a week. It then shows the tweets that were most effective. The ones higher up the chart got the most impressions and the ones over to the right got the most retweets.
Find out the tweets that are working for you!
Based on this report you can then drill down and view the actual tweets. You can also see a similar graph for Facebook and when you drill down to see the actual Facebook updates this is what you would see.
View various filters for Facebook
You can also find your most engaged users on Twitter or Facebook. This is useful as these are people you may want to follow and/or engage with.
View a list of people engaging/sharing your content
Overall Opinion
Crowdbooster is a well designed application with good functionality and their tips for making improvements are useful. The only reservation I’d have is that I would prefer to use a social media analytics platform that supports all the major social networks (only Twitter/Facebook supported) or use a full social media management platform that includes a lot more functionality.
7. Quintly
Quintly provides analytics for Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter. The information is laid out in customizable dashboards where you can add widgets for data or stats you want to monitor. A list of standard widgets are provided.
How much will it cost you?
There’s a free option with limited Facebook analytics and then a starting price of $69 per month that includes analytics for the 4 platforms and 7 profiles (each account/page is a profile). $199 for 20 profiles and $399 for 45 profiles.
What are the main features?
Analytics provided for Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn company analytics
Create multiple dashboards that contain a different set of clients or customers.
PDF reports that are nicely formatted and presented
Competitive analysis reporting
How does it work?
When you add your social profiles (and any competitors) you are presented with a customizable dashboard with widgets containing graphs/data. You can also set up multiple dashboards. Here is an example of the graphs.
An example of charts provided by Quintly
You can customize the dashboard according to your needs by adding/removing any widgets.
Select from a good variety of standard widgets
Reports are available as PDF, JPG, PNG, XLS or CSV.
Overall Opinion
A nice easy user interface and I particularly like the dashboard approach where you can customize your own widgets. It comes in at an attractive starting price for your social media analytics.
Summary
As your social media presence grows you will need to consider investing in some 3rd party analytic tools. Ideally you want a cross platform tool with good competitive analysis. The selection of tools we have covered gives you some good options.
What is your experience with the tools? What works best for you?
The post 7 Multi-Platform Social Media Analytics Tools appeared first on RazorSocial and was written by Ian Cleary