If you’re running your brand’s social media presence, you need the ability to understand when your content or campaigns are or aren’t performing well.

Social media analytics help brands gauge key metrics like reach, followers, engagement, clicks and conversions. Many platforms have built-in insights, but a third-party social media analytics tool collects all of that data in a single, easy-to-use dashboard.

In this article, we’re going to cover 20 of the best social media analytics tools marketers should consider in 2024.

What are social media analytics tools?

Social media analytics tools are a type of software that collects and analyzes data from your social media channels. Data from social media analytics software lets you better understand your audience and how they interact with your content. With these tools, you can increase social media followers, optimize engagement and improve conversion rates.

Some social analytics tools provide additional functionality, like monitoring and analyzing competitor behavior. Advanced tools will also help you “listen” to the conversations your target audience has on social media to gauge their perception of your brand.

Using social media analysis tools for monitoring and insights is a way to optimize your social media strategy—and strengthen your market position with business intelligence.

Benefits of using a social media analytics tool

It’s essential to invest in a tool that’ll give you deeper insights into how your social media strategy is performing. Here are three key reasons to use social media analysis tools.

Gain deep insights into your followers

Using a social media analytics tool helps make sure you’re consistently creating and publishing content that actually resonates with your target audience. Get insights like:

  • How many people are your posts reaching
  • How often do people like or interact with your content
  • How much your social media following is growing
  • How many sales and conversions your social media posts are generating

And so much more. Having these details helps you get a better idea of what content to publish, when and where so you’re moving strategically rather than reactively. These insights will inform messaging that hits on audience pain points, needs and interests—making sure your content is relevant and engaging.

Increase follower engagement and customer loyalty

When followers see that your social media content aligns with what they care about, they’ll be more interested in your brand. What happens when you make an emotional connection with them? You win their trust and loyalty.

As a result, your followers may engage with your content more often, signaling they want to build a two-way relationship with you. They don’t want to simply scroll by your content—they want to interact with you.

Optimize social media ROI

Social media analytics platforms track key performance indicators (KPIs), like click-through rates, conversion rates and follower growth. Having insight into these social media metrics lets you attribute specific social media activities to revenue generation.

When you’re able to measure the ROI of your social media strategy, you can execute data-driven optimization. For example, if you identify a specific type of organic social post that tends to have high conversion rates, you can increase the number of those posts to maximize conversions.

Best social media analytics tools for your brand

1. Sprout Social

The need for cross-channel social media analytics makes Sprout Social’s analytics tools an easy choice.

Whether you want to dive deep into your performance on a single network or quickly compare results across multiple networks at once, Sprout has you covered.

Track Facebook Page impressions, tally up X (formerly known as Twitter) link clicks, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement, assess content performance on Pinterest and much more, all from the same location.

Then quickly organize and share your data with easy-to-understand, presentation-ready reports. Or take it a step further with Premium Analytics to create custom reports tailored to your organization’s KPIs.

Sprout comes complete with both templated and customizable reporting options, meaning you have multiple ways to gather essential social metrics and easily present them to others in meaningful ways. You can easily include only the metrics you care about most to reduce the noise.

Sprout Social's Instagram Business Profiles Report, which measures outbound hashtag performance.

From tags to trends and everything in between, Sprout puts powerful analytics at your fingertips. Take this case study from the University of North Dakota, where Sprout Social helped them streamline and optimize social media performance and tracking. You can even access data related to internal team performance and competitor activity to help you improve customer care or benchmark your brand against others in your industry.

But that’s only scratching the surface.

Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data surrounding audience demographics, industry influencers, campaign performance, share of voice and consumer sentiment.

Plus, if you work with social media influencers, Sprout offers influencer search and tracking capabilities, so you can better understand how your partnerships are playing out.

No matter your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout has been built from the ground up to give you a fast, user-friendly way to display social insights.

2. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management tool for agencies, with comprehensive analysis and reporting features. It works with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and X. With it, you can better understand how your social posts perform in order to optimize your social media strategy. Sendible offers automated reports with customized branding and 200 analytics modules to choose from.

Sendible also offers social media management features, like content customization, image editing, direct scheduling and client collaboration. It also has audience engagement capability so you can respond to audience comments, DMs and mentions from one inbox.

A key differentiator for Sendible is that it can be white-labeled, so it works well for social media agencies that want to use the software under their brand for their clients.

3. Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time social media analysis tool for X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok. Its products monitor what followers say about your brand, track competitor behavior, find leading social media influencers, spot upcoming trends and more.

Keyhole aggregates your analytics for each social media profile across your accounts so you can monitor everything through a single platform. Plus, it shows your social media performance over time to help you better understand how your strategy is working—so you can optimize it to reach your goals.

This platform works for agencies, B2C brands, nonprofits and several industries such as media and entertainment.

4. IZEA

The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.

Enter IZEA, an analytics platform which removes many of the what-ifs related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.

IZEA’s Flex software also enables brands to get a look into potential influencers’ audience demographics, influencer campaign performance, conversion rates and so much more.

Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be an ROI mystery. Using a tool like IZEA to not only find but track influencer partnerships is a good way to monitor success.

5. BuzzSumo

Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is a resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.

If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.

Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.

6. Google Analytics

While it’s not solely a social media analytics tool, Google Analytics is a way to track social media campaigns driving to your website and even help you measure social ROI.

You may already have an account set up on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic right now. But did you know you can access and create reports specifically for social media tracking, too?

For instance, you can see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network, or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns.

7. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an X-specific analytics tool that can help brands search relevant Twitter bios to find users to engage with, compare users, analyze accounts, track followers and more. Users can get access to valuable insights and help with their Twitter strategy using a completely free Followerwonk account.

Followerwonk was recently acquired by Fedica, which is adding new AI-powered tools to help automate more social media management workflows.

8. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a social media analytics tool that can help businesses track their success across a number of channels—YouTube included. With features like competitor analysis, basic social analytics, social listening, reporting and social media audits, Rival IQ works for businesses with a widespread online presence. It can also be a huge help for agencies working with multiple clients.

Build out custom dashboards for each client based on their specific goals with social media marketing. Then download reports to share in a number of formats, like PPT, PDF, PNG or CSV. Rival IQ also offers influencer tracking and hashtag analytics to help you monitor influencer campaigns and choose the best hashtags for your content.

9. Iconosquare

Iconosquare started as a basic Instagram analytics tool years before the platform started offering built-in insights. At the time, this tool was one of the only ways to effectively monitor your Instagram efforts. As platforms adapt and change, analytics tools must do the same.

Now, Iconosquare is a social media analytics tool that lets users monitor 100+ different metrics across various social media platforms. Supported social media platforms include Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn and TikTok.

Create custom dashboards that allow you to see your most important metrics at a glance, like follower growth, audience demographics, post engagement, reach and more. Iconosquare also offers publishing capabilities, collaborative content creation and approval, social listening and community management.

10. Tailwind

Tailwind is another social media analytics tool that has changed and evolved over the years. What started as a Pinterest scheduling tool called Pin League has quickly evolved into a social media management and analytics tool.

Tailwind supports a limited number of social networks. While users can connect their Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest accounts, Tailwind’s features are catered to the visual platforms of Pinterest and Instagram.

Get Pinterest and Instagram insights, create and schedule posts, find the best hashtags, access a seamless link-in-bio tool and more with Tailwind. Brands can easily track the performance of their visual social media profiles with this platform’s visually appealing and easy-to-use dashboard.

11. Audiense

Audiense is an audience-building tool that helps brands track their performance across multiple social media platforms. Audiense is also a very X-minded tool, so it works well for brands who put a major emphasis on their X audience and performance.

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With Audiense, brands can easily create customer personas based on their target audience demographics, gather sources of influence that their audience likes to get content from, find the best influencers to work with and more. Audiense’s X marketing tools enable brands to also get a deep dive into their Twitter analytics.

12. Facelift Data Studio (formerly quintly)

Facelift Data Studio (formerly quintly) is another advanced social media analytics tool that supports a number of social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok—and even YouTube and Snapchat. The platform also offers analytics specific to Instagram Stories so brands can ensure their audience is properly responding to the stories they post.

Brands can build out dashboards using more than 500 different metrics so they can choose which KPIs mean the most to them. Facelift Data Studio allows brands to build multiple dashboards, even offering templates to help them get started, so they’re only given the most comprehensive look at each platform’s data.

13. SparkToro

SparkToro is similar to Audiense in that it’s also an audience intelligence platform. While this tool doesn’t necessarily provide you with data and analytics from your own social media performance, it gives brands insight into their audience, competitors and other profiles within their networks.

Use SparkToro for social media intelligence on where your customers spend their time online (so you know where to advertise to them), uncover audience demographics (so you can improve your ad targeting), pinpoint what your audience is talking about right now (so you can create catered content) and even get insight into your own account’s influence and authority online.

14. Hubspot

With HubSpot’s analytics tools, you can tie your social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, publishing using other tools (like Sprout Social) or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. You can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.

HubSpot’s social media analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths‌ and impressions.

They’re also part of its Marketing Hub, an all-in-one inbound marketing software.

This means that when using the platform, you’ll gain insights into the entire customer journey—not just social media-specific metrics. You’ll be able to see which marketing tactics are working best for your business, how they’re impacting your bottom line and learn more about your social media campaign’s ROI.

HubSpot works for businesses whose marketing teams want to keep all campaign functions in one place.

Native social media analytics platforms

The tools we’ve shortlisted above are third-party social media analytics software. Below, we get into native social media analytics platforms. These tools gather, monitor, analyze and report on data from within the app.

15. TikTok analytics

TikTok’s native social media analytics platform offers many insights across different areas, like an account overview, account content and account followers. You can also see a breakdown of video views, including engagement for the last month or 60 days, with the option to filter data through custom date ranges.

TikTok also provides details on your followers, including your growth rate over a period of time. Plus, it offers basic insights into your profile activity, like the number of videos you’ve shared, the number of comments you’ve received and the type of engagement for each video.

If you’re interested in comparing account activity over different periods of time, you’ll need to use a third-party TikTok analytics tool.

16. Facebook analytics

If you have a Facebook Business page, you’ll find insights in the Meta Business Suite. Facebook offers Page overview and performance metrics from the last seven to 90 days. You’ll also find data on post reach, engagement, new Page likes, follower demographics and more.

Facebook also offers insights for your Reels page, such as plays, likes and shares, as well as insights for your posts.

While Facebook’s native social media analytics platform is comprehensive, it’s missing a few things you may find in third-party Facebook analytics tools, like competitor analyses and an aggregated audience engagement inbox.

17. Twitter (X) analytics

X has a social media analytics platform that provides insights into how your profile and posts have been performing over a set period. X analytics aggregates metrics like post impressions, new followers, mentions and profile visits.

For additional insights, such as a performance trends report, you’ll need to use a third-party Twitter analytics tool.

18. LinkedIn analytics

LinkedIn analytics offers insights on your Page performance. If you have Creator Mode turned on, you can also see analytics for personal profiles. The tool covers all the basics like followers, follower trends and demographics, content impressions, content engagement, click-through-rate, shares and more.

Note that the analytics for personal profiles are more limited than for Pages. Depending on your account level with LinkedIn, you can also create and export reports.

If you need additional insights, like more comprehensive reports or social media listening capabilities, you can use a third-party LinkedIn analytics tool instead.

19. YouTube analytics

YouTube’s native social media analytics features are available through YouTube Studio. With it, you can find several metrics specific to your channel, audience and video performance, including:

  • Channel subscribers
  • Average view duration
  • Views
  • Impressions
  • impressions CTR
  • Returning viewers
  • Top geographies
  • Viewer age and gender
  • Playlists featuring your videos

If you run ads, you’ll also find earnings, ad impressions and other details within the native platform.

There are several third-party YouTube analytics tools that offer additional features, like more detailed video-specific insights, comprehensive reports and audience engagement tools.

20. Instagram analytics

Instagram has native social media analytics tools for Business or Creator profiles, providing you with information on your profile, followers, posts, Stories and ads. You’ll find metrics like content reach, impressions, content interactions, saves, plays and more. It also has detailed engagement metrics like peak concurrent viewers and live interactions.

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If you’re looking for additional insights, like industry benchmarking or a side-by-side comparison of Instagram with your other social accounts, you’ll need a third-party Instagram analytics platform.

Get actionable intelligence from social media analytics tools

The takeaway from all of these tools? Marketers need to own their data. Doing so is the difference between running data-driven campaigns that result in a positive ROI versus just following your gut.

Choose a tool based on what will work best for your business. As you consider your options, start with a free 30-day trial of Sprout to see exactly how well it’ll work for you.

You can also download our free social media analytics spreadsheet template to get an idea of which metrics to track, must-use formulas and more.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are social media analytics tools?

Social media analytics tools are essential for measuring the performance of social media marketing campaigns. By leveraging a tool, businesses can make informed decisions about their social media strategies at scale, such as what content to create and when to post it.

What can social media analytics tools help you measure?

Social media analytics tools enable businesses to track and measure important key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, reach, and impressions.

What are the benefits of social media analytics for business?

Social media analytics provide businesses with valuable insights into their performance across major social media networks, allowing them to track their progress, measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, and optimize their strategies.

In addition, these tools enable businesses to understand their audience better, gain competitive intelligence, and make data-driven decisions. Ultimately, social media analytics can help achieve better results and stay ahead of the competition.

What can social media analytics tools help you measure when assessing campaign results?

Social media analytics tools measure the efficacy of a campaign through key performance indicators, such as audience engagement, user behavior, competitor comparisons, click-through rates and more. The metrics will vary based on the tool you’re using and the type of campaign you’re running.