The Best Free Social Media Analytics Tools for 2017

Global social media marketing is now showing 37% penetration. In simpler words, there are around 2.80 billion users from all around the world, who are using social media sites. Among all users, adults between the age of 18 and 34 are 95% likely to use social media platforms to follow a brand. That brand can be yours if you can include your social media strategy to your digital marketing plans.

Just doing is not enough, watch carefully

Most brands think that hiring experts to "do" social media marketing and buying new tools to automate the process is sufficient to ensure better penetration. They could not be more wrong! Social media marketing is competitive. You may be using all your resources to reach out to a new market, but your competition is also trying the same. More than once, multiple brands target the same audience on social media platforms. Without a keen monitoring system, it becomes impossible to tell which platform is giving you more traffic and what fraction of your traffic actually comes from social media channels.

What is social media analytics?

Let us first understand the dimensions of social media analytics. Well, it includes all the parameters of social media marketing including gathering data about your customers, their activities on your page, their likes and dislikes, their buying habits, their average dwell time on your page, their proclivity to click on a link and the chances of converting a visitor to a customer. Social media analytics is like the Pandora’s Box of marketing. It has a milieu of different components that can correctly tell you about your social media position, right now.

Social media monitoring is not always expensive

Most small and medium businesses are strapped for cash while starting their new social media campaigns. Now, if you are one of them, do not lose hope. Social media marketing is not just for the big giants of business and marketing. Smaller indie brands and startups can also enjoy the benefits of social media by investing smartly.

The mantra of social media marketing: do not spend money on what you can get for free!

There are so many social media monitoring tools from around the globe that you will feel dizzy after a point. However, we aim to find the best of the best and the FREE ones just for your brand. So let’s get started.

Followerwonk

It is a Twitter follower tool. This one can give you detailed twitter user analytics. Followerwonk can tell you when your users are active when they are more likely to retweet and categorize your followers according to their activity trends on Twitter. It is an excellent tool, which will give you a new perspective of social media as a powerful tool to promote your brand and business.

Buffer

How is any list of social media tools complete without Buffer? The free version of this tool is actually good enough to get most of the social monitoring work done. The free plan will enable you to get all user engagement stats from the popular sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. Buffer can show you the performance of each of your posts on each social medium. In fact, when one of your posts performs better than the average, you will get a notification instantly. It is quite the complete tool for all budding entrepreneurs and marketers.

Google Analytics

It is not the prettiest, but it surely is free. The top use for Google Analytics is for website traffic analysis. This tool-suite can tell you where your traffic is coming from, what is the share of social media directed traffic and analyze your referral traffic too. Just go to Acquisition > Social > Overview for a detailed report on your site visits from social networking channels. The dashboard is one of the most attractive features, not by the looks, but by functionalities. You can perform complete traffic analysis and add goals to your Google Analytics tracking options.

SocialRank

SocialRank is the perfect tool for all Twitter and Instagram users. This tool allows you to manage all your posts and check their performances real-time. If you want, you can get a free summary report of your followers for Instagram, popular keywords, words in bio and top follower locations.

 Wolfram Alpha Facebook Analyzer 

The Wolfram Alpha Facebook Analyzer is a powerful tool for Facebook. You can check out your customer stats, get complete reports and find out what your customers actually like and dislike on your business accounts. This one shows you all the information you need from your Facebook posts and profiles. It is one of the few tools that are both useful and immensely fun to use. From the house of Wolfram Alpha Search Engine, this is a surprise-packed tool for all marketing enthusiasts on Facebook.

Analytics tools from the social media giants themselves –

Facebook Insights

It is a complete tool for your Facebook business needs. If you have a business page, you must have Facebook Insights. It is as simple. To see the full stats on a post, click on the "people reached" potion at the bottom of any post. 

Instagram Insights

To know how many followers “hearted” your post and how many shares they received, you can just opt for Instagram Insights. This universal tool for business profiles on the site gives you a graphical representation of your post trends and Instagram Analytics.

Twitter Analytics

Less than 25% of all accounts on Twitter are actually active. You may have thousands of followers, but how many of them are responding? You need to find out how each of your Tweets is performing in terms of retweets, reach and traffic conversion.

LinkedIn Analytics for Businesses

It is a great tool for both businesses. This one provides complete performance reports on your long-form articles or the LinkedIn Pulse articles, including total views, reader demographics, engagement, and shares. This one is similar to Facebook Insight's tab in looks and function.

As long as you have these few free tools in your toolbox, you are set to rock the social media channels with the right posts at the right times. Listening to what your customers think about your posts and understanding the post trends is as important as posting regularly on your social media accounts.

About the Author: Harris Scott is a leading blog writer and content marketing professional with thousands of real Instagram followers for his postings.