4 Tools That Improve Your Social Media Analytics
Are you looking for a tool to bring important analytics to one place?
In this article, you’ll discover four social media analytics tools that deliver clear insights about your business’s social media activity.
Why Analytics?
Social media analytics are more than numbers.
Analytics give you the data you need to improve your social media engagement, make marketing decisions and tie social media to your bottom line.
To use analytics effectively, the data needs to be presented in easy-to-understand formats.
Here are four tools worth checking out:
#1: Receive Automatic Reports Daily Via Email With Social Report
The one thing we check every day is our email. So it makes sense to get social analytics and updates automatically delivered to your inbox.
Social Report is a comprehensive analytics tool with a very affordable starter account that lets you to monitor up to five projects, each with an unlimited number of social accounts for only $9 per month.
To get started, sign up for a 30-day free trial of the plan that best fits your business.
Once your account is created, you can set up your first project. Under your project dashboard, click on the Add Social Media Accounts option to start connecting all of your social media accounts and other important business accounts.
Account options you can choose for your Social Report profile.
Social Report connects to all of the major social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare and many others. You can also add any individual groups you own on Facebook and LinkedIn, your Google Analytics and online stores.
Once you’re set up, you can access lots of graphs to analyze audience growth, engagement, reach and activity. You can also find demographic details about your social audience on each social network you’ve connected.
Demographic information about your social media audience.
What you’ll really love about this tool is that you can get a daily digest summarizing the most important activity from each of your connected accounts (pages, profiles and groups) via email.
You can learn more about members of your LinkedIn group.
LinkedIn group insights from a Social Report email.
Get a quick summary of your audience and activity on Twitter followed by a list of your tweets, mentions, direct messages and new follower details.
Twitter profile insights from a Social Report email.
Get a list of new activity on your Facebook page, a summary of your fans, page views and referrer URLs leading traffic to your page.
Facebook page insights from a Social Report email.
Social Report’s daily digests keep you up to date about most—if not all—of your social media activity, without you leaving your inbox!
#2: Share Analytic Reports With Stakeholders Via Cyfe
Like dashboards? Then you’ll love Cyfe. You can create an unlimited number of dashboards with an unlimited number of widgets for only $19 per month.
To get started, create a free account and get a feel for the way Cyfe works, then upgrade to the premium plan to go unlimited.
Once you’ve created your account, set up your first dashboard.
Create a new dashboard on Cyfe.
Inside your new dashboard, you’ll add widgets to track your social accounts. The following are available for social media.
Add a variety of social media widgets in your Cyfe dashboard.
There are also widgets for Twitter, Twitter search and YouTube.
Depending on the network you choose, you’ll be able to create widgets to display your audience size, activity and keyword searches.
Configure your social media widget.
You can also create dashboards and widgets for many other platforms including Google Analytics and AdWords, WordPress, AWeber, FreshBooks, PayPal and Moz.
View your social media activity in dashboards with Cyfe.
In addition to being able to quickly see the most important information about your social accounts, you can create reports based on your dashboards. Cyfe sends the reports to you at your preferred frequency.
Create reports for yourself, your boss and your clients.
Keep everyone up to date on the status of your social media marketing with dashboard data emailed to you, your boss and your clients.
#3: Establish ROI With SumAll
Want to connect your social media activity to other areas of your business? SumAll can help you do that. First, you’ll need to sign up for your free trial. Then you can start connecting to your social networks.
Choose platforms to connect within your SumAll account.
To get the most out of your SumAll account, be sure to connect to other platforms such as Google Analytics, Constant Contact, Amazon Payments, eBay and Shopify. This helps you visualize how your activity on social media affects other areas of your business and your bottom line.
Once your data has loaded, you can add various streams of data to your chart by selecting them from the library on the left side.
Select platforms from the SumAll library menu.
As you add different data points, they’ll appear on the chart. This allows you to analyze how your activity on one platform affects the activity on another.
For example, chart your Twitter activity and PayPal transactions to see if an increase in tweets leads to an increase in income.
Compare social activity with other important business data.
Now, you can find out if an increase in Instagram posts leads to more Facebook engagement, or if an increase in followers on Twitter leads to an increase in sales on Shopify. The potential to find social media ROI is limitless.
#4: Explore Social Audience Demographics With Google Analytics
Last but not least is Google Analytics. Goals help you link your social media activity to conversions on your website.
The easiest way to get social media data from Google Analytics is by using the standard social media report under Traffic Sources > Social.
Learn more about your social media activity in the social media overview.
Here, you learn more about the website traffic you receive from top social networks. Note that this only covers popular networks—Google Analytics doesn’t officially categorize a lot of smaller niche networks as part of their equation.
Under the Conversions section of the social reporting area, you can find out which social networks have led to the most conversions, including the value of those conversions if you set up values in your goals.
See which social networks drive visitors who convert the most.
Alternatively, if you’d like to view all of your Google Analytics data based on traffic from social networks, you can create a Custom Segment. To do this, click on Advanced Segments and then + New Custom Segment.
Click the + New Custom Segment button to start a new custom segment.
Name your custom segment and start adding the domains for each social media network you want to analyze. Each line should say Including > Source > Containing > domain.com. You can add up to 20 sources total.
Creating a custom segment in Google Analytics.
Save your custom segment and you can view everything in your website’s Google Analytics data based on traffic from the social media networks you specified.
Custom segments can show you the top content consumed by your social media referrals, how many social media website visitors come from mobile devices, what countries your social media website visitors live in and other specific insights that will help you do better online business.
Over To You
These aren’t the only tools available to help you track and use the data from your social media analytics, but they do show that measuring or reporting social media analytics doesn’t have to be difficult or overly time-consuming.
What do you think? Which of these tools do you find most interesting? What tools do you use to measure and report your social media analytics? Share your favorites in the comments!
