Online analytics for your social media sites gather information from social channels and other online content. This data is designed to help you make informed decisions concerning what works and what doesn’t in your posts. There are a wide variety of companies and sites out there promising beneficial analytics for you and your company. Their offerings range from the very simple to the extraordinarily complex, and there are price ranges to match. What if you are just getting started with your endeavor and just want something easy at the outset?
Built-in Analytics Tools
First, check out the built-in analytics in each of the social media outlets that you are using. These are designed specifically for the site, and best of all, they are free!
Facebook Insights
Instagram Insights Twitter Analytics
Pinterest Analytics
But keeping up with three or four different analytics pages can be time-consuming. If you are using more than one social media site to promote your business, it would be beneficial for you to look at one of the following sites that offer free plans that you can use until you decide if it’s something you want to spend more money on. These sites all work with multiple platforms at one time.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s free plan offers tracking for three social media profiles, and you can schedule up to thirty posts at a time for those profiles. Choose from your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, WordPress, and YouTube profiles. The analytics offered are quite basic, but there are some other advantages to this site. HootSuite offers two RSS feeds and integrates some apps you already use like Mailchimp or DropBox. If you want to boost your Facebook posts, HootSuite gives you a $100 credit every thirty days to do just that. They also offer some free courses to develop your social marketing strategies, as well as others that you can purchase.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social gathers information from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, and Instagram. It allows you to make posts through the program but not to schedule. The analytics are a little more complete than some of the other sites, which means if you are not interested in programming your posts through your analytics site, this could be a simple free tool for you to use.
Cyfe
Cyfe displays the analytics you choose in the form of widgets. The free version gives you up to five of these widgets to use as you wish. If you have more than one brand, you can create different dashboards for them and use the widgets you want on each one, up to five total.
Mediatoolkit
Mediatoolkit focuses on keeping track of interactions with your brand across social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and VKontakte) and other online sources such as Web sites, blogs, and forums. You can set up multiple brands. The free version gives you basic analytics along with notifications by email or using Slack when new information is available.
Buffer
Buffer has options for you to manage three different social media accounts. You can choose from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. Unfortunately, if you want the analytics on this site, you need to update to the first paid plan. To Buffer’s credit, the price is less than $10 per month. The free plan gives you a total of three different social accounts to track. You can schedule posts ahead of time up to ten posts at a time for each of your social accounts. There is no daily limit, so you can keep adding more once previous ones have gone live. There is a browser extension available as well as mobile apps. If you want analytics, the upgrade you need will also include a calendar, RSS feed, and a higher limit of accounts and scheduling. This plan offers ten social accounts, and you can schedule 100 posts for each of them at a time. Are you just starting out in social media for your business? Hopefully one of these sites will give you the information you need to improve your presence and make your business a success.
