5 of the best social media analytics tools you can't live without

To be successful in the social media sphere takes time and investment in the right activities.

The five tools below will allow you to analyse both your competitors’ and your own performance on social media, learning how to manage your activity on social media a more productive and engaging experience.

BuzzSumo

Is there anything BuzzSumo can’t do? OK yes – it can’t fly to the moon and doesn’t have laser vision, but other than that, it’s got it all.

BuzzSumo allows you to find great content to share on your social channels and also use its social share metrics to find content that you could try to replicate – safe in the knowledge its successfully engaging people on several social platforms.

You can even find out who the people that shared similar content to your planned content are. Armed with that knowledge, you could promote your content to those accounts to almost guarantee engagement.

BuzzSumo allows you to pull a series of reports, including backlink analysis – a great opportunity to plug in your competitors’ sites, to find out where they’re getting high value links from and mimic this activity for your own business.

buzzsumo.com

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is perfect for small and medium-sized businesses, agencies and busy community managers who need to manage, engage and measure with a scalable, intuitive platform.

It allows you to take control of your social media platforms, making the process more time efficient and easier to track.

It’s a great tool for tracking conversation, allowing you to set-up ‘streams’ to monitor specific hashtags, keywords or search terms – ensuring you’ll never miss out on the opportunity to join the discussions that matter to your business.

With full reporting suite and the ability to schedule content across popular platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn company pages – Hootsuite is an investment in better social media time management.

hootsuite.com

Iconosquare

Iconsquare is the Instagram analytics package you’ve been dreaming of. It gives you your total number of likes received, most liked photos ever, average number of likes and comments per photo, follower growth charts and more.

Our favourite part of the tool is the ability to analyse which filters are the most engaging, allowing you to play around to find the perfect option to maximise your content’s reach.

Iconosquare.com

ShortStack

If you’re running a Facebook social media contest and want to manage the process in the most efficient way, Shortstack is a great option.

Prices range from free to $399 a month and include entrant analytics, downloadable database of entrants (excel CSV and XLS files) and contest templates to design a competition, with customisable forms and design elements, to create aesthetically pleasing ‘on brand’ competitions.

The tool does take a little while to get used to, but it’s worth being patient with it in the long-run.

Riffle

Riffle allows you to monitor the success of any Twitter account, giving you an instant breakdown of tweet metrics.

Get Twitter engagement, interest and activity analytics in real time, to make interactions more personal and more meaningful.

It allows you to find the influencers in your industry and get the lowdown on competitor activity so you can stay ahead of the game.

crowdriff.com/riffle/

There we have it – a whistle-stop tour of some of the best social media tools on the market. What other tools are you using that you’d add to the list? Let us know with your comments below.

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Thanks for reading.