27 Free and Paid Social Media Analytics for Marketers

Where do you turn for meaningful stats on your social media marketing?

I’m grateful for the insight from some truly incredible tools that help make sense of the actions I take on social media. How have my followers grown this month? Which type of content performs best? Which times make the most sense to post?

The answers are out there, and there are tools to help you find them. I’ve collected a bunch of my favorite ones in this post. Feel free to try them and see what insights you can find!

First, before we jump into some of the excellent social media analytics tools available, I wanted to talk briefly about how we define social media analytics.

At Buffer, we see social media analytics as the gathering of data from social media platforms to help inform us and guide our social media marketing strategy. By paying close attention to social media analytics, you can measure your performance against your social media goals.

Social media analytics tools are usually used to complement social media management tools. The latter lets you plan and schedule your social media content, while the former lets you measure the performance and informs your strategy. With some tools — like Buffer — you can do both. 

Here’s a breakdown of the best social media analytics tools, both free and paid. Whether you’re a creator or social media marketer, small business or enterprise, there’s an analytics tool in here for you. 

1. Buffer

Buffer takes the admin and the guesswork out of social media analytics. We’ve made it our mission to help you make better decisions about when, how, and what to post.

Buffer tracks essential metrics like:

• Total impressions
• Total engagement
• Follower growth
• Engagement rate and reach on specific posts
• Audience demographics
• Hashtag performance

The difference? With Buffer, you’re not just served a series of numbers and graphs that you have to make sense of — the platform does that for you (though you’ll still find plenty of easy-to-understand graphs and data there, too!)

My engagement has increased steadily over the past few months, with a growth rate of 150% with Buffer. I’ve saved a total of 60 hours since I started using it!

— Anna C Mallon

3 cool Buffer analytics features brands + creators love

All your social media metrics in one dashboard

Forget hopping between social channels and copy-pasting all those numbers into a spreadsheet — Buffer pulls all your data from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn into a single dashboard.

Recommendations based on your content performance

What’s the best content for each platform? When is the best time to post on Instagram? How often should you be posting? Buffer crunches the numbers for you to answer these questions and more to help maximize your chances of engagement and growth. 

Create professional social media reports in as few as two clicks

Ditch that old spreadsheet and presentation you spend hours copying and pasting every month. Buffer creates downloadable custom reports for you — and you can even add your branding. Great for sharing with CEO’s and brand sponsors. 

Price: Starts at $6 per month; 14-day free trial

As an agency, we’ve been able to scale up and double our size. Over the past three months, we’ve managed to grow one of our client’s social media accounts by 400%, from 6k to over 23k followers!

— Red Pigeon Media

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management and monitoring tool that provides various enterprise-level options for your marketing campaigns. Its cross-channel social listening features allow you to contextualize and qualitatively analyze topics, hashtags, and keywords. You can tell how your content performs on various social networks from its visual and intuitive reports.

3 cool features

• Analyze paid campaign performance across networks
• Get group report of your social media profiles
• Analyze your team’s performance (task performance, response rates, etc.)

Price: Starts at $249 per month, with a 30-day free trial.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite combines social media management, listening, publishing, and analytics tools. It helps you figure out what kind of content is working for you, increase your posts’ reach, improve your ads’ effectiveness, and get your whole social media team working in tandem. It has in-depth analytics features that give you a clear understanding of your performance across all social platforms.

3 cool features

• Customize reports by choosing from over 200 metrics and export them in PDF, Excel, or PowerPoint formats.
• Measure your customer care team’s response and resolution time on Facebook and Twitter.
• Track brand mentions better by integrating with specialized tools like Brandwatch and Talkwalker.

Price: Starts at $99 per user per month with a 30-day trial

4. Zoho Social

Zoho Social enables you to understand your social media audience and how they engage with you. You can listen to multiple channels from a single dashboard and respond in real time. You can also dig deeper into each post to measure its reach and engagement.

3 cool features

• Create intuitive reports from a vast list of pre-defined segments based on the demographics of your fans, influencers, or people reached.
• Get a breakdown of the content formats your connections engage with and compare it to those you publish.
• Compare fans vs. other people reached for every post.

Price: Starts at $10 per month; 15-day free trial

5. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management tool with considerable monitoring, listening, and reporting features. It gives you ready-to-use insights into social media post engagement, mentions, and audience profiles across digital channels. Sendible also lets you track what’s being said about your brand on various web and social platforms and identifies mentions that might need your attention or response.

3 cool features

• Create presentation-quality reports with a drag-and-drop builder.
• Measure response times and track team performance in responsiveness.
• Get notified of reactions and engage with multiple social profiles across networks from a single dashboard.

Price: Starts at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial

6. Keyhole

Keyhole offers various trackers that help you monitor your events, campaigns, influencer activity, brand mentions, and industry-specific social conversations. It lets you track hashtags, keywords, and accounts, providing a wealth of information such as reach, top posts, share of voice, and more for your brand. You’ll also be able to create a competitor analysis with similar info.

3 cool features

• Predict your campaign’s performance with machine learning and make changes accordingly.
• Analyze people’s sentiments when they engage with your posts.
• Manage influencers’ accounts and permissions and track their performance from one place.

Price: Starts at $79 per month; 7-day free trial

7. Rival IQ

Rival IQ lets you track several companies and compare their performance across social media platforms and SEO. It also analyzes Facebook and Instagram ads and features historical data for up to 24 months. This way, you can pinpoint the overall social media strategy that works for your competitors and learn from their tactics.

3 cool features

• Compare your profiles to others in your industry regarding social metrics, hashtags, and content quality.
• Integrate Google Analytics to get a complete understanding of your customer’s journey.
• Improve your Facebook and Instagram ad performance with automated insights.

Price: Starts at $239 per month; 14-day free trial

8. Hubspot

HubSpot offers an intuitive social media management tool that stands out through its social listening and analytics capabilities. The platform lets you set up keyword-monitoring streams to keep track of all comments that include your target terms, while its AI-powered assistant quickly analyzes incoming comments to determine their overall sentiment and the type of content that generates the most engagement. Meanwhile, HubSpot’s analytics let you track social performance across all your accounts under straightforward dashboards. 

3 cool features

• Link social comments to your CRM to visualize previous prospect interactions and get the data necessary to tailor your responses. 
• Track metrics beyond social media — monitor website traffic, conversions, and more to see how each specific channel contributes to your marketing goals. 
• Get notified via email whenever HubSpot detects comments within your keyword monitoring streams. 

Price: Starts at $800 per month.

9. Emplifi

Emplifi is a collection of analytics tools that includes all the fundamental resources you might need — tracking multiple profiles, key performance indicators, competitive intelligence, and automated reports. Besides analytics tools, Emplifi also offers tools for publishing and optimizing your content, identifying influencers, digital persona mapping, and customer care on social media.

3 cool features

• Analyze audience sentiment towards your campaigns from their reactions and interactions.
• Decide whether to boost Facebook posts or not based on predictive analysis.
• See how your performance compares to your competitors on Instagram and Facebook in the last 90 days.

Price: Prices and a trial are available after you book a demo.

10. Iconosquare

Iconosquare helps you track, grow, and report your performance on your Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok accounts. Agencies can manage multiple brands from a single dashboard, and schedule custom reports to be sent directly to clients. The competitor tracking and benchmarking features help you compare your performance with other brands in your industry.

3 cool features

• Discover photos, captions, and comments that tag or mention your brand.
• Track engagement on competitors’ profiles.
• Learn when your followers are online and engage them live.

Price: $49 per month; 14-day free trial

11. Tailwind

Tailwind is a Pinterest and Instagram marketing solution that helps you schedule content, monitor conversations, and analyze performance. Its Pinterest analytics tools give you insights such as the number of pins in your domain, the potential impressions, and the number of followers for your boards. For Instagram, it shows basic metrics such as followers, posts, comments, and likes.

3 cool features

• Identify the best hashtags on Instagram with the Hashtag Finder.
• Use the browser extension to create multiple posts from any site.
• Upload images in bulk using a drag-and-drop calendar to save time.

Price: Starts at $14.99 per month.

12. Cyfe

Cyfe is a custom dashboard tool you can fill with integrated metrics from dozens of marketing tools. Its social media section lets you sync up all the major networks and pull overview reports for the accounts you manage and those you want to track. It offers 50 widgets for Facebook alone for tracking reach, impressions, clicks, check-ins, and posts.

3 cool features

• A fully customizable dashboard
• Set up email and SMS alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are crossed.
• Monitor your brand mentions and competitors’ activity using the Twitter search widget.

Price: Starts at $19 per month; 14-day free trial

13. Quintly

Quintly is an enterprise-level analytics tool that monitors your engagement on all major social networks. You can mix and match dozens of customizable metrics and automate the deployment of flexible, shareable dashboards. By adding multiple pages belonging to you or your competitors, you can compare them against pre-set benchmarks or each other.

3 cool features

• Choose from 350+ metrics to effectively set up and measure social KPIs.
• Export data in various formats, including CSV, XLSX, PDF, and PPTX, and send automated reports.
• Use Quintly’s API to extract data into custom dashboards and integrate it with a BI solution.

Price: Starts at $345 per month

14. SparkToro

SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool that analyzes web pages and social media profiles to help you better understand your audience (and the target audience you want to attract). It can serve up info like what your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online.

3 cool features

• Audit your followers and know what percent of them are fake.
• See the specific topics your audience is talking about.
• Get a ‘SparkScore’ of your influence based on the content performance.

Price: Starts at $38 per month. Free plan with limited functionality available. 

15. Talkwalker

Talkwalker gives you unlimited free searches for hashtags and keywords across major social media platforms, news, blogs, and forums. It provides a wide range of data, such as mentions, sentiment, distribution of conversations, top posts, and more.

Overall, Talkwalker is a powerful brand monitoring platform that helps you measure sentiment and compare your performance to competitors’ across channels.

3 cool features

• Monitor in real-time what customers are saying about your brands, products, events, earning calls, or campaigns.
• Map your mentions to a world map.
• Get demographic information on your audience, such as age, gender, and occupation.

Price: Custom pricing for SMBs and enterprise companies

16. Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is built for analyzing website traffic down to the last detail, it is handy for analyzing the impact of social media as a marketing channel and traffic source. Click through to Acquisition > Social > Overview, and you can check out how many visits your site receives from each major social network. You can tie this back to your bottom line using goals and conversions.

3 cool features

• Find social networks and communities where people are interacting with your content.
• Measure the value of social media as a channel by analyzing conversions and e-commerce transactions.
• See how users who come from social media navigate through your site.

Price: Google Analytics is free to use.

All the major social media networks have their own built-in analytics and dashboards that offer great insights into your activity on the network. Here’s how to find all the data and metrics the social networks provide.

1. Facebook Insights

Analytics for Facebook now lives in Meta Business Suite, a dashboard that will measure your content performance on both Facebook and Instagram, and within your professional dashboard. The data in both spots is similar — you’ll be able to see things like reach, engagement, followers, and link clicks.

How to access: You have two options here: 

1. Log into Facebook, and click on your profile picture on the top right > Select your Facebook Page (not personal profile) > Click Meta Business Suit > Click on Insights on the bottom left.
2. Log into Facebook, and click on your profile picture on the top right > Select your Facebook Page (not personal profile) > Click on Professional dashboard on the left.

Quick tip: You can click on the people reached number at the bottom of any individual post in your Page’s timeline to see a pop-up of the total stats for that post.

2. Instagram Insights

If you have an Instagram Business or Creator Profile, you can access Instagram Insights — Instagram’s native analytics. It offers comprehensive data about your profile, posts, stories, and ads. It also has detailed information about your followers, such as their most active times and days.

How to access: You’ll find Instagram Insights both via the app and on web.

1. For the Instagram app, tap on your profile picture > menu (three horizontal lines on the top right) > Insights.
2. Head to Instagram.com in your browser > go to your profile > View insights (under your bio).

Quick tip: Tap on Total followers, then scroll down to see their most active days and times on the app — these are great times to post!

3. X (Twitter) Analytics

X (formerly Twitter) will show you both a high-level overview of your content performance over the past week and allow you to dive deeper into the numbers and set custom dates. Both options have been in beta since the platform moved from Twitter to X, so this may change.  

How to access: Log in to your Twitter account > go to twitter.com/i/account_analytics > click Access your Post Analytics for more details (as pictured above). 

Quick tip: Clicking on the bar chart icon of any of your tweets will show a complete breakdown of the engagement on the tweet, including link clicks, profile visits, new followers, and more.

4. TikTok Analytics

TikTok provides up to a 60-day summary of your profile and shows you how it has performed in terms of views, follower growth, likes, comments, and shares. It also gives you an analysis of the performance of specific videos. You can also export your data to run reports for yourself.

How to access:

• In the app: Go to your profile > Tap on the menu (three horizontal lines on the top right) > Creator Tools > Analytics.
• On web: Log in to your TikTok account > Hover your mouse over your profile picture > View Analytics

5. Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest has excellent analytics tools. The dashboard shows growth in impressions and followers, audience stats, and website engagement. You can click into more in-depth reports for each of these and see which posts and boards have performed the best.

Pinterest analytics is available only for business accounts. So, first, convert your personal account to a business account (for free).

How to access: Log in to Pinterest > go to analytics.pinterest.com.

Quick tip: Don’t miss the Audience Insights report (available on the left side of the Analytics screen), which shows a breakdown of your audience’s interests and demographics.

6. LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn offers analytics both for LinkedIn Pages and personal profiles (provided you have Creator Mode turned on).

For a LinkedIn Page belonging to your company or organization, you can track the performance of your content, visitors to your page, followers, leads, competitors, and even employee advocacy. 

For personal profiles, you get similar (though slightly more limited) data, including post impressions, followers, profile viewers, and search appearances.

How to access: 

• LinkedIn Page Analytics: Click on your profile picture on the top right > choose your company page from the drop-down menu > Analytics .
• LinkedIn profile analytics: Click on your profile picture on the top right > choose your View profile > Analytics (under your bio).

Quick tip: Get a bird’s-eye view of who is engaging with your LinkedIn profile content by clicking on the impressions bar chart icon on the bottom left. Scroll down to viewer demographics, and you’ll see a breakdown of who viewed your content by job title, location, company, and more.

7. YouTube Studio Analytics

YouTube Studio is the control room for all the platform’s creators — here you’ll find a comprehensive system for tracking the performance of your videos, Shorts, and channels. It reports on many metrics, including estimated traffic sources, watch time, views, earnings, ad performance, audience, and subscribers.

New to YouTube? Here’s how to use YouTube Studio to edit videos and grow your channel.

How to access: Sign in to YouTube > go to studio.youtube.com

Quick tip: Check out the Audience tab in YouTube Studio to see your audience’s peak active times — a great indicator of when you should post. 

That’s a wrap!

There are so many great social media analytics tools out there. I hope this list has given you a good overview of the tools available to help you with your decision-making process.

Once you’ve had a chance to research all your options, we’d love to help you analyze your performance on social media!