Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from social media websites, blogs such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc., and analyzing that data to make business decisions, ideas or solutions. Social media analytics are mostly used to support marketing or customer service activities, but this depends upon your type of business and your goal.

The first goal is to determine what are you trying to analyze and what is your end goal. For instance, some companies use analytics to find better ways to engage with customers, to reduce customer service costs, to determine the return on investment, feedback, or amending the public opinion of a particular product or service.

Once you identify your end goal, key performance indicators (KPIs) for objectively assessing the data should be placed. For example, on Twitter customer engagement might be measured by the number of followers, retweets, mentions or clicks on a link.

There are so many social media analytics tools that measure performance. Below are different social media analytics tools.

Works with all major social media channels

Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Klout, and Google Analytics; Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn is coming soon. With Simply Measured, analysis doesn’t stop with one profile. Measure the cohesive relationship between each network, your competitors’ social profiles, and how your audience interacts throughout the entire social space.

Hootsuite is one of those multi-function social media tools.

The leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks. You can manage multiple social networks, schedule messages and tweets. Track brand mentions. Analyze social media traffic. 7 million+ satisfied users. You can post updates on a wide range of social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube. Tumblr, WordPress.

Social marketing is all about relationships. With the new Adobe® Social, marketers finally have a comprehensive solution to build stronger connections through the content that’s guided by tangible data. Create the most relevant posts, monitor and respond to conversations, measure results, and connect social activities to business results.

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real time.

PageViral tracks real-time user behavior, sentiment, engagement and interaction patterns in 41 different languages. PageViral is one of the very few multilingual social media analytics platform in the industry. Multi-Lingual support is a subset of our natural language processing technology, which analyzes audience interactions in their own native language.  You get to identify key influencers and understand your audience better, including how they feel towards your brand, how they engage, their active time intervals, etc.

Conclusion

In social media, it is important to determine if you’re reaching the right audience and connecting with them. Regular reports and metrics enables you to figure out the best solution and gain insights for your company or brand.