Wondering which of your social media tactics are working? Busy social marketers need effective social media analytics tools to focus their efforts.

Let’s take a look at some of the best (free and paid) options for 2025.

What are social media analytics tools?

The best social media analytics tools for 2024

1. Hootsuite

Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, large marketing teams

Coolest feature: Custom recommendations for the best time to post on each social account based on your accounts’ metrics and historical data

Price: Starting at $99/month

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Hootsuite Analytics is a comprehensive social media management tool that lets you easily track the performance of all your social channels and formats in one place, so you can replicate what works and get more engagement. It works across Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.

It Hootsuite Analytics, you can track over 120 social media metrics, including page, profile, follower and video stats — and much more. (Check out the full metric list here.)

You can set up custom dashboards that give you an overview of your most important KPIs at a glance, over a select period of time:

… and look up much more granular information, down to the performance of every individual post you published.

With Hootsuite Analytics, you can also:

• Easily view industry benchmarks and see how you compare to competitors
• Find out when your audience is online
• Get personalized recommendations for the best times to post for each of your accounts
• Create custom social media reports to showcase your results to your boss and share actionable insights with your team

On top of all of that, Hootsuite won a 2024 TrustRadius Most Loved Award. That’s thanks to our great tools… and to thousands of raving reviews like this one:

Explore all the capabilities of Hootsuite Analytics in more detail:

• Best time to publish
• Competitive analytics
• Industry benchmarking
• Building reports

2. Sprout Social

Source: Sprout Social

Best for: Marketing teams at larger organizations

Coolest feature: Tag inbound and outbound social messages to track and analyze volume and performance patterns.

Price: Starting at $199/month

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Sprout Social is another top contender in the battle of social media analytics tools, and it may be worth your consideration. Offering analytics for all the major social media platforms, Sprout can help you plan and execute your social media strategy.

Like Hootsuite, Sprout offers a full-featured analytics dashboard, which provides details on both your paid and organic posts and helps you decide when to publish content for the best results. You can also easily white-label and download social media analytics reports from the Sprout dashboard.

Sprout is quite a bit more expensive than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite offers more features and integrations.

Learn more: Compare Hootsuite and Sprout to see which one works best for you.

3. Buffer

Source: Buffer

Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, solo social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses, agencies

Coolest feature: Simple Instagram performance tracking, including Stories analytics

Price: Starting at $6/month for 1 social channel

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Buffer is primarily a social media scheduler for Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

When it comes to analytics, Buffer is relatively light on features. It doesn’t offer analytics for all platforms and doesn’t come with social listening analytics features or competitor analysis. However, Buffer’s user-friendly dashboard is simple and intuitive, making it great for social media managers who just want to get in, schedule, and get out.

Learn more: Read our guide to Hootsuite vs. Buffer for more on how these platforms compare.

4. Hubspot

Source: HubSpot

Best for: Marketing teams at larger companies focused on understanding how social marketing efforts impact the customer journey

Coolest feature: Integration with your CRM to track data like new contacts driven by social media

Price: Starting at $800/month

Skill level: Advanced

Hubspot is a bit different from some of the other social media analytics tools on this list. With Hubspot, social media management is part of the Hubspot Marketing Hub software that also helps you manage email, SEO, and CRM records.

That means it’s best for brands that develop long-standing customer relationships, both before and after purchase, and that use multiple marketing approaches rather than sticking to social.

Hubspot integrates with Hootsuite to bring more social user context into your Hubspot CRM data and ticket system.

Learn more: You can add Hubspot to your Hootsuite dashboard

5. Later

Source: Later

Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, solo social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses

Coolest feature: Link in Bio page data flow to track website clicks from Instagram and TikTok

Price: Starting at $25/month

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Later really shines for smaller brands and creators who like to visualize and preview social media content before they post.

While Later can also help you measure the performance of your social media content and allow optimization for posting times, the platform lacks some more advanced analytics reporting features like competitive analysis and industry benchmarking.

Learn more: Compare Later and Hootsuite to see which solution is best for you.

6. Rival IQ

Source: Rival IQ

Best for: Social media managers who crave stats

Coolest feature: Free head-to-head reports against individual competitor accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X

Price: From $239 per month

Skill level: intermediate

Rival IQ was designed to let social media managers be data scientists, without the pesky certification. Rival IQ delivers on-demand analytical data, alerts, and custom reports from major social media platforms.

Easily conduct a competitive analysis or a complete social media audit with Rival IQ’s in-depth reporting. Then, present your findings to your stakeholders and marketing team with fully customizable reporting like charts, graphics, and dashboards.

Rival IQ isn’t just for the big picture. Comprehensive social post analytics lets you see exactly which posts work for each platform and identify why they work.

Pro tip: Getting owned by the competition? With Rival IQ you can also analyze your competitors’ social media accounts. See what works for them and look for ways to incorporate those techniques into your own social media online presence.

Learn more: Try a demo or start your free trial with Rival IQ

7. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Source: Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers

Coolest feature: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions

Price: Pricing upon request – request a demo for more details

Skill level: Intermediate to advanced

Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:

• Mentions
• Brand sentiment analysis
• Important influencers
• Conversation clusters

You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.

Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.

8. Brandwatch

Source: Brandwatch

Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring

Coolest feature: Track and analyze data from more than 100 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social media networks

Price: Pricing available on request

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Brandwatch offers a powerful suite of tools that allow you to track and analyze your social media accounts while also monitoring brand reputation and social share of voice.

Brandwatch Consumer Research pulls from more than 1.4 trillion posts, with AI tools to help you filter out the trends and data that are most relevant to your business. You can set up email alerts to keep you informed when sentiment or conversion volume change.

Learn more: See how Brandwatch compares to Hootsuite.

9. Keyhole

Source: Keyhole

Best for: Enterprise-level businesses and organizations

Coolest feature: Automated reports on influencer marketing campaign performance with a breakdown of social media ROI

Price: Starting at $89/month

Skill level: Intermediate to advanced

Keyhole lets you report on everything: social media campaigns, brand mentions and interactions, hashtag impact, and even influencer campaign results.

You can drill down into your impressions, reach, share of voice, and even analyze your competitors’ social media strategies.

If you’re using influencer marketing as part of your social content strategy, Keyhole has reporting capabilities that will let you identify the ideal influencers to work with and measure their performance over time.

Learn more: How to identify and work with the best influencers.

10. Channelview Insights

Source: Synaptive

Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels

Coolest feature: Analyze the performance of multiple YouTube channels and export PDF or CSV reports

Price: Starting at $8/month (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: All skill levels

Channelview Insights allows you to analyze YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.

Easily see the following performance metrics in one place:

• Views, engagement rates, subscription activity, and watch time
• Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more

Learn more: You can add Channelview Insights to your Hootsuite dashboard

11. Mentionlytics

Source: Mentionlytics

Best for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.

Coolest feature: Clear sentiment and share of voice analysis in multiple languages

Price: Starting at $69/month

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Want to get the big picture view of what’s being said about your brand on the internet?

Mentionlytics is a great entry point to using social media analytics for brand monitoring — especially if you run a global business in more than one language.

It’s also an effective tool for identifying influencers and tracking relevant hashtags.

Learn more: You can add Mentionlytics to your Hootsuite dashboard

12. Panoramiq Insights

Source: Synaptive

Best for: Instagram marketers and creators

Coolest feature: Detailed Instagram Story analytics for multiple accounts

Price: Starting at $8/month (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)

Skill level: All skill levels

Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Instagram marketers who want deeper insights on their Stories in particular.

Among other things, Panoramiq Insights lets you:

• Analyze follower demographics, including age, gender, country, city and language
• Monitor Instagram account activity (for multiple accounts), including views and new followers
• Discover your best social media posts with view and engagement analytics
• Measure Story views and interactions

Learn more: You can add Panoramiq Insights to your Hootsuite dashboard

13. Quintly

Source: Quintly

Best for: Social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses, enterprise-level companies, agencies

Coolest feature: Customizable dashboards that draw from more than 500 social media metrics

Price: Starting at $315/month

Skill level: Intermediate to advanced

Unlike many of the tools on this list, Quintly is exclusively a social media analytics software tool. That means it’s built solely to provide top-quality analytics, rather than bundling analytics with other social media management capabilities.

Quintly provides detailed data and reports for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Snapchat, along with competitor benchmarking.

Learn more: The social media metrics you need to track in 2024

14. Iconosquare

Source: Iconosquare

Best for: Solo entrepreneurs who manage their own social media accounts, social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses

Coolest feature: Reports (in PDF or XLS) include social images for clearer reporting and analysis

Price: Starting at $79/month

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Iconosquare allows you to report on brand metrics for multiple social profiles across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. You can compare time periods and track more than 100 metrics as graphs or raw data.

While you’re at it, you can benchmark your performance against your competitors and set your reports to arrive in your inbox on a regular schedule.

7 free social media analytics tools

15. Google Analytics

Source: Google

Best for: Social media professionals who work for a web-based business

Coolest feature: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels

Skill level: All skill levels

Google Analytics is one of the best free tools to learn about your website visitors. If you’re a social marketer who wants to drive traffic to your website, it’s an invaluable resource.

While it’s not a standalone social media analytics platform tool, you can use it to set up reports that will help you:

• See which social media platforms send you the most traffic
• See what content drives the most leads and traffic on which social networks
• Get to know your target audience with demographic data
• Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns

With these data points, you’ll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google Analytics.

Learn more: How to use Google Analytics to track social media success

16. Meta Business Suite Insights

Source: Meta Business Suite

Available to: Facebook Pages and Instagram professional accounts

The Insights tab within Meta Business Suite is the place to find account-, platform-, and post-level metrics for Facebook and Instagram side-by-side. You can also research the audience demographics and track your ad account spend.

Learn more: 3 Top Facebook analytics tools

17. Instagram Insights

Source: Instagram

Available to: Business and creator accounts

Instagram’s in-app analytics tool offers account- and post-level data for metrics like reach and engagement. You can track trends in follower growth and identify all the different ways followers interact with your content.

You can also learn about the demographics of your Instagram audience and track the performance of your Instagram Reels and Stories.

Learn more: Guide to Smarter Results Tracking on Instagram

18. TikTok Analytics

Source: TikTok

Available to: TikTok business accounts

TikTok’s native analytics tool breaks your metrics down into overview data, content performance analytics, and follower demographics and growth.

Learn more: 4 TikTok analytics tools

19. X Analytics

Source: X

Available to: X Premium users

While X analytics are currently being modified, for the moment they allow you to understand the performance of your paid and organic X posts and learn which other X users have the most potential to amplify your content.

You can access monthly highlights like top posts and top followers. It’s a good place to get a snapshot of your best performing content and identify potential influencers or brand ambassadors.

You can also dig deeper to track the engagements and impressions on your content over a selected period.

Learn more: How to use X analytics

20. Pinterest Analytics

Source: Pinterest

Available to: Pinterest business accounts

Pinterest’s built-in free social media analysis tools help you understand your Pinterest audience’s interests. You can track key metrics for paid and organic Pins, including impressions, engagements, video views, and profile visits. You’ll also find Pinterest-specific stats like saves and closeups.

If you add the Pinterest tag to your website, you can use Pinterest Analytics to track conversions.

Learn more: A Simple Guide to Using Pinterest Analytics

21. LinkedIn Page Analytics

Source: LinkedIn

Available to: LinkedIn Page admins

LinkedIn Page Analytics provides data on your LinkedIn content, followers, visitors, leads, and competitors. You can also track your employee advocacy efforts, engagement with your career pages, and newsletter performance.

Learn more: LinkedIn Analytics: The Complete Guide for Marketers

Why every marketer needs a social media analytics tool

The right social media analytics tools help you figure out what’s working and what’s not. They should also provide the historical data you need to assess your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.

The best comprehensive social media analytics tools allow you to compile data from multiple platforms and create custom reports so you never find yourself in a position like this:

My manager wants me to create incredibly granular analytics of all our social media pages. When I joined, they had already compiled over a year's worth of analytics in a spreadsheet breaking down every analytic you can think of.
byu/BreakfastAntelope insocialmedia

Social media analytics tools can help you answer questions like:

• Is it worth it for my business to keep posting on Pinterest?
• What were our top posts on LinkedIn this year?
• Should we post more on Instagram next month?
• Which network drove the most brand awareness for our product launch?
• What kind of posts do my followers like to comment on?

… and many more.

With all of that data at your fingertips, you can make data-driven decisions and clearly see the ROI of your social media strategy. This can help prove the value of the work you and your team do every day. This is incredibly valuable when annual budget time rolls around or when you want to request new resources.

That’s the theory. But what does all this mean for a real social media team?

Here’s an example. Before using Hootsuite’s social media analytics, the University of Sydney struggled to build a consistent (and consistently successful) social media presence for its faculties. Measuring success effectively across many different accounts and pages was particularly challenging. Implementing a comprehensive analytics tool helped the social team monitor the overall social strategy, and easily measure individual and combined success.

Hootsuite Analytics also easily integrates with other business tools. The Adobe Experience Manager CMS integration allowed the university to track the entire student journey, from initial social media audience engagement to becoming prospective students. This end-to-end visibility enabled the social media team to measure and prove the return on investment of their social media efforts.

And if you’re curious, here’s how the Hootsuite social team uses analytics every day:

Track your social media performance and maximize your budget with Hootsuite. Publish your posts and analyze the results in the same, easy-to-use dashboard. Try it free today.

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