7 Tools for Measuring and Tracking Social Media Growth

Social media is an amazing tool for marketers everywhere, as it’s a great way to engage with and advertise to customers. And it can have great ROI. But the biggest challenge is often proving that ROI to management and being able to show that your efforts are working well. That’s where social media tracking tools come into play. Today we will be taking a look at 7 platforms that will take your social media monitoring and data tracking to the next level.

Social Media Tools

1. Buffer

Buffer is a robust social media management platform. You can link all of your social accounts and manage them from Buffer, including scheduling posts for a future date. The platform’s queue will hold posts that you write, and you can use a browser extension or mobile app to add curated content that you find to the queue. Most importantly, you can view engagement and interactions on your posts. The most useful feature of Buffer is its ability to determine what kind of content resonates best with your audience, based on interactions over time.

If you want to go the free route, you can connect 3 social media profiles and have 10 posts queued in each. For bigger businesses, there is a $15 a month option. For larger corporations, Buffer will be $99 or more depending on your needs.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is fairly comparable to Buffer and is similarly a household name among social media marketers. It is managed from a dashboard where you can set up a queue of scheduled posts. Details analytics let you show where the ROI of social is and if it comes from paid or organic. With hashtag and keyword monitoring, Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor all of your favorite social networks for chatter about your chosen topic.

This platform features several plans depending on your team size and other needs. The plans start at $19 a month for 10 social profiles and unlimited scheduling, and goes up to a $499 a month option for up to 50 profiles and 10 users. They also offer custom solutions for enterprises.

3. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is focused on discovering and curating new content. You can find what kind of content performs the best in certain areas of interest. This is for social media managers who want to have a pulse on the hottest trends. Another useful future is the ability to view backlinks. There are also great resources for finding influencers, including tools for understanding how influencers work and how to find and contact them. The platform features tools for analyzing the content strategies of competitors and seeing what is working for them.

Buzzsumo starts at $79 a month and goes up to $499+, depending on how many alerts you want and which tools you need. You can do some content research through the site for free, though.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social‘s social media marketing platform allows you to schedule your content in a calendar then track campaign performance. The platform analyzes interactions to identify brand advocates that can maximize your social media ROI. It can also pull out trends and the content that is performing best, so you can optimize your social content in the future. Sprout Social makes tracking performance across multiple platforms incredibly easy, and is an all-in-one platform for finding out who is talking about you and where.

Sprout Social can come in one of three levels, ranging from $99 a month per user, up to $249. These levels include increasingly more features and has something for anyone between small business and enterprise.

5. Snaplytics

Snaplytics is a social media analytics platform for two platforms that are not known for having robust analytics themselves – Snapchat and Instagram. Obviously this platform can track the performance of your content on these two channels, but it also lets you schedule certain posts. The ability to dig into the data of apps that don’t support it natively is immensely valuable. The data reports come with insights and industry benchmarks, so you will always know if there is more you can be doing for your Snapchat and Instagram strategies.

The pricing and plans for Snaplytics are not posted on their website, and require a contact with their sales team.

6. TapInfluence

TapInfluence is all about influencer marketing. Influencers could have a massive following, but if they are not an effective marketing channel for you then you need to know! This platform allows you to see the metrics of your influencer campaigns. This goes beyond just clicks, and focuses more on continued engagement and conversations that drive your marketing goals. TapInfluence allows you to research influencers and find someone that works for you and who wants to work for your brand. And of course, you can set your own posts through this platform, and work with influencers on a content calendar.

TapInfluence is an influencer marketplace and does not list pricing on the main website. If you login and create an account you can find out more information about the different packages available and how you can work directly with influencers for campaigns.

7. PeakFeed

While all of the other platforms that we’ve shared are complex dashboards, PeakFeed strives to be simple and streamlined. It displays you the data you want in simple graphics and emails you a regular report. Something like this is great for people who aren’t the primary social media managers. Those people need something more detailed, but this is perfect for executives and supervisors that just need a bird’s-eye-view of the brand’s social media landscape.

PeakFeed starts at $5 month for one dashboard, and goes up to $25 a month for 10. They also offer custom solutions if you need more.

These are our 7 picks. If you have any favorite social media tools that we didn’t mention, let us know in the comments, and tell everyone about them! Otherwise, be sure to check out these platforms and see if they are the right choice for your campaigns.