The 15 Best AI Social Media Analytics Software to Use in 2024

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, social media analytics software is the granmas secret ingredient to your success pie. These tools transform data into actionable insights, helping you find what works and revamp what doesn’t. Curious to see which tools can help you turn data into decisions? Buckle up! 

Here are the top 15 social media analytics tools that every marketer, social media guru, and business owner should have in their arsenal. Get ready to use the full potential of your social media efforts!

15 Best Social Media Analytics Tools

• Brand24
• Google Analytics
• BuzzSumo
• NapoleonCat
• Sotrender
• Cyfe
• CoSchedule
• Social Status
• Sprout Social
• Keyhole
• Brandwatch
• Quintly
• Audiense
• HeyOrca
• Buffer

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said:

Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay!

Just like Sherlock Holmes carefully gathers evidence and puts together another piece of the puzzle to solve a case, you should gather and analyze bits of data to make sense of your marketing efforts and get the full picture of the situation.

The Analytics tool is here to help!

So, what are the best social media analytics tools? Some of them are free, some paid… let’s dive in!

01 Brand24

Free 14-day trial.

Correct, that’s us – one of the best social media monitoring tools. Says who? Says Buffer!

Brand24 does web and social media monitoring and analytics across various channels.

But here’s the twist: Even if you focus on boosting the brand’s social media performance – your marketing will likely go beyond that.

And that’s a beautiful thing that you should be happy about!

However, it creates some “untracked” digital spheres that live independently without your control.

You should monitor these places, too. Here’s why:

1. It creates marketing opportunities: If managed well, you can reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and gain insights about your business.
2. It can be dangerous for your reputation: When you don’t monitor your online presence, you won’t know about a potential PR crisis.

Brand24 collects data from:

• Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Telegram, and Twitch
• Review sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, Booking, App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot
• Blogs
• Video platforms
• Podcasts
• Discussion forums
• Newsletters
• Online news sources
• Other publicly available sources

Using the tool, you can monitor keywords related to your company, such as:

• company name
• website address
• company hashtag
• marketing campaign name
• hashtag

and discover how they perform on social media channels in terms of reach, engagement, the volume of mentions, influential sources mentioning them, etc.

Brand24’s main features:

• AI-based analysis: Access social media stats without manual counting. Thanks to advanced AI technology, the tool can analyze social media metrics for you.
• Social media analytics: Analyze the performance of your keywords on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, including volume of mentions, social media reach, sentiment analysis of your keywords.
• Metrics of engagement: Track the engagement of the social media posts, marketing campaigns, and mentions.
• Trending hashtags: Find trending hashtags on Instagram for any keyword and spot hot trends in your niche.
• Hashtag analytics: See how often a hashtag was used and what awareness it created.
• Influencer marketing: Find the most influential profiles for your brand and increase its social media presence with valuable collabs.
• Competitor analysis: The tool provides features that allow you to compare your performance against others.

Pros:

• Allows tracking brand mentions across all social media platforms in real-time.
• Clear, user-friendly interface.
• AI-based analysis.
• Customizable reporting capabilities.
• Ability to check positive and negative sentiments with your tracked keywords.
• Finding influencers and trends.

Cons:

• Doesn’t provide a social media management platform.

Brand24 is a social media analytics tool that analyzes data for you, saving you a ton of time!

02 Google Analytics 

One, seemingly unrelated social media analytics tool is Google Analytics.

Even though Google Analytics has been mainly designed to analyze the web performance of your website, it also offers plenty of insights about social media channels, for example:

• Sources of social media traffic to your website: Discover what social media platforms bring the traffic
• Goals completions for your social media posts: Assign goals and analyze their completion
• Conversions from social media posts: Assign revenue to conversions in social media
• Assisted social media conversions: See if any of your social media platforms contributed to a conversion

Pros:

• Google Analytics is free.
• Provides valuable insights about your audience.
• One of the most popular analytics platforms – lots of free tutorials are available online.

Cons:

• It takes time and skills to set it up to track your performance properly.
• It’s not designed for managing social media, and requires some advanced knowledge about the tool.

03 BuzzSumo

Another, this time paid, social media analytics tool I personally really, really, really like is BuzzSumo.

What is BuzzSummo? It’s a content-focused analytics tool. Among many features such as brand monitoring, social listening or competitor research, it also provides social media analytics:

• Content discovery: This feature allows content writers to find the most shared content on social media networks. It’s a powerful feature!
• Content analysis: Find social media data about a particular topic of interest: content type, top shared domains, top social media platforms, etc.
• Influencer marketing: Find top influencers in a niche or industry based on social media reach or engagement.

Pros:

• Presents up-to-date popular content. Allows finding trending topics to share on social media.
• Easy to use.

Cons:

• Bit pricey if you want the full version.
• It’s not a management tool. You will need additional tools if you need that feature.

04 NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a social media analytics tool with built-in management and reporting features.

It allows you to track the performance of your social media campaigns across channels for multiple profiles and pages.

Interestingly, you can also track your competitors’ social media activity. 

Equipped with data from NapoleonCat, you’ll easily spot tendencies and craft social media content that resonates with your company’s target audience and brings the best results.

Here’s what NapoleonCat can help you with:

• Viewing what content types work best and when or how often you should post to achieve the highest engagement
• Monitoring your team’s activity to keep your social customer service major league
• Comparing audience insights and post engagement of multiple social media profiles (including competitive analysis)
• Scheduling weekly, monthly, or quarterly social media analytics reports that will be automatically sent out to your boss, your client, or whoever else needs them

Pros:

• Allows you to benchmark your results against your competition
• Automatically generates customizable social media analytics reports
• Tracks social media key metrics in real-time

05 Sotrender

Sotrender is a social media analytics tool with a fantastic reporting solution. It makes marketers’ daily work much easier. 

Why exactly can it become your go-to?

First, in Sotrender, you can analyze both your organic and paid performance. Since almost every brand is currently investing in social advertising, it’s crucial to have all the KPIs at your fingertips.

To monitor whether your ad costs are at an acceptable level, you can also sneak in the average ad costs (e.g., CPC, CPM) in your industry.

In addition, you can monitor competitors’ content performance, organic engagement, and more.

Last but not least, the above data can be exported to a report – a comparison report, a Facebook ads report, a recurring report… you name it!

Pros:

• Extensive analysis of your own social media accounts
• Possibility to track competitors’ organic and paid social media performance (including their CPC and CPM costs)
• Quick social media reporting – getting a report takes less than 60 seconds
• Offers unique data, like Interactivity Index counting the total engagement on a profile
• Social inbox is included in every package 

Cons:

• Doesn’t provide LinkedIn analysis
• Custom reports are available only on request 

06 Cyfe

One of the best social media analytics tools is Cyfe – a business dashboard tool.

It syncs up data from many, many, many marketing tools in one place.

The number of available integrations and dashboards is astonishing and makes Cyfe a powerful tool.

It covers social media analytics tools and advertising, email, monitoring, sales, SEO, and even web analytics tools!!!

However, let’s focus on the social media analysis part.

In Cyfe, you can build your social media analytics dashboard, including the following apps and data:

• AddThis
• Bitly
• Facebook Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, actions
• Facebook Pages: Likes, clicks, active users, page views
• Flickr: Top photos, slideshows
• Google+: Plus ones, circled by
• Google+ Search: Posts
• Instagram: Photos, followers, following
• LinkedIn Ads: Cost, impressions, clicks, conversions
• LinkedIn Company: Followers, impressions, engagement
• Pinterest: Boards, pins, likes, followers, following
• Publisher: Schedule social media posts
• Reviews: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Google, YP
• SlideShare: Views, favorites, comments, downloads
• Twitter: Tweets, followers, listed, mentions, influencers
• Twitter Ads: Cost, impression, engagement, follows
• Twitter Search: Tweets, mentions, hashtags
• Vimeo: My feed, top videos
• YouTube

Pros:

• Create reports with an in-depth social analytics tool
• Easy setup
• Pre-built widgets for services like Google or Salesforce

Cons:

• UI can be unintuitive
• No custom reports with social data
• Doesn’t provide audience demographics

07 CoSchedule

At Brand24, we use CoSchedule as our editorial calendar – it never let us down and we can surely recommend it to all small, medium and large businesses.

The cool thing about CoSchedule is that it analyzes the performance of your social media posts and, on this basis, suggests improvements and recommends particular actions across all your social media channels, for example:

• The best day to post
• The best time to post
• The best type of content to post

It can be super valuable for your social media marketing strategy.

What’s more, with CoSchedule, you can track social media analytics, including:

• Social engagement analytics: Analytics of interaction your social media posts receive
• Social campaign report: Tracking across multiple platforms the performance of a campaign
• Audience insights: In-depth reports about the performance of your social media channels
• Social message analytics: Tracking engagement for particular posts
• Social share analytics: How many times your link has been shared across social media
• Top projects report: Analysis of top 100 posts

Pros:

• Great for scheduling social media campaigns
• Creates social media reports
• Good for task tracking

Cons:

• Can be a bit pricey for smaller companies
• The UI can be difficult to use for some people

08 Social Status

Social Status is one of the most feature-rich social media analytics tools suited for both agencies and brands.

It offers multi-channel analytics and automates the reporting process to help you get quick insights into your performance, which you can use to improve your strategy.

Here are some of its best features:

• Automated reports: It offers fully customizable, white-label social media reports that are automatically generated according to your specified schedule.
• Competitor analytics: You can use Social Status to spy on your competitors and track their performance metrics to see what is working for them.
• Multichannel profile analytics: It allows you to track your social media performance across multiple channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• Influencer analytics: Social Status lets you track your influencers’ and campaign performance. You can see how your influencer campaign is performing and make improvements.
• Ads analytics: If you run social media ad campaigns, Social Status will help you motor your campaign performance and provide in-depth analytics for ads.

Pros

• Automated recurring reports for ongoing performance tracking
• In-depth profile, ads, and competitor analytics and reporting
• Integrated dashboard for analytics on multiple channels
• An intuitive user interface that is extremely easy to use

Cons

• Limited historical data with the starter plans
• The free plan offers limited functionality

09 Sprout Social

Another all-time best social media analytics tool is Sprout Social. It’s a comprehensive social media management tool you can use to track your performance on social media.

The platform offers plenty of features to analyze social media performance and engagement, post social media messages, and listen to social media conversations about your company.

Sprout Social has plenty of features. To make users’ lives easier, they offer solutions:

By business type:

• For enterprise
• For Agencies
• For small businesses

By need:

• For social management
• For social marketing
• For customer care
• For employee advocacy

By network:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Google+

But it has its limitations. Here’s a pros and cons breakdown.

Pros:

• Great social media reporting tool.
• A good solution for social media professionals – includes advanced social media management and analysis options.
• You can track social media campaigns inside the tool.

Cons:

• Can cause problems with Instagram posting.
• No integration with YouTube or TikTok.
• Expensive.

10 Keyhole

If you’re interested in the hashtag game, Keyhole is a nice tool for learning a bit about the hashtags you use. Keyhole also supports account, keyword, and URL tracking on the Web.

Moreover, you can use Keyhole to track mentions about social media profiles, keywords, and URLs.

Importantly, you can request historical data from Twitter and Instagram, including information about the number of posts, users, engagement, and influencers.

That’s unusual, huh?

It makes it a versatile social tool.

There are 5 pricing plans, and the highest one includes the following features:

• Historical data 
• PDF reports
• Real-time data 
• Twitter Analytics tools
• Instagram analytics tools
• Facebook Analytics tools
• Youtube analytics tools
• Social media sentiment analysis 
• API Access 

Pros:

• Ability to measure influencer impact & ROI.
• Tracking and analyzing competitors in social networks.
• Hashtag tracker.

Cons:

• Hidden pricing. Might be too expensive for some companies.
• Not easy for first-time users.

11 Brandwatch

Brandwatch is one of the best social media analytics tool out there.

It collects online mentions from all over the web:

• social media
• discussion forums
• blogs
• news sites
• other publicly available sources

Also, it has plenty of features that allow in-depth analytics of your online mentions.

Some of the features include:

• Demographics: Data about authors of mentions, including gender, interests, profession or location
• Image analysis: Detect images that contain your company logo
• Influencers: Find top influencers mentioning your keywords
• Locations: Discover where do your mentions come from
• Automated reports: Get your data directly to your inbox in HTML or PDF formats
• +more!

Pros:

• Provides valuable marketing data and custom reports.
• A great tool to collect brand mentions.

Cons:

• Pricey
• It offers a lot of advanced data, so it’d be wise to use it for more than just social media analysis.

12 Quintly

Quintly can help you with social media analytics, including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Google+
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• blogs

There are plenty of features for each platform, but the most important features include:

• Competitive benchmarking: Find benchmarks for your social media channels and discover what content works best for you
• Centralized analytics: Discover over 250 social media metrics and track your performance on multiple social media accounts
• Smart reporting: Get reports based on your custom dashboards and pick any parameters you want
• Custom dashboards: Create custom dashboards including metrics of your choice
• Overall metrics: Track specific KPI’s and measure social media performance across all major networks
• Key influencers: Get data about the most influential profiles
• Data exporting: Export your data to CSV or Excel and download any metric as JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX
• Customer care: Monitor Facebook and Twitter to track customer queries
• + more!

Pros:

• You can track your marketing efforts with automated reports and customized dashboards.
• Easy to track social analytics.

Cons:

• Too expensive for smaller brands, custom plans start from $300 a month.
• The gathered data is too general and not good for in-depth social analytics.

13 Audiense

Audiense is one of the best Twitter analytics tools. What’s cool is that it’s free if you have less than 5k followers.

It gives you insight into your followers’ basic metrics:

• Interests
• Location
• Languages
• Influence
• Best time to tweet

Pros:

• Dedicated to Twitter analytics – a great tool if your brand is focused on this social media channel.
• Allows identifying nano influencers and micro-influencers.

Cons:

• Very simple tool with limited possibilities.

14 HeyOrca

HeyOrca is a social media planner designed for quick and easy collaboration with clients. It offers publishing, management, collaboration, and analytics of social media content across various major social media platforms.

It’s a great choice for agencies that frequently cooperate with customers and present them with content for approval.

Some of the features HeyOrca offers include:

• Accounts organization
• Social media planning
• Internal collaboration
• Client approvals
• Direct publishing
• Monitoring Social Media Performance

Pros:

• It’s a social media analytics tool that allows advanced collaborations for agencies.
• Tracking campaigns is easy.

Cons:

• Doesn’t provide in-depth media analytics.
• Limited capabilities in terms of integration.

15 Buffer

Buffer is another must-mention to this list. It’s a useful social media analytics tool that allows users to schedule and publish content.

Social media managers admit that the best part is that you can manage a few channels at once.

Plus, it allows them to analyze the performance of their content.

On top of that, its simple dashboard is very user-friendly.

Buffer offers:

• Automated publishing
• Social media analytics
• The ability to engage with your social media audience within the app
• AI features

Pros:

• AI-powered ideas generator
• Affordable pricing and free plan for individuals
• Easy to use

Cons:

• Limited functionality compared to other social media management tools
• Limited reporting compared to other analytic tools
• Doesn’t include audience demographics

Why should I use social media analytics software?

I’m sure you know that algorithms change from time to time… or actually more often.

For example, lately, we have experienced a love for live and video format. People enjoy how direct the connection is and engage a lot with profiles that use it.

Videos dominate the internet!

Every social media marketer knows that following trends is just the tip of the iceberg. Some posts perform better than others, and it doesn’t necessarily depend on trends.

That’s why using social media analytics software is so important!

These tools are designed to gather, analyze, and interpret data from major social networks.

Understanding key performance indicators is also key to choosing the right direction for marketing teams.

Here’s the insight into Spotify’s social media analytics:

Most of the mentions come from Instagram, and videos have the broadest reach.

Now, let’s look closely at why these tools and the analytics they bring are so helpful.

Understanding your audience

Social media is one of the best places to observe your target audience.

This is where they speak their mind, react in real-time, and freely express their emotions about something – a product, brand, or service.

Social media are a gold mine of audience insights. By tracking social media metrics and analyzing social platforms, you can get to know your audience and answer questions like:

• Who they are?
• What are their needs?
• What do they think about your business?
• What types of content resonate with them?
• What time do they hang out on social networks?

And much more!

Increasing brand awareness

Social media analytics tools help track various rates connected to your social media presence.

These parameters illustrate your brand awareness, at least online. Based on this, you can track how your branded content’s online exposure changes.

Some of the crucial brand metrics in social media analytics include:

• Social media reach – shows how many social media profiles come across branded content
• Influence score of social media profiles – shows influential profiles that talk about your business
• Sentiment analysis – shows happy and unhappy customers and media talking about your business and products
• Topic analysis – delves into the discussions around your brand and categorizes it into topics
• The volume of mentions – shows how the number of online mentions of branded content changes
• Engagement – shows the engagement around your brand

Some tools have their own brand metrics.

For example, In Brand24, you get the Presence Score and Reputation Score. They help to measure the online popularity of branded content.

How? They combine your performance and present it in one general score.

Conducting competitor analysis

Social media analytics allows you to track your channels’ and competitors’ social media performance.

With the data these tools collect, you can then conduct a detailed competitor analysis.

This way, you can track their activities, marketing campaigns, what their customers think about them, and much more.

And why should you conduct competitive analysis?

Here’s a list of competitive analysis benefits:

• Gain a better understanding of customer needs and preferences.
• Uncover potential market gaps, industry trends, and growth opportunities.
• Refine your social media strategies to better compete.

It’s a great source of business intelligence!

In Brand24 you can perform a detailed competitor analysis.

Just go to “Comparison”, select the projects to compare, and this is what you get:

You also receive a breakdown of positive and negative sentiment (and how it changed over time):

Plus, the Share of Voice analysis:

See also: Best Competitor Analysis Tools

Conclusion

Be honest – what’s your screen time? Yep, your clients spend quite a lot of time on social media daily. Just like you!

It’s worth knowing where and when they are active the most.

But with so many different social media platforms out there, it can be difficult to know which ones are worth your time and effort.

That’s where social media analytics tools come in.

By tracking social media activity and engagement, they can help you to identify which platforms are driving the most traffic to your website or blog.

Also, they can help you to see which posts are getting the most likes, shares, and comments.

In other words, social media AI analytics tools can help you to make the most of your social media marketing efforts.

Brand24 is one of those tools.

So, if you want to improve your social media strategy, try it and start monitoring conversations online. Sign up for a 14-day free trial!

See also: Media monitoring tools