When I first started posting on LinkedIn consistently, I couldn’t understand why some posts were a huge hit, while others flopped like soggy tacos. That is, until I started monitoring my social media analytics.
Suddenly, it all became much clearer: I had data that pointed to which hooks grabbed the most attention, what posting times got the most engagement, plus the ideal length for a post. Everything clicked.
The clues are out there for you too, right in your analytics. And they can guide your social media strategy in the right direction.
But if you run multiple social media platforms, it can be hard to collate and stitch these insights together. Luckily, plenty of social media analytics tools help you do just that, and then some. I've tested many of these tools myself and organized this list by specific use cases so you can find the one that fits your needs.
Key takeaways
- Consolidated insights: Analytics tools eliminate the need to manually toggle between native platform insights, providing a unified view of cross-channel performance.
- Top recommendation: Buffer is one of the most intuitive and cost-effective solution for creators and small marketing teams.
- Niche specialization: Specific tools excel in different areas, such as Rival IQ for competitive benchmarking, Tailwind for Pinterest-heavy strategies, and Keyhole for historical market research.
- Qualitative data: Modern tools like Siftsy and Talkwalker use AI to analyze comment sentiment and audience demographics beyond simple engagement metrics.
Here are 11 of my favorite social media analytics tools.
What are social media analytics?
First, a quick definition: Social media analytics are the numbers that show how your posts have been performing across different platforms. Social media analytics can help you answer questions beyond “How many likes did this post get?” For example:
- Which are my best content types?
- When is my audience the most engaged?
- What kind of content gets followers talking?
- What kind of content is the best for reaching new followers?
- ...and so much more
Social media analytics help you measure your performance and benchmark it against your social media goals.
Do all social media platforms offer native analytics?
Yes, they do. All major social media networks provide native insights within their platform. But there are a few issues when you rely solely on them:
- Social media networks don’t always provide the insights you need. For instance, LinkedIn doesn’t show timestamps on past posts, making it tricky to understand what days and times are best to reach your audience.
- Relying on native insights alone won’t give you the full picture. Let’s say you’re running a large-scale social media campaign and using multiple social media networks. You’ll have to manually cobble insights from all of them if you rely only on each channel’s native insights. In contrast, on many social media analytics tools, you can gather all posts under one tab and monitor collective insights on how your campaign performed across channels.
Social media analytics software collects and helps you make sense of your performance data — so you can spend less time tracking and more time improving your social media strategy.
Social media analytics tools vs. management tools
There are dedicated social media analytics tools that only show insights from social media posts. And then there is social media management software that encompasses social media analytics along with scheduling posts, engaging with your audience, storing ideas, etc. This list contains options for both. But which one should you choose?
- Choose social media management software if you’re a creator, a one-person team, or a small marketing team managing your entire social media strategy.
- Choose a dedicated social media analytics software if you’ve already covered other aspects of your social media strategy (either manually or with another tool) and/or if you need specific insights about your social media efforts that a management tool can’t provide.
In most cases, social media managers and creators will likely prefer one-stop social media management tools. Having everything in one place just makes life easier.
That said, there are times when standalone social media analytics tools might make more sense.
- When you need insights about a very particular aspect of your social media strategy — like competitive analysis — standalone tools often work better. Many social management tools offer competitor analysis, but a standalone tool often digs a little deeper and can provide more useful insights.
- When you’re a small creator or team on a shoestring budget, managing your content calendar and social media engagement manually. Maybe you can’t afford comprehensive social management software for multiple social media channels. But you might be able to swing for a social media analytics tool that’s a little more budget-friendly.
You'll find both dedicated social media analytics tools and social media management tools on this list. Choose the one that best fits your needs.
Jump to a tool:
Quick summary of the 11 best social media analytics tools
| Social media analytics platform | Best for | Price | Supported social media platforms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buffer | Creators and small teams | Free plan for up to three social media platforms (10 posts per channel). Advanced analytics tools are available on paid plans, which start at $6 per month. | Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube |
| Rival IQ | Large agencies | Plans start at $239 per month. Free 14-day trial available. | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube |
| Keyhole | Market research | Not publicly available. | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube |
| Social Status | Small businesses running ads and influencer partnerships | Free plan available. Paid plans start at $99 per month. | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube |
| Siftsy | Analyzing comments on social media posts | Not publicly available. | Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube |
| Vista Social | Tracking reviews along with social media | Plans start at $79 per month. Free 14-day trial available with each plan. | Apple Play Store, Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business, Google Play Store, Instagram, LinkedIn, OpenTable, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Tumblr, X, Yelp, YouTube |
| Typefully | Social media networks that support text-only posts | Free plan available for 15 posts/month. Paid plans start at $16 per month and have compulsory yearly billing. | Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Threads, X |
| Tailwind | Pinterest users | Free plan available for five posts per month. Paid plans begin at $29.99 per month. | Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest |
| DashThis | An all-in-one marketing dashboard | Plans begin at $49 per month. There’s a 15-day free trial with every plan. | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube |
| Socialinsider | AI-driven content pillar insights | Plans start at $99 per month. All plans have a 14-day free trial. | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube |
| Talkwalker | In-depth audience insights | Not publicly available. | Facebook, Instagram, X |
The 11 best social media analytics tools for creators and marketers
1. Buffer
Best social media analytics tool for creators and small teams
Buffer is a flexible social media toolkit that helps you schedule your posts, engage with your audience, store ideas, and a lot more. As social media analytics tools go, Buffer is really easy to use.
As soon as you open your social media analytics dashboard, you find your:
- Best type of post
- Best day to post
- Best type of content to post
Instead of just throwing numbers at you, Buffer helps you make sense of the data, which is crucial for strapped-for-time creators and social media managers. And of course, if you need it, you can also see all the raw data and graphs showing you:
- Follower growth
- Total impressions
- Total engagement
- Hashtag performance
- Audience demographics
- Engagement rate and reach on specific posts
You can create beautiful branded reports in just a few clicks — no more manual copy-pasting.
Price: Free plan for up to three social media platforms (10 posts per channel). Advanced analytics tools are available on paid plans, which start at $6 per month.
Supported social media platforms: Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube,
Note: The advanced analytics features are available in our paid plans. Our free plan includes basic analytics to help you get started.
2. Rival IQ
Best social media analytics tool for large agencies
Rival IQ is one of the best dedicated social media analytics tools for large social media agencies. It stands out by offering in-depth social media analytics and adjacent social media tools as add-ons.
For example, it has competitor analysis and social listening built into its analytics tool. Instead of having three separate platforms for these tasks, you can just use Rival IQ.
Their pricing designed for social media agencies:
- You can add at least 10 companies (your clients) to your account
- If you want to add more, you can add five companies for $50 per month
- You can swap the companies whose performance you’re tracking
Comparing it to other social media analytics tools, I was impressed with its competitive benchmarking. Rival IQ:
- Shows when your competitor’s posts are likely boosted
- Compares brand positioning (such as social media bios and other profile attributes)
- Benchmarks your performance with your social media niche and your chosen competitors
As an agency, competitive analysis plays an important part in informing the social media strategy and social media reporting of your clients. Rival IQ makes that a breeze.
Price: Plans start at $239 per month. Free 14-day trial available.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube
3. Keyhole
Best social media analytics tool for market research
Keyhole is another one of the dedicated social media analytics tools on this list. Like Rival IQ, it also has competitive analysis features (and even influencer marketing features), but its strength lies in its powerful historical insights paired with market research.
- In historical insights, you can unlock insights as old as a decade. What was your audience saying about [important topic] five years ago? How has their opinion shifted today? What were the most engaging posts on this topic in this timeframe?
- In market research, thanks to Keyhole's machine learning system, you can identify emerging trends on any topic. You can see a real-time evolution of how your audience’s sentiments are evolving on a subject.
These social media analytics can give you powerful insights into developing your products and services: You can see what has stood the test of time and how the conversation on a topic has changed.
One catch is that the historical insights are only available for X (formerly Twitter). Sure, it has been the go-to place for conversation in the past, but I would’ve loved it if other social media platforms were included in the historical insights, too. And these reports cost extra — starting at $50 and increasing depending on the volume of X posts you’re analyzing.
Price: Not publicly available.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube
4. Social Status
Best social media analytics tool for small businesses running ads and influencer partnerships
Social Status is one of the top social media analytics tools for small businesses running ads and managing influencer partnerships as part of their social media strategy.
If you’re a small business that just wants to measure its performance across organic and paid social strategies, Social Status would be a great social media analytics platform.
It provides the key performance indicators (likes, impressions, comments, shares, etc.) and also:
- Ad analytics (only for Meta, LinkedIn, and X)
- Competitor analytics (only in the paid plan)
- Influencer analytics (only in the higher tier plans)
- Customized social media performance reports on higher-tier plans
Social media managers who practice advertising, collect user-generated content, and dabble in organic social media marketing have a lot on their plate (to say the least). Social Status makes it easy to collate all your insights in a single dashboard.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube
5. Siftsy
Best social media analytics tool for analyzing your comments
Comments often reveal the ‘why’ behind the numbers. Ever wish an analytics tool could surface those insights for you? Siftsy does exactly that.
Designed to pull sentiment from comments across multiple channels, Siftsy works like this: upload a CSV of post URLs, tag your campaign, and let the AI do the heavy lifting.
Analyzing your comments can be beneficial in various scenarios:
- When you want to do a qualitative analysis of an influencer partnership
- When you want to get feedback about a product or an experimental social media post
- When you want automated reports about the overall sentiment of a social media campaign
The numeric data in post analytics are great, but combining them with the qualitative comments' sentiment makes them even more powerful. Siftsy’s AI even summarizes the key takeaways and highlights valuable insights from specific conversations for you.
Price: Not publicly available
Supported social media platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube
6. Vista Social
Best social media analytics tool for tracking reviews and social metrics
Vista Social takes what Siftsy does a step further. It’s not only a social media analytics tool; it can also help you schedule posts, manage your comments and social inbox, and practice social listening.
Where Vista Social really shines is review management. It pulls feedback from multiple sites into one dashboard so you can:
- See every new review from Facebook, Google Business, Yelp, and more side-by-side
- Reply to reviews and social comments without switching tabs
- Create filtered, branded reports that combine social metrics and review sentiment
Price: Plans start at $79 per month. Free 14-day trial available with each plan.
Supported social media platforms and review sites: Apple Play Store, Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business, Google Play Store, Instagram, LinkedIn, OpenTable, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Tumblr, X, Yelp, YouTube, and more
7. Typefully
Best social media analytics tool if you’re only focused on X (formerly Twitter)
Typefully is one of the best social media analytics tools for X (formerly Twitter). While it supports multiple social media channels, it aces X like no other. I especially love writing X threads on it — the user experience is great. The ‘viral thread hooks’ examples it contains are also top-notch for inspiration.
Typefully also provides social media metrics that are unique to X. For example, your dashboard would refer to comments as ‘replies’ because that’s the unique terminology for X.
A unique metric I love in Typefully is ‘profile conversion rate,’ which tells you how many people in your target audience who visited your X profile hit the follow button. This is such a helpful social media data point because it helps gain insights on:
- How effective is your profile image, bio, and pinned tweet in converting a visitor to a follower
- How your target audience discovers your social media profile through other sources (like web traffic, podcast mentions, etc.)
Apart from this, Typefully provides all the essential social media metrics such as number of posts, follower growth, impressions, profile visits, etc.
Price: Free plan available for 15 posts per month. Paid plans start at $16 per month and have compulsory yearly billing.
Supported social media platforms: Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Threads, X
8. Tailwind
Best social media analytics tool for businesses relying on Pinterest traffic
Tailwind is one of the best social media tools for small businesses focused on using Pinterest to drive traffic. Since Pinterest marketing functions differently (it’s a social media channel and a search engine), Tailwind has designed its tool to complement both.
The most significant benefit is a Google Analytics integration, which can help determine which pins drive the most traffic to your website. Using this data, you can double down on the most successful pins and recreate them.
For a Pinterest-specific social media analytics platform, you need many more key performance indicators because of how pins, boards, and trends function on the platform. Tailwind delivers. You can access Pinterest analytics from the high level to the individual pin.
- Track engagement metrics for your boards and pins , including trends for repins
- A ‘Pin Inspector’ helps you monitor the insights for individual pins and understand which pins you should reschedule
- Interest heatmaps help gain actionable insights into whether your social posts are resonating with your target audience
- Board insights help you understand which boards of yours are performing the best — and you can filter them for boards garnering the most outbound links, too
When it comes to Pinterest, few social media tools do a better job than Tailwind — and that includes its social media analytics capabilities.
Price: Free plan available for five posts per month. Paid plans begin at $29.99 per month.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest
9. DashThis
Best social media analytics tool for an all-in-one marketing dashboard
DashThis is marketing software with in-built social media reporting. It’s best suited for teams with a comprehensive marketing strategy who need to show how social media marketing fits into (and contributes to) the big picture. Social media marketers can use it with their adjacent marketing teams to create social media performance reports and overall marketing reports.
DashThis has over 30 integrations to help you connect Google Analytics, Ahrefs, HubSpot, and many more platforms. You can also keep an eye on paid marketing efforts — like TikTok Ads, Meta Business Suite, Pinterest ads, and even Google ads — to provide a combined report of your organic and paid strategy.
I wouldn't recommend using DashThis if you need in-depth social media performance insights — it provides the basic audience insights report, likes, comments, shares, impressions, etc. It's the ability to integrate with other marketing tools in your tech stack (0ver 30 of them) that makes it stand out.
I also love that each plan has unlimited users, making DashThis perfect for a large marketing team. There’s also no cap on how many data sources you can add, so don’t worry if your marketing strategy has a ton of moving parts. You can combine them all in this one analytics tool.
Price: Plans begin at $49 per month. There’s a 15-day free trial with every plan.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube
10. Socialinsider
Best social media analytics tool for AI-driven content pillar insights
Socialinsider is an advanced social media analytics tool that offers AI-driven insights about your content pillars.
In the higher tier plans, you can also run an AI-driven competitor analysis that lets you check if a certain pillar works well for a competitor. You can then consider tailoring and using it in your own strategy.
I also love the post tagging feature — here, you can tag and group social media posts and monitor how they’re performing collectively. It’s just the feature you’d need when you want to monitor how your different social media campaigns or content pillars have performed.
The only catch is the price of Socialinsider is prohibitive for most creators and small teams, since the best features of Socialinsider are restricted to the higher-tier plans.
Price: Plans start at $99 per month. All plans have a 14-day free trial.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube
11. Talkwalker
Best social media analytics tool for in-depth audience insights
Talkwalker is another advanced analytics tools for social media monitoring. For me, their audience insights are a standout feature. You can pull insights from customer calls, support tickets, and online communities to find what your audience truly cares about — a great way to find content ideas.
I also love the audience segmentation features. You can slice and dice your data based on audience demographics. This can help garner actionable insights about the various segments of your social media audience — which is especially useful if you’re a global brand.
You can also chat with Talkwalker’s AI assistant, Yeti, to ask questions about various audience demographics and access relevant insights at your fingertips.
If you wish Talkwalker could also help you manage your social media marketing efforts, you’re in luck: Hootsuite acquired Talkwalker in 2024. With Hootsuite, you can schedule your posts, manage your inbox, and measure your social media performance, all in one place.
The snag is that most of Talkwalker’s features are only available in the higher-tier Hootsuite plans — which isn’t easy on the pocket even with its lowest-tier subscription ($199 per month).
Price: Not publicly available.
Supported social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, X, and more
Let your analytics tools deal with the data
Instead of spending hours crunching numbers, you can focus your time on analyzing what the data tells you: Which are my best types of posts? How can I replicate my previous success? What should I shift in my strategy to improve my return on investment?
And if the tool offers ready-made report templates, even better — you can spin up a polished, share-worthy deck in minutes and get back to the creative work.
If you’re on a budget and need a simple, intuitive, and pocket-friendly analytics tool, you really can’t go wrong with Buffer. Having tested these tools, I find Buffer to be one of the easiest to get up and running. Plus, you can try it for two weeks to see if it’s a good fit (or just opt for the free plan if you find the basic analytics are enough). Start for free today.
FAQ about social media analytics tools
What is a social media analytics tool?
A social media analytics tool helps you track and understand how your content performs across different platforms. Instead of checking each platform’s native insights separately, these tools bring all your data into one place.
Why are social media analytics important?
Social media analytics help you understand what’s actually working in your content. Instead of guessing, you can see which posts drive engagement, when your audience is most active, and what topics resonate most. Over time, this data helps you create more effective content, grow your audience faster, and make smarter marketing decisions.
What metrics should you track on social media?
The most helpful social media metrics depend on your goals, but a few core ones apply to almost everyone. Engagement rate shows how people interact with your posts, reach and impressions show how many people see your content, and follower growth reveals whether your audience is expanding. Many creators also track clicks and conversions to understand how social media contributes to website traffic or sales.
What is the difference between social media analytics and insights?
Social media insights usually refer to the basic data provided by each platform, like Instagram or LinkedIn. Social media analytics tools go a step further. They combine data across platforms, visualize trends, and often provide recommendations to help you improve performance.
Do you need a social media analytics tool if platforms already provide data?
Native analytics on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok are useful, but they can be limited. If you manage multiple accounts or platforms, you’ll often need to jump between dashboards to see the full picture. Social media analytics tools simplify this by gathering everything into one view and helping you compare results across channels.
How often should you check your social media analytics?
Most creators benefit from checking their analytics at least once a week. A quick weekly review helps you spot patterns, like which posts performed best or when your audience was most active. A deeper monthly review is useful for evaluating long-term trends and refining your overall social media strategy.
What’s the difference between analytics tools and social media management tools?
Dedicated analytics tools focus purely on measuring performance and generating reports. Social media management tools combine analytics with other features like scheduling posts, managing comments, and storing content ideas. For many creators and small teams, a management tool with built-in analytics is the best option.
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