For the most part, consumer-facing brands today have embraced the importance of a thoughtful social media strategy. But when it comes to analytics, even many major enterprise brands struggle to get it right. Part of that is because there are so many social media channels — with over 30 that have over 100 million monthly active users — and very few have cross-platform analytics. That means the only solution that makes sense for virtually everyone is to find a social media platform that can hopefully help.
And that list gets at least as long.
So, you can’t blame marketing leaders if their heads are spinning at all the options. How do you differentiate from one solution to the next when there are so many to choose from? Making it even more complex, there are lots of different areas of social media analytics, and every platform has its own key strengths.
We’ll look at what we view as the strongest social media analytics platforms on the market today, give you a look at the main strengths of each, along with some questions that are worth asking if you engage with them, in the interest of getting the most out of your key investment.
Emplifi Unified Analytics
If you’re looking for a user-friendly UI experience that brings the most comprehensive and intuitive set of analytics tools to your team, Emplifi Unified Analytics delivers. From AI automation to flexible widgets for easy customization to omnichannel insights that bring everything social media together in one UI, it checks every box for the vast majority of brands when it comes to analytics.
Notable strengths:
Competitive benchmarking: Take advantage of Emplifi’s 20,000+ customers to better understand the numbers you should be hitting.
AI and predictive capabilities: Don’t put all your efforts to chance. Gain insight into how programs will perform before you commit spend, and even gain insights to help you determine the optimal time to post social content based on when it would drive the most impact.
Truly unified analytics: Unified not just in name, but also across all the channels and teams you need. You can simply get more done in less time.
Automated sentiment analysis and labeling: Get reliable intelligence into the nature of social media chatter around your brand based on custom rules, without manual work — aiding in data categorization, organization, and comprehension.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite may be the most recognizable name in the social media marketing business, and they’re one of the longest-standing solutions on the market. A lot of small teams start with them and stick with them as they grow. They’re primarily known for their robust publishing tool, but let’s look at what they do well when it comes to analytics.
Notable strengths:
Simplified view: Visualizing the performance of your social media efforts by channel, time, and individual posts is easy, with one page for everything.
Personalized metrics: Set up the metrics that work best for your team and the goals you’ve set for each campaign.
Best time to post tool: Based on your team’s previous engagement data, visualize the optimum times to post to different channels.
Sprinklr
With a feature-heavy overall offering, Sprinklr is a popular platform among many enterprise brands. When it comes to analytics, Sprinklr likes to promote their unified customer experience management platform and its ability to bring siloed data together in one place.
Notable strengths:
Personalized metrics: Customize how you visualize all your metrics, connecting them to messages, listening, and benchmarking data.
Journey tracking: Monitor cross-channel customer journeys and gain insights into all your customer interaction data.
Real-time monitoring: See and analyze performance as it happens, tracking KPIs and responding to events in real-time.
Sprout Social
An all-in-one solution that includes much of the standard functionality, Sprout Social is another popular solution, especially for mid-market brands. Teams looking for a straightforward social media planning and community engagement solution have often found Sprout Social to serve their needs.
Notable strengths:
Integrations: Sprout Social’s integrations with tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk help it give clients many options for solving problems.
Detailed reporting: Gain lots of data to help you better understand how audiences are interacting with your content.
Ease of use: Access a clean UI and easy-to-read graphs make it simple for you to understand your social media performance.
Meltwater
Known primarily as a public relations tool, Meltwater also employs a suite of other solutions for marketers. They focus much of their analytics efforts on social listening, helping brands to be a part of the overall social conversation that’s going on around their brand.
Notable strengths:
Social listening: This is Meltwater’s biggest reporting strength, helping brands understand their audience and get automated reports on any time interval.
Public relations: For brands intently focused on PR and earned media, Meltwater’s global journalist database can help.
Hootsuite partnership: Meltwater partners with Hootsuite to give clients a fuller suite of assistance when it comes to social analytics.
Dash Hudson
Historically, Dash Hudson’s major focus has been on influencer marketing, with a particular focus on Instagram. That’s led to them having a high percentage of their clients in the Beauty and Retail sectors.
Notable strengths:
Instagram influencers: If your main need is to identify and engage influencers on Instagram, and then track campaign performance, Dash Hudson’s solution is strong.
Visual intelligence: Predict the performance of images and videos on brand feeds with an AI image recognition feature.
Dashboards: Quickly see how your social media campaigns are performing with reporting dashboards.
12 questions to ask social media analytics tool providers
Social media plays an ever-growing role across marketing, commerce, and care. Whether you’re looking to start using a social media analytics platform at your company, or thinking about making a switch to a different provider, make sure that you find a solution that can provide the level of insights you need to elevate your social media efforts to the level that consumers expect from their favorite brands today.
Here are a dozen questions to help prepare you for your search:
How will you handle questions and problems as they come up with our team?
What is included in the pricing, and can you detail what features cost extra?
Can we get a full, custom demo of the platform before we proceed?
When there are major platform updates, will we have to spend additional implementation feeds for customer solutions?
Will you be able to provide us with the ability to use omnichannel flexible widgets for custom reporting?
Do you offer a multi-tenant structure so that many teams can use one account?
Do you provide automatic labeling for managing our content?
Is the social analytics offering you provide unified across all the social channels?
Are your social tools fully integrated across the board?
Do you offer an end-to-end solution for social media marketing?
Will we need to add another piece of software in order to fill product gaps in your reporting capabilities?
Can you offer customizable widgets on the web?
At Emplifi, we deeply understand the importance of analytics when it comes to your social media marketing campaigns. That’s why we’ve built the most robust, comprehensive unified analytics and reporting solution on the market. If you’d like to see how we can help your team better understand how your performance stacks up, learn more about Emplifi Unified Analytics today, and let’s set up some time to talk.
Editor's Note: This is an update to a previously published article from July 2020. All items are current as of the date of this update's publishing date.
