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The 15 Best Social Media Analytics Tools in 2024: Get Your Brand in Line

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Social networks are for more than just brand building; they're also for boosting engagement and sales. With the right insights, you can transform your strategies and beat your competitors. Our list of the best social media analytics tools will help you find the tool you need.

Last Updated: 01 Mar'24 2024-03-01T08:59:25+00:00

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• Hootsuite — All-in-one social media management tool with robust analytics capabilities
• Sprout Social — Known for its analytics capabilities and advanced reporting features
• Keyhole — Great for real-time monitoring of social media performance
• Rival IQ — Ideal for competitive analysis and benchmarking social media performance
• Quintly — An enterprise-grade analytics tool providing metrics and benchmarking
• SocialPilot — An efficient tool for scheduling posts and tracking performance
• Sendible — A monitoring and management tool designed for marketers and agencies
• Buffer — Simplifies social media reporting and performance tracking
• Zoho Social — A tool that unifies social media management, analytics and reporting
• Brand24 — Provides social media listening and tools to track brand mentions
• BuzzSumo — Ideal for content analysis, tracking trends and finding influencers
• Iconosquare — A feature-rich analytics tool with a user-friendly interface
• Vista Social — An intuitive social media management platform
• Tailwind — A social tool specifically designed for Pinterest and Instagram analytics
• Google Analytics — Offers website insights and referral sources from social platforms

Facts & Expert Analysis

• The Benefits of an Analytics Tool: A social media analytics tool monitors and measures the performance of your social media campaigns, allowing you to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies and adjust your approach accordingly.
• How to Use One: The key to getting the most out of social media analytics is to set benchmarks and segment your audience so you can personalize your content for each one.
• The Best Social Media Analytics Tool: Hootsuite stands out as a top social media analytics tool for key features like customizable dashboards, real-time analytics, automated reporting and a visually appealing interface.

Metrics like reach, likes, shares and comments indicate whether your social media marketing strategy is moving in the right direction. If you’re not sure which tool to use to help you track these metrics, don’t worry; we did the research and compiled a list of the best social media analytics tools.

If you’re wondering how your content is performing, who your audience is or which tactics work best, these analytics tools can give you the answers. Our overall pick for the best social media analytics tool is Hootsuite. Keep reading for other great options to help you choose the right one for your social strategy.

This article was rewritten with more providers added and an easier-to-read format.

What Are Analytics Tools for Social Media Platforms & Why Do You Need Them?

Social media analytics tools are applications that collect data from your social media accounts . These tools also analyze the data to help you understand and optimize your social media performance . Analytics tools provide social media metrics such as engagement rates, follower growth, reach and target audience demographics.

Here are the reasons why a solid social media analytics tool is essential for your social media strategy:

• Social media ROI: By tracking important metrics from social media, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and measure the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts.
• Saving time: Social media analytics tools automate the process of collecting data from multiple platforms in one place. This saves a lot of time because you don’t have to go through each platform separately.
• Identifying trends: You can track social media analytics and look at how your metrics change over time. This way, you can spot upward trends or detect downward trends and make adjustments accordingly.
• Competitive analysis: Detailed social media analysis allows you to benchmark your own performance against industry leaders or competitors and identify areas of opportunity.
• Audience insights: Analytics tools give insights into your target audience’s behavior, age, location, interests and more. This helps you tailor your content and target your audience more effectively.

15 of the Best Free & Paid Social Media Analytics Tools for 2024

Let’s explore 15 of the leading social media analytics tools that provide the necessary social media data and insights.

1. Hootsuite

More details about Hootsuite:  

• Pricing: $149 per month
• Website: hootsuite.com
• Consolidates data from multiple platforms
• User-friendly dashboard
• Robust, customizable reports
• Expensive for small organizations
• Learning curve for beginners
• Free plan available: No
• Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
• Key benefit: An all-in-one analytics solution for managing multiple social media platforms and creating customizable reports
• Who is it for: Solopreneurs, small- to medium-sized businesses and agencies
• Engagement rate
• Impressions
• Video views

Hootsuite remains a top choice for social media management. Its dashboard provides an overview of all major social media platforms in one place. Hootsuite also provides robust reporting capabilities. The interface is visually appealing, you can create customized social media reports and it integrates with Dropbox, OneDrive, Canva and more.

Additionally, Hootsuite’s help center offers a comprehensive suite of resources to help users get started. Hootsuite offers three paid plans: Professional, Team and Enterprise. Pricing starts at $99 per month, billed annually. You can try Hootsuite free for 30 days.

2. Sprout Social

More details about Sprout Social:

• Pricing: $249 per month
• Website: sproutsocial.com
• Strong analytics & reporting
• Integration with many apps
• Easy-to-use interface
• High prices
• Steep learning curve
• Skill level: Intermediate to advanced
• Key benefit: A robust social media analytics tool for scalability and data-driven decision-making
• Who is it for: Medium- to large-sized businesses, agencies and enterprises
• Organic and paid impressions
• Engagements
• Post and link clicks
• Followers by age, gender, country and city
• Page and profile actions

Sprout Social is a powerful social media management platform with solid analytics capabilities and a clean and intuitive interface. The customizable reports help you analyze social media performance. You can also track standard metrics, brand mentions and keywords; monitor conversations across multiple platforms; track demographics and influencers; and more.

Sprout Social offers four paid plans: Standard, Professional, Advanced and Enterprise. The Standard plan starts at $249 per month, with a limit of five social media profiles, while the Professional plan offers unlimited social profiles for $399 per month. Sign up for the 30-day free trial to test out Sprout Social.

More details about Keyhole:  

• Pricing: $89 per month
• Website: keyhole.co
• Beautiful data visualization
• Great monitoring tools
• Real-time analytics
• Weak knowledgebase
• Lacks integrations
• Key benefit: Real-time, in-depth social media analytics
• Who is it for: Agencies, small- to large-sized businesses and enterprises
• Best time to post
• ​​Most engaging post types 

Keyhole stands out for its analysis capabilities. It offers a social listening tool to monitor brand mentions and a profile analytics tool to optimize profiles. Additionally, Keyhole offers impressive data visualization and allows you to track influencer marketing campaigns and track trends across social media channels, forums and news websites.

Keyhole provides six flexible pricing plans suitable for businesses of all sizes: Individual, Team, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise and Campaign. Prices start from $89 per month for individuals. Check out the plans in our price chart below or try Keyhole’s seven-day free trial.

4. Rival IQ

More details about Rival IQ:

• Pricing: $239 per month
• Website: rivaliq.com
• In-depth competitive analysis
• Customize dashboards & reports
• Wide range of analytics metrics
• Expensive prices
• Unappealing interface
• Key benefit: Allows social media professionals to gain insights into their competitors’ strategies
• Who is it for: Agencies, medium- to large-sized businesses and enterprises
• Conversations
• Posts per day
• Top hour per day

Rival IQ is a powerful tool that provides in-depth analysis for optimizing social media strategies. The tool shines with its competitive analysis, allowing you to benchmark against competitors. Rival IQ also includes content analysis to boost engagement and social listening to monitor brand mentions.

Rival IQ’s interface is more functional than visually appealing, but the data is presented clearly. You can easily build custom dashboards, which makes digging into complex analytics simple and understandable.

Rival IQ offers three paid plans: Drive, Engage and Engage Pro. The Drive plan costs $199 per month, billed annually. For full access to listening and extensive analytics, a costlier Engage plan is necessary. Give Rival IQ a try with the 14-day free trial.

More details about Quintly:

• Pricing: $315 per month
• Website: quintly.com
• Many social media metrics
• Comprehensive data collection
• Highly flexible & customizable
• Expensive pricing
• Key benefit: An enterprise-grade analytics tool that provides robust social media insights
• Follower total
• Follower change rate
• Organic reach by post type
• Average interactions per post
• Stories by hour
• Posts by hour

Quintly is an advanced social media analytics tool with a clean interface that offers a wide range of metrics to measure social media efforts. You can use its pre-made dashboards to simplify analysis or create custom dashboards for your specific needs, and you can create automated reports that can easily be charred.

Additionally, Quintly lets you benchmark your channels against competitors, and you can create automated, shareable reports to keep teams and clients up to date. However, beginners may need guidance from the help center to get the most out of the platform.

Quintly offers a straightforward pricing approach based on the number of social profiles and users. With prices starting at $315 a month, Quintly has more expensive plans than its competitors. To see Quintly in action, you can book a demo and try its seven-day free trial.

6. SocialPilot

More details about SocialPilot:

• Pricing: $30 per month
• Website: socialpilot.co
• Multiple social network analytics
• Content publishing & scheduling
• Team collaboration features
• Few social media platforms supported
• Limited Professional plan
• Key benefit: Detailed social media analytics for improving content performance
• Who is it for: Solopreneurs, small- to medium-sized businesses and marketing agencies
• Engagement insights
• Content type
• Popular posts
• Post frequency

SocialPilot is a clean and friendly tool that helps optimize content performance and strategy through detailed analytics and insights. You can use the tool to identify high-performing content, better understand audiences and evaluate content strategies. SocialPilot also lets you create automated reports and schedules for specific time periods.

Additionally, SocialPilot integrates with apps like Slack, Zapier and Google Drive, which makes it flexible. SocialPilot offers four paid plans: Professional, Small Team, Agency and Agency+. The Professional plan is the cheapest and starts at $25.50 per month, billed yearly. Give SocialPilot a try with a 14-day trial to experience its analytics capabilities firsthand.

7. Sendible

More details about Sendible:

• Pricing: $29 per month
• Website: sendible.com
• Combines engagement metrics from multiple networks
• Google Analytics integration
• Drag & drop report builder
• User experience could be better
• No X/Twitter analytics report
• Key benefit: Consolidates engagement metrics from various channels into a single dashboard for simple client management
• Who is it for: Freelancers, marketing agencies and small- to medium-sized businesses
• Follower growth
• Engaged users

Sendible, with its straightforward interface, simplifies workflows for marketers and agencies. The platform tracks engagement metrics such as top posts and engaged users, and suggests the best time to post. Additionally, Sendible allows you to integrate your account with Google Analytics to track traffic sources.

The platform provides an intuitive report builder, and you can easily design automated reports using the drag-and-drop report builder. However, Sendible lacks an X (Twitter) analytics report, which may be a dealbreaker for some.

Sendible offers four plans: Creator, Traction, White Label and White Label+. The Creator plan costs $25 per month, billed annually, which includes basic reporting features. For custom reports, you’ll need the Limited Time Offer plan or higher. You can try Sendible’s features with a 14-day free trial.

More details about Buffer:  

• Pricing: $6 per month per channel
• Website: buffer.com
• Performance recommendations
• Integrates with popular apps
• Basic analytics compared to other tools
• Limited customizability
• Free plan available: Yes
• Skill level: Beginner
• Key benefit: A simple social media scheduling and analysis tool
• Who is it for: Solopreneurs, bloggers, small teams and marketing agencies
• Total impressions
• Total engagement
• Reach on specific posts
• Audience demographics
• Hashtag performance

Buffer is a simple analytics tool for social media managers to schedule social media posts and analyze performance. The tool provides a dashboard that collects important metrics from different social channels, while the recommendation feature helps you optimize posting times. You can also create reports and share them with multiple clients.

The intuitive interface makes it easy for beginners to navigate the tool. However, larger companies may find Buffer’s analytics capabilities limited. Buffer also integrates with more than 30 popular apps, such as Dropbox, Canva, Zapier and IFTTT .

Buffer offers a free plan with limited post-scheduling options and no analytics tools. There are also three paid plans: Essentials, Team and Agency. Essentials starts at $5 per month per channel, with annual billing. You can use the 14-day free trial to see if any of the plans meet your needs.

9. Zoho Social

More details about Zoho Social:

• Pricing: $15 per month
• Website: zoho.com/social
• Supports various social platforms
• Customizable dashboards
• Flexible pricing plans
• Fewer 3rd-party integrations
• Not suitable for larger teams
• Key benefit: Easy post scheduling and custom dashboard creation
• Who is it for: Freelancers, solopreneurs, agencies and small- to medium-sized businesses
• Top connections
• Number of posts

Zoho Social is a social media management solution that offers a range of analytical capabilities. You can track key metrics such as engagements, demographics and top posts, while custom reports allow you to gather relevant data in one place. The listening dashboard is also convenient for monitoring brand mentions, industry trends and conversations.

Zoho Social’s interface is intuitive, and reports offer insights into engagements and audiences. Additionally, Zoho Social seamlessly integrates with products like Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk.

The platform offers a free plan that supports up to seven social channels. Its paid plans include Standard, Professional, Premium, Agency and Agency Plus. For more comprehensive analytics and reporting tools, we recommend the Premium plan, priced at $30 per month and billed annually. Take advantage of the 15-day free trial to explore its features.

10. Brand24

More details about Brand24:

• Pricing: $99 per month
• Website: brand24.com
• Robust listening tool
• Lots of online sources
• Detailed reports
• Few 3rd-party integrations
• Overwhelming interface
• Key benefit: An AI-powered social listening tool that helps track online presence
• Who is it for: Freelancers, solopreneurs, agencies and businesses of all sizes
• Social media reach
• Non-social media reach
• Interactions

Brand24 is ideal for tracking brand mentions and monitoring online conversations. It gathers real-time insights to see what people are saying about your brand. The platform also provides sentiment analysis and metrics to measure brand awareness. Brand24’s interface is clean, but the depth of data can feel overwhelming. 

Brand24 offers four paid plans: Individual, Team, Pro and Enterprise. The Individual plan is priced at $79 per month (billed annually) and is suitable for small brands. For complete analytics capabilities and reporting options, the Pro plan, priced at $199 per month (billed annually), has everything covered. Brand24 offers a 14-day free trial to explore its features.

11. BuzzSumo

More details about BuzzSumo:

• Pricing: $199 per month
• Website: buzzsumo.com
• In-depth competitor analysis
• Extensive content database
• Ease of use
• Supports few social networks
• Analytics features restricted to higher plans
• Key benefit: A popular marketing tool for content generation, social media monitoring and influencer marketing
• Social engagement
• Best day to post

BuzzSumo is a clean and easy-to-navigate marketing tool that provides features like content discovery, content research, media monitoring and influencer research. You can use it to conduct keyword searches, uncover trends and monitor competitors. The platform also helps you find influencers that align with your brand and provides users with a robust knowledgebase.

BuzzSumo offers four paid plans: Content Creation, PR & Comms, Suite and Enterprise. The Content Creation plan costs $159 per month, billed annually. However, if you require advanced features such as finding influencers or analyzing performance data, you may want to consider the Suite plan. To get started, take advantage of the 30-day free trial offer.

12. Iconosquare

More details about Iconosquare:

• Pricing: $59 per month
• Website: iconosquare.com
• Great content creation & scheduling
• Lots of social media metrics
• Visually appealing interface
• Unable to separate paid & organic posts
• Key benefit: A feature-rich analytics tool with a user-friendly interface
• Who is it for: Solopreneurs, freelancers, bloggers, marketing agencies and small- to medium-sized businesses
• Average likes per post
• Like history
• Post type distribution

Iconosquare is a user-friendly social media analytics, management and scheduling tool that helps managers understand content performance through engagement insights and other metrics. Thanks to the beautiful, easy-to-use interface, you can create personalized dashboards to easily track specific metrics and automate reports at specific time intervals.

Iconosquare offers three paid plans: Single, Team and Custom. All plans come with core analytics and reporting tools. The cost varies depending on the number of social profiles you manage, starting at $49 per month (billed annually) for up to five profiles. Iconosquare also provides a 14-day free trial period.

13. Vista Social

More details about Vista Social:

• Pricing: $39 per month
• Website: vistasocial.com
• Streamlined social media management
• Supports many platforms
• Many reports available
• Difficulty connecting profiles
• Key benefit: Streamlined social media management
• Audience growth
• Total posts by network
• Brand awareness

Vista Social, with its intuitive interface, unifies all social media management tasks, from scheduling to analysis. With its analytics tool, you can access customizable reports, including a social profile performance report and a competitor analysis report. Vista Social also monitors conversations across many platforms to provide actionable insights.

Vista Social offers free and paid plans, including Standard, Professional, Advanced and Enterprise. Prices start at $39 per month. The Standard plan includes social media and post-performance reports, and more comprehensive reports are available with the Professional plan and higher. Give Vista Social a try with a 14-day free trial.

14. Tailwind

More details about Tailwind:

• Pricing: $24.99 per month
• Website: tailwindapp.com
• Actionable insights
• Affordable prices
• Easy to use
• Limited platform support
• Key benefit: A simple content management and analytics tool for Instagram and Pinterest
• Who is it for: Freelancers, solopreneurs, agencies and small teams
• Reaction score
• Engagement score

Tailwind is for marketers focused on Instagram and Pinterest. It offers an actionable reporting tool that provides analytics across both platforms. Despite its limited functionality and sometimes slow processing times, the data provides a solid starting point for beginners. Another bonus is that the interface is intuitive for users of any skill level.

Tailwind offers a free plan with basic analytics. If you’re looking for more advanced analytics capabilities, upgrade to one of their paid plans: Pro, Advanced or Max, which provide additional features and insights to enhance your social media marketing strategies.

15. Google Analytics

More details about Google Analytics:

• Pricing: Free
• Website: analytics.google.com/analytics
• In-depth traffic analysis
• Customizable reports
• Customized dashboards
• Fully Google integrated
• Requires technical setup
• Key benefit: An analytics tool that tracks and analyzes your website’s performance
• Who is it for: Businesses of all sizes, marketers and agencies
• Traffic sources
• Bounce rate
• Geographic location
• Conversions
• Average engagement time

Google Analytics provides powerful website traffic analytics for marketers. The tool delivers data such as demographics, traffic sources, leads converted and more. This data allows you to calculate your social media ROI and identify which platforms are driving the most traffic.

Though Google Analytics is highly robust, it has a steep learning curve. However, Google offers extensive training resources. It also integrates nicely with other Google products. The best part about Google Analytics is its free access to a wide range of capabilities. You can sign up for Google Analytics for free to start measuring your social media performance.

How to Use Social Analytics Tools to Grow Your Business

Social media analytics provide actionable insights needed to actively grow businesses. Here are some tips on how to use social analytics tools to grow your business:

• Set benchmarks: Define the metrics you want to track, such as followers, engagement and clicks, and set a baseline for each metric to measure progress over time.
• Segment your audience: Many social media tools allow you to break down your audience by location, age, gender, interests, peak hours, devices and more. You can use this information to craft content for each audience.
• Review historical data: Your reports from the past three, six and 12 months indicate which types of content, campaigns and strategies led to growth or decline. This data can greatly help improve your future social media efforts.
• Analyze conversions: If you run paid social media ads, conversions like purchases or sign-ups will allow you to assess the success rate of your campaigns and make necessary changes.

Final Thoughts

Social media analytics tools are necessary to keep track of performance and get the most out of your social presence. For an all-in-one solution, Hootsuite is hard to beat. The platform consolidates data from every social network and provides comprehensive insights into key metrics.

Alternatively, if you prefer a more specialized tool, Sprout Social is another top choice for social media analytics. However, the right choice depends on your business needs, budget and skill level.

Which analytics tool is your favorite? What features do you find most useful for tracking performance? Do you have any tips for making the most of social media analytics tools? Let us know in the comments below, and thank you for reading!

FAQ: Best Social Media Analytics Tools

Our experts believe Hootsuite has the best analytics tools. Its dashboard collects data from all major social media networks for easy monitoring and analysis.

The four types of social media analytics are descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

A social media analytics tool collects data from social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) to help you understand your audience, track campaigns and optimize content.

The most effective social media tool depends on your needs and goals. Hootsuite and Sprout Social are great options for comprehensive analytics across multiple social media channels.

Thanks for sharing these tools. This would really help those who are looking for one. Been using one of the tools and it really is manageable. Plus I can add all the social media accounts that I needed.

I just got a question, why not included user reviews on the criteria? since user reviews says a lot about the tools too. Anyhow great article and again thanks for sharing.

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The 17 Best Social Media Analytics Tools for Marketers in 2024

Updated: April 15, 2024

Published: April 21, 2023

These days, businesses across every industry are investing in social media marketing. But no matter how great your social media content is or how many people follow your accounts, you won't be able to grow your audience, reach, and presence if you don't understand the data behind it all.

In-depth knowledge about the status and success of your social media marketing will offer actionable insight into things like which strategies should remain in place and what you should change or experiment with in order to grow. Social media analytics tools are able to help you with just that.

What is social media analytics?

Why use social media analytics.

• How to track social media analytics
• Best social media analytics tools

Social Media Analytics

In this blog post, we'll review the importance of social media analytics and some great options to help you measure your social media marketing success.

Get certified in social media strategy with this free course.

Social media analytics is the process of gathering, analyzing, and applying data, information, and reports related to the content shared on your social profiles and the social profiles themselves.

With social media analytics, you can:

• Understand the metrics that matter most to your team and business such as engagement, reposts, shares, clicks, impressions, and sessions.
• Identify effective ways to boost brand awareness and reach.
• Resonate with your audience.
• Boost traffic to your other content and website.
• Increase conversions.
• Improve customer loyalty.

How to Track Social Media Analytics

Here are the steps involved in tracking social media analytics

• Identify which social media platforms you'll be measuring impact on (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram).
• Determine which metrics you're doing to track (e.g. clicks, impressions, likes, shares).
• Choose a time period to analyze (e.g. last quarter, last month, last week, duration of your campaign).
• Determine which tools you'll use to track and measure success (we'll cover your options in the next section).
• Review and analyze your data (depending on your tool of choice, there may be internal features to help you understand and analyze your data — such as this one with HubSpot ).
• Apply your findings and conclusions to improve growth in the future.

Best Social Media Analytics Tools

• Sprout Social
• Mentionlytics
• Social Status
• ActiveCampaign
• BazaarVoice

1. HubSpot Social Media Software

Get started with HubSpot Social Media Analytics 

HubSpot provides a deep look into the way social media impacts your bottom line and gives you the ability to report on social media ROI. View and compare performance across different platforms, campaigns, and publishing times — all from a single tool.

Monitor your brand on social to understand how your target audience perceives your business and content. Additionally, YouTube Reports provide insight into how your audience and buyer personas engage with your videos. Lastly, effectively reach certain audiences by using data and context from the Contacts in your CRM (which this social tool integrates seamlessly with).

Feature highlights: Social campaign publisher, social mentions monitoring, social reports

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an all-in-one tool with advanced social media analytics capabilities to help you prove (and improve) your social media ROI.

Build your social content calendar around best time to post recommendations based on your unique audience, then view your organic, paid, and web performance side-by-side in one intuitive dashboard. 

Hootsuite also offers competitive analysis tools like industry benchmarking and custom reporting to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Feature highlights : AI-powered content creation tools , custom performance metrics, industry benchmarking, customizable report templates

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media planning service with expansive analytics and reports that help you understand the performance of all of your social accounts.

Configure and customize reports and metrics to help you scale your business's presence on social. And if you're a HubSpot customer, integrate your CRM with Sprout Social to collect and view accurate reports all in one place.

Feature highlights: Competitor comparison tool, integrated publishing and engagement tools, social listening

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence tool and social media management solution with analytics capabilities.

Social insights like social listening and competitor benchmarking can inform your content creation. You can gain a better understanding of the audiences engaging with your social content with audience profile cards. View key data in one place with customizable dashboards.

Feature highlights: Audience profile cards, customizable dashboards

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is an all-in-one social listening tool that helps you understand how audiences feel about your brand, competitors, or industry.

It tracks mentions across all web and social media sources, analyzes the data, and provides valuable insights about your online performance. With features like share of voice and metrics like reach, engagement, and keyword analysis, you can create insightful reports to measure your performance and benchmark against competitors.

Mentionlytics also offers AI-powered sentiment analysis in every language and AI-powered emotion analysis that categorizes your mentions into 4 emotions: Joy, anger, sadness, or fear.

Feature highlights: Real-time alerts, Share of Voice reports, influencer identification, Social Intelligence Advisor with custom recommendations.

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a full-service marketing platform that offers analytics for social media ads. It's easy to use for small marketing teams and requires little time to pour over the accompanying analytics.

With Mailchimp, you'll have an audience dashboard, which is a page dedicated to understanding audience behavior. Additionally, the software offers tools to look into smart targeting and mobile integrations. These tools can diversify a social strategy and deliver higher engagement numbers by helping you create content that specific audiences will respond to.

Feature highlights:  Content optimizer with AI-assisted suggestions, content studio for managing digital assets

Keyhole is an all-in-one social media analytics tool that’s trusted by 100,000+ brands like Amazon, Google, Spotify, and more. The tool supports the top social media platforms for social listening, profile tracking, trend analysis, and influencer marketing.

You can set your custom dashboard and see your profile metrics like engagement rate , follower growth, reach, impressions, and more in one place. The best part is you can even track competitors and check what’s working for them or not.

Moreover, in one shot, you can discover the best time to post and schedule unlimited posts to your favorite platforms. 

Feature highlights: Custom dashboard, automated report generation

8. Social Status

Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics tool with robust reporting features. The platform comprehensively covers Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Social Status reports can be completely customized and white-labeled making them perfect for agencies and brands with complex requirements. Reports can be exported to PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides. The tool also covers paid and organic performance, competitor benchmarking, and influencer campaign tracking all in one powerful social analytics tool.

Feature highlights: Social media reports across multiple channels, influencer campaign tracking

Databox is an expansive analytics platform that lets you set and track social media campaign goals. It's a good choice for businesses that have many contacts, social accounts, campaign goals, and target audiences.

Customize metrics that matter most to your campaign or social channels for your reports. Any integration you have, such as HubSpot , will be visible from your dashboard as well.

Feature highlights: Dashboard designer, custom metric builder

Grow users gain full visibility into engagement on all of the social accounts. The tool integrates with HubSpot , Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook, Marketo, and Microsoft Office so you can view all data in one place.

Grow breaks down complex data into graphs and visuals, and your social reports are easily sharable which is helpful if multiple people are working on the same project. Grow's reports are built with metrics chosen by the user — meaning, you can customize reports in a way that works for your needs.

Feature highlights: Data modeling, dashboards

11. Rival IQ

Rival IQ takes social beyond the vanity metrics with competitive benchmarking designed to show off how you’re really doing on social. With comprehensive data available from your competitors to private social data with all the bells and whistles, Rival IQ saves the time and hassle of native analytics on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Rival also integrates seamlessly with HubSpot via our Competitor Streams social monitoring, making it easier than ever to track your performance against your competition on social. Feature highlights: C ompetitive benchmarking, easy-to-understand insights about your social performance

12. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing software with social media features including reporting. You can connect Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other platforms to gather insights related to performance.

Since you'll have both social media and email metrics in one place, this is a good option for businesses with a heavy email marketing focus. Additionally, ActiveCampaign's reports track what contacts do after they click through to your site. Further, if you're a HubSpot customer, the software integrates with your CRM .

Feature highlights: Site tracking, landing pages, reports 

13. Meltwater

Meltwater is a global company specializing in media intelligence and social listening. They provide software solutions and services to help businesses monitor their online presence, track media coverage, and gain insights from social media and other online sources.

Meltwater collects data from various online channels, including social media platforms, news websites, blogs, and forums. Their social media analytics capabilities allow businesses to understand their brand's reputation and industry trends.

Feature highlights: Sentiment Analysis, Demographic Analysis, Influencer Identification, Social Media Reach and Engagement, Trend Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Campaign Performance Measurement

14. CoSchedule

CoSchedule gathers social network, campaign, and engagement data for your profiles and compiles that real-time data into reports.

On your dashboard, compare multiple campaigns to determine the evolving ecosystem of audiences. You'll also be able to see the top fans of your social accounts, making it easier to create targeted content for them (and followers like them).

Feature highlights: Content organizer, dashboard

15. Bazaarvoice

If you're a brand, social media is a valuable tool for e-commerce. According to HubSpot's Social Media Report , 50% of survey respondents said social shopping is very important to their overall social media marketing strategy.

Bazaarvoice helps make your content shoppable with their link in bio solution called Like2Buy. You'll be able to retarget shoppers who clicked the link by creating lookalike audiences and segmenting social campaigns. Tools like Showroom turns your content into a storefront. Bazaarvoice also helps measure ROI from your social commerce efforts.

Feature highlights: Link in bio solution, pop-up shop

Buffer measures and analyzes how your content performs across different social channels. With Buffer, you'll be able to gain insight into how your organic content compares to boosted posts, measure engagement for individual posts and stories, and figure out your audience demographics.

You can also extract data to help you determine the best time to post and the optimal posting frequency.

Feature highlights:  Custom reports, daily updates

17. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo helps with social content creation with tools like the Content Analyzer — by using the Content Analyzer, you will be able to figure out what topics receive the greatest engagement, broken down by platform.

BuzzSumo can also analyze the social engagement your content receives. This way, you will be able to see the number of shares from each platform and use these insights to determine which pieces of content to focus on in the future.

Feature highlights: Keyword tool, real-time view of trends, Content Analyzer

Choose a Social Media Analytics Tool

Ultimately, choosing the right social media analytics tools for your business shouldn't be a stressful process. The tools should align with your business goals and deliver the metrics you need to be successful. So review the options above and choose the right one for your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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29 Top Social Media Analytics Tools in 2024

Unleash the power of data. Compare the best social media analytics tools available and transform metrics into valuable insights.

Wondering which social media posts are working and which not?

Looking for an app for social media analysis where you can track all the social media platforms in one single, user-friendly dashboard?

Social media analytics are essential for measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts and making informed decisions based on data.

With the right social media metrics , you can identify your target audience and track your reach, engagement, conversions, and loyalty across different platforms and channels.

In this article, we’re going to cover 29 of the best social media analytics tools marketers should consider in 2024 to improve your social media marketing plan .

Best social media analytics tools for 2024

What are social media analytics tools Why use social media analytics tools Who uses social media analytics tools? 29 of the best social media analytics tools for 2024

• Socialinsider
• Dash Hudson
• Iconosquare
• SocialPilot
• Sprout Social
• Zoho Social
• Followerwonk
• Social Status

Social media analytics within social media platforms

Facebook analytics, instagram analytics.

• X(Twitter) Analytics

LinkedIn Analytics

Tiktok analytics.

• YouTube Analytics

What are social media analytics tools?

This list of social media analytics tools was created based on a G2 comparison that provides insights on customer satisfaction across all types of businesses.

Why use social media analytics tools

Many social media analytics tools are available, each providing different functionalities to suit the client's needs.

According to our ' The Life of a Social Media Manager ' survey, the ideal social media analytics tool needs to include all social media platforms (78%), be easy-to-use (75%), and provide real-time data (74%).

Most social media managers use analytics tools for:

• measuring the content performance (85%)
• understanding their audience (75%)
• social media reporting (69%)
• tracking social media campaigns (61%)
• competitor analysis (46%)
• tracking brand awareness (45%)
• creating agency pitches (26%)
• influencer research (22%)

Who uses social media analytics tools?

Social media plays an essential role in selling products. 43% of customers discover new items through social networks, and 66% of customers purchase after seeing other people's social media posts .

Social media has evolved, and social media managers must adapt to changing algorithms.

Tracking social media performance is one of the best practice for social media . Social media analytics tools are useful for:

• social media managers who want to track their social media objectives and measure their social media efforts.
• head of social media who needs to get an overview of how their brand evolves on social, monitor competitors, track social media campaigns with influencers, or prove social media ROI.
• marketing managers who need to use social media analytics software to track top metrics, export data, or track social media campaigns.
• customer support teams can utilize social media analytics to address complaints received on social media promptly.

29 of the best social media analytics tools for 2024

1. socialinsider.

Socialinsider is one of the best social media analytics tools , offering premium features for measuring and reporting social media performance and Instagram listening insights .

Using this tool for social media analysis, you can get in-depth insights, compare strategies, optimize social media content , track and monitor social media campaigns, gain competitive insights and benchmarks, get history posts data, and export social media data in multiple formats.

Socialinsider's social media analytics features include:

• Get top social media metrics and analyze your social media performance.
• Get in-depth insights for any business page or influencer.
• Identify the best-performing content.
• Access analytics on a post-level.
• Get competitive insights and industry trends.
• Track competitors' performance and content strategies.
• Tag and group social media content by keywords or trends.
• Get social media listening insights for any hashtag on Instagram.
• Monitor your branded hashtags or hashtag campaigns on Instagram.
• Discover the influencers who use your hashtags on Instagram.
• Export social media data as PDF, PPT, CSV, or EXCEL. You can import your Socialinsider data to Looker (Google Data Studio), PowerBI or get social media data via API .

Socialinsider offers an easy-to-use analytics dashboard for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, catering to social media professionals and marketing managers.

Pricing : Socialinsider's plans start from $99/month.

Free trial : 14 days

G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5

2. Agorapulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management tool that analyzes the performance of your social media accounts and monitors social media trends . It helps you to keep track of your social media activity and provides insights on how you can improve your social media strategy.

AgoraPulse provides a suite of tools including inbox, publishing, social media analytics and reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration tools, enabling you to publish and schedule content while on-the-go.

You can use AgoraPulse to track your content's organic and paid reach, clicks, and engagement.

Pricing : options ranging from €49 to €119 per month or more—if a custom plan is chosen

Free trial : 30 days

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a powerful digital consumer intelligence platform that offers analytics for social media.

Brandwatch provides a range of digital marketing tools, including consumer research, social media management, and influencer marketing solutions.

Brandwatch monitors and analyzes billions of online conversations across various channels, including blogs, reviews, news, and images.

Beyond providing access to vast amounts of data, Brandwatch enables users to gain a deep understanding of their customers – their needs, desires and interests.

Pricing : disclosed on demand

Free trial : not disclosed on the website

G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5

Buffer's social media analytics and reporting dashboard enables social media proffesionals to track performance and create reports on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

With their social media analytics software, you can gain insights on boosted posts, audience demographics, Instagram stories and hashtags, and export downloadable reports.

The product is divided into 5 key tools: Publishing, Analytics, Engagement, Start Page, and AI Assistant.

Buffer simplifies the process for brands to schedule their posts, analyze social media performance, and manage all their accounts in one centralized hub.

Pricing : options ranging from $0 to $120 monthly for 3 channels

G2 rating: 4.3  out of 5

Cision is a PR software platform that offers media analytics and measurement for brands.

You can understand and manage your brand story, brand reputation , and communication campaigns using Cision's analytics tool.

With this Cision, you can execute PR campaigns, target the right media contacts, engage with personalized outreach, or measure and monitor your brand.

Key features of the platform include interactive social media dashboards , full-funnel measurement, and executive-ready reporting.

Free trial : not mentioned on the website

G2 rating: 4.0  out of 5

6. Dash Hudson

Dash Hudson provides social media analytics and reporting for major platforms. You can get stats at a glance, customized reports, and content benchmarks.

Dash Hudson's solutions include Reporting, Insights, and Trends, Influencer and Creator ROI, and AI-Powered Social Listening.

You can use their social media analysis software to measure success, get competitor insights, view customized reports, and track social media metrics.

Pricing : starting from $249 monthly

G2 rating: 4.7  out of 5

7. DashThis

DashThis is a social media reporting software that helps marketers save work hours and create beautiful reports.

DashThis automatically collects marketing data from various sources, allowing marketers to compare and combine data in a single dashboard, providing a comprehensive view of the results of their efforts.

DashThis offers its services to a diverse range of business types, including non-profits, franchises, automotive, hospitality, and healthcare.

DashThis is great for social media marketing reporting which gather data from 34 of the most popular marketing platforms, like Facebook, Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, Twitter, Ahrefs, Moz, Google My Business, Youtube, Instagram, and much more.

With DashThis, you can create visually appealing and informative dashboards that showcase the impact of your marketing efforts.

The app excels in providing various reporting capabilities such as PPC reports, Google Analytics reporting, social media reporting, SEO reporting, and more.

Pricing : options ranging from $45 to $419 monthly

G2 rating: 4.8  out of 5

Determ is an AI media monitoring and analytics software designed for PR and marketing professionals. This app is ideal for brand monitoring, gaining insights into any topic, crisis communication, competitor analysis, campaign tracking with sentiment analysis , and social media monitoring.

With Determ, you can focus your communication efforts, detect potential issues, and capitalize on positive publicity.

Determ helps track brand mentions, measure social media reach , and create PR reports - all in one place. It offers media monitoring, analytics and reporting, sentiment analysis reports, and AI Synthia for smart insights to identify potential opportunities or threats relevant to your interests.

Free trial : 7 days

9. Hootsuite

Hootsuite provides tools for scheduling, analyzing, listening, and managing social media.

It's easy to see which social media platforms, days of the week, and posts generate the most revenue with Hootsuite's social media analytics dashboard.

Additionally, it provides advanced analytics for social media that shows the paid, organic, and web metrics side by side.

Hootsuite streamlines various tasks for social media managers.

From scheduling posts to organizing content and measuring ROI, it offers a range of features that simplify the management of your social media accounts.

Pricing : starting from $99 per month

G2 rating: 4.1  out of 5

10. Iconosquare

Over time, Iconosquare has evolved into a robust analytics, reporting, publishing, and monitoring platform catering to the needs of small businesses, enterprises, and agencies.

Iconosquare provides essential analytics, content scheduling, and brand monitoring features, enabling you to manage your social media presence effectively.

Pricing : options ranging from €49 to €139 per month

11. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social media analytics software that instantly lets you analyze multiple profiles, brand mentions, campaigns, and influencers. It provides social media listening, campaign tracking, profile analytics, and influencer tracking tools.

Pricing : options ranging from $79 to $479 per month

G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5

12. Quintly

quintly , recently acquired by Facelift, provides social media analytics and competitor analysis tools.

You can easily track, benchmark, and analyze your social media activity, and create and automate reports for the most important platforms.

quintly is a social media analytics software brands and agencies use to make data-driven decisions.

You can utilize this tool for in-depth analytics and reporting, gain insights about your competitors, and customize reports.

Pricing : $315 per month for all features, including 3 profiles and one user. Additional charges apply to extra profiles and users. Taxes not included.

Free trial : book demo on demand

13. Rival IQ

Rival IQ , recently acquired by Quid, is a social media analytics and benchmarking tool. Rival IQ looks at your social media metrics and offers real-time insights that help you make quick decisions.

Rival IQ offers competitive analysis, social posts analysis, social media audits, and social listening . You can access detailed analytics for each channel and include competitive context in your social media reports .

Pricing : options ranging from $239 to $559 per month

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5

14. Semrush

Semrush's social media analytics tools help you track and analyze any brand's social strategy.

You can keep track of the top social media accounts in your niche, stay ahead of trends, create and schedule engaging content across all social profiles, and receive social media reports directly to your inbox.

Pricing : $19.75/month

15. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a comprehensive social media analytics tool that offers a range of powerful capabilities.

It provides comprehensive analytics for all posts, regardless of the publishing platform.

SocialPilot caters to a diverse range of businesses, including small businesses, marketing agencies, multi-location brands, and enterprises.

With features like content performance analysis, audience insights, identification of top fans, optimal posting times, and shareable PDF reports, SocialPilot empowers you to understand your audience, enhance your engagement rate and strategies, and effectively track and share your social media performance.

Pricing : options ranging from $30 to $200 per month

16. Sotrender

Sotrender is a social media analytics and benchmarking dashboard for digital agencies. Automate your monthly reporting or generate white-labeled social media reports with ease using this tool.

Sotrender offers a range of key features designed to enhance your social media management. Covering popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, Sotrender streamlines your monthly reporting, provides competitor insights, and simplifies online conversations with its Social Inbox feature.

Pricing : options ranging from $59 to $331 per month for annual plans

17. Sendible

Sendible is a tool for managing social media content, scheduling posts, and monitoring social media performance and trends, specifically designed for marketing agencies.

Using Sendible's social media analytics tools you can gain in-depth insights from your social media data and quickly generate reports for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.

Pricing : options ranging from $29 to $750 per month

18. Sprinklr

Sprinklr Insights offers access to user-friendly social media analytics dashbord, advanced social listening metrics , media monitoring, competitive benchmarking, audience insights and more.

Sprinklr is a unified-CXM platform used by thousands of the world's largest enterprises for marketing, advertising, research, customer care, and engagement.

The platform offers comprehensive capabilities across various areas, including publishing, engagement, listening, analytics, employee advocacy, and commerce.

For those seeking dedicated social media insights, Sprinklr Insights is the perfect solution. The price, however, is disclosed on demand.

Pricing : $249 per seat/month, billed annually.

Free trial : 90 days

G2 rating: 4.0 out of 5

19. Sprout Social

Sprout Social  is one of the most popular social media reporting tools primarly meant for larger agencies and teams.

From managing social media publishing to engaging with your audience and analyzing your performance, Sprout Social provides a centralized solution for your marketing needs.

Sprout's social media analytics tool allows you to select the metrics that align with your business goals and show data impact in social media reporting.

Sprout's social media analytics dashboard provides a comprehensive view of your social performance. It allows you to create custom reports, and filter based on tags, content, and message type. This helps to highlight the most important metrics for different pieces of content.

Pricing : starting from $249 per month

20. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a tool that helps businesses and agencies manage, expand, and report on their social media presence.

Additionally, it has a social listening feature that gathers data from various channels.

Using Zoho Social, you can see individual metrics for each post, like reach and engagement.

One of the best things about this social media analytics tool is that it can help you create a comprehensive report including data about your demographics.

You can also see how your audience engages with your content, while also being able to compare how your fans and other users interact with your posts.

Price: The starting price is $15 per month for one brand and one user

21. Emplifi

Emplifi is an enterprise marketing platform that enables you to track all the necessary social media metrics required for success.

With Emplifi, you get to check sentiment analysis, develop a competitors analysis and get a predictive analysis that helps you adjust your strategy.

Price: The starting price for Emplifi is $240 per month.

22. Tailwind

Tailwind's app for brands and small businesses helps you optimize your social media performance and provides detailed reports.

For Pinterest, you get metrics like the number of pins, the number of followers for your boards, but also the potential number of impressions.

When it comes to Instagram, Tailwind provides basic metrics, such as engagement, reach, followers, comments, likes and shares.

For a low-price analytics tool, this one provides you with quite a few metrics.

With this social media analytics tool, you can find the best hashtags on Instagram using the Hashtag Finder, and you can upload more images at the same time, using a drag-and-drop calendar.

Price: For this social media analytics tool, the price starts at $19.99 per month for annual plans.

Cyfe provides a comprehensive social media analytics dashboard to monitor all of your essential performance metrics, visualize your KPIs, and share them with your team.

With Cyfe, you can add all your social media platforms and then pull reports for a specific account.

You can set up SMS and email alerts for this social media analytics tool to notify you about different thresholds. By using its Twitter search widget, you can easily track your competitors’ performance and brand mentions.

Price: For this app, you only have to pay $19 per month.

24. Followerwonk

Followerwonk provides tools for Twitter analytics, offering in-depth data about your followers.

The app provides a lot of demographics data, splitting your followers into categories.

The cool thing about this social media analytics tool is that you can search followers by their names and keywords in their bio.

Moreover, you can categorise them based on their activity and influence.

You can use the app’s visual graph to benchmark yourself against your competitors.

Price: The starting price for this app is $29 per month.

25. Audiense

Audiences offers audience intelligence inisghts, and it's extremely useful when it comes to measuring Twitter metrics .

You can gather in-depth data about your audience due to the app’s advanced use of machine learning. All the data obtained helps you learn more about your target audience.

With Audiense, you can use chatbots to engage with your Twitter audience in DMs. By providing you with all the necessary data on your audience, you can easily build a more engaged community.

Moreover, you get to analyze historical conversations on Twitter.

Price: For this app, the starting price is $39 per month.

26. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a reporting software for social media platforms that allows free unlimited searches for hashtags and keywords. Through this app you gain access to hashtag and keyword searches across all social media platforms, news websites, forums and blogs.

You get to see distribution of conversations, mentions, top posts and sentiment analysis, helping you learn what works and what doesn’t work for your audience.

With Talkwalker, you can also compare your brand’s performance to your competitors.

With the help of its monitoring feature, you can find out what customers say about your brand, services and products.

Talkwalker also offers you demographics data which helps you adjust your content.

Price: For this app, you will have to contact their team to express your needs and establish a price according to what you’re looking for.

27. Social Status

Social Status is a tool for social media analytics, designed for agencies and digital marketers to report on multiple channels, customize their reports, and white-label them for different clients.

You can even download the social media reports in different formats.

The great thing about this social tool is that you can also perform a competitive analysis, track influencer campaigns and check your organic performance.

Price: For this app, the starting price for the smallest package is $9 per month.

28. Meltwater

With Meltwater, you get a combo of several features, including analytics, social listening and social monitoring.

You can track your brand’s mentions, social media coverage and obtain insights about your content from other media sources.

This social media analytics tool collects data from several forums, blogs, news websites and social platforms.

Through this, you learn more about the latest industry trends, being able to keep up with them.

Above all that, Meltwater also provides sentiment analysis, competitive analysis and trend analysis to help you craft a better social media strategy .

Price: To see the pricing, you have to fill in a form where you specify your needs and someone from their team will give more details in a demo.

G2 rating: 3.9 out of 5

29. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a complex social media analytics tool that also features content creation tools.

Providing you with the best content creation topics and a thorough analysis, you can easily develop targeted content for your audience.

With this tool, you can also check your social media engagement , helping you find out on which type of content you can rely more.

Key features: For BuzzSumo, the feature that makes a difference is the Content Analyzer one, but also the possibility to see the latest trends.

Price: The starting price for their plan is $199 per month.

Most social media networks provide integrated analytics tools that offer insights into your activity and track content performance.

If you are looking to monitor your social media metrics and check the effectiveness of content on a platform using a free social media analytics tool, native analytics may be a useful solution.

Here is how to track social media analytics using the platform's native dashboard and get the needed data.

In Meta Business Suite, you can find the social media reporting tool for Facebook and Instagram. Within the professional dashboard, you can find basic analytics about your content performance and audience demographics over a selected period of time.

The metrics available are reach, engagement, followers, and link clicks.

How to use it:

After you log into Facebook, click on your profile picture on the top right - Select your Facebook Page - Click on Meta Business Suite - Click on Insights on the bottom left.

You can customize the dashboard only to have data for Facebook and start to analyze your performance for maximum success.

There are two ways of tracking social media analytics for Instagram:

• Native analytics within the Instagram app
• Meta Business Suite

If you have a Business or Creator profile, you can access Instagram analytics within Instagram app or web. It provides metrics like reach, engagement for content types, and your profile visits.

Instagram Insights is a thorough audience analytics tool that allows you to find your audience's most active time spent and optimize your posting schedule.

On the app : Click on Profile Picture - Click on Menu (three horizontal lines on the top right) - Click on Insights.

On the Web:  Go to Instagram in your browser - Tap on your profile and click View Insights under your bio.

X (Twitter) Analytics

Looking for basic social media analytics and reporting for X, formerly Twitter?

Twitter provides a social media analytics dashboard where you can track your content progress and export data as CSV by tweet or by day.

Moreover, with Twitter Analytics, you can select a custom time period, which makes it easy to verify the performance of your posts for a campaign.

On each Twitter report, you can see:

• link clicks
• video views

Go to your Twitter account - Go to Twitter account analytics - Click Access your Post Analytics

LinkedIn provides social media analytics and reporting where you can get data for your page, such as:

• content analytics
• visitor demographics
• followers growth
• analytics for newsletters
• basic competitive data
• employee advocacy metrics

On each section, you can dive in and get in-depth metrics such as:

• impressions
• engagement rate

You can also customize the time range and export the data set as an XLS file.

How to access:

Click on your profile image in the upper right corner - select your Company Page from the drop-down menu - Analytics.

On TikTok Analytics, you can monitor your video's performance with key metrics, such as profile/video views, impressions, likes, and shares.  

This social media analytics tool offers followers insights regarding demographics and time usage. So, you’ll get to know where and who your target audience is and when they are spending more time on your content.

You can access up to 60 days of historical data and easily see the gaps or improvement opportunities in your TikTok marketing strategy.

In the app: Go to your profile - Click on the three horizontal lines on the top right on the menu - Click on Creator Tools - Click on Analytics .

On the web: Log in to your TikTok account - Click on your Profile Picture - Select View Analytics

Youtube Analytics

YouTube Studio Analytics is the go-to option for brands and creators who want to manage their YouTube channels, analyze and optimize content performance

This is probably the most comprehensive analytics tool for social media, offering in-depth insights into your videos, Shorts, and channels from your first uploaded video to the last.

In the dashboard, you can find metrics like average view duration, reach and impressions , engagement, and audience insights (for new and returning viewers).

Sign in to YouTube - Click on your Profile - Select YouTube Studio

Final thoughts

This list includes more than 20 social media analytics tools, but it’s very important to choose a tool that can help you achieve your social media goals .

Consult your social media team and your budget, and don’t forget that almost every tool has a free trial. So, try it out and find a perfect match for your brand.

Hopefully, this list comes in handy!

FAQs about social media analytics tools

#1. Why is social media analytics important?

Social media analytics provides data and context for any business or individual looking to establish a strong social media presence and make informed decisions based on data.

#2. What are the benefits of social media analytics?

By analyzing social media data, you can gain valuable insights into your audience and their behaviors. This information can help you create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns, leading to increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, more sales.

Social media analytics tools help you make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition.

#3. What is social media analytics used for?

Social media analytics is used for getting insights about:

• your social media performance
• your competitors and their performance on social
• brand evolution over time
• how people perceive your brand values on social
• sentiment analysis on a brand level
• influencers and campaigns

#4. Which is the best social media analytics tool?

Socialinsider is one of the best social media analytics tools out there. You can track and monitor social media metrics such as engagement rate, reach, impressions, video views, top-performing content, and sentiment analysis for Instagram hashtags. You can compare your performance against competitors, get social media benchmarks and industry trends, and conduct research.

#5. How do you get social media analytics for free?

Most social media platforms provide free analytics through built-in dashboards. However, there are some limitations when it comes to native analytics apps such as: history data, exportable charts and metrics.

#6. Is there any alternative to Sprout Social for analytics and reporting?

Socialinsider offers additional features such as competitor analysis, AI Instagram listening, and content analysis, making it a cost-effective alternative to Sprout Social's analytics and reporting tools.

Miruna Vocheci

Social Media Manager @ Socialinsider graduated with an M.A. in Content & Media Strategy. While I do have a bit of a social media obsession, I also enjoy history books, playing with semiotics and 🏃‍♀️.

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21 Best Social Media Analytics Software Reviewed for 2024

Our reviewers evaluate software independently. Clicks may earn a commission, which supports testing. Learn how we stay transparent & our review methodology.

Based on my experience as a marketing specialist, I've tested, evaluated, and shortlisted the best social media analytics software to gather and analyze data from social media platforms to help businesses understand and improve their social media presence.

10 Best Social Media Analytics Software Shortlist

Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 21 tools reviewed.

• 1. Social Status — Best for automated social media reports
• 2. Brand24 — Best for social listening
• 3. Sprout Social — Best for audience insights
• 4. Agorapulse — Best for measuring ROI
• 5. Rival IQ — Best for competitor analysis
• 6. Sendible — Best for enterprise brands and agencies
• 7. Cyfe — Best for customizable dashboards
• 8. Buffer — Best for getting started
• 9. Keyhole — Best for real-time tracking and analysis
• 10. Hootsuite — Best for mid-market and enterprise companies

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There are so many different social media analytics software that making a shortlist of the best can be tricky. You want to track metrics like engagement rates, follower growth, and content performance, providing insights into audience behavior and preferences—and now need the right tool for your brand and team. I've got you covered! In this post, I share from my personal experience using many different social media analytics tools, and share my picks of the best social media analytics software overall.

Why Trust Our Reviews

We’ve been testing and reviewing marketing software since 2022. As marketing experts ourselves, we know how critical and difficult it is to make the right decision when selecting software.

We invest in deep research to help our audience make better software purchasing decisions. We’ve tested more than 2,000 tools for different marketing use cases and written over 1,000 comprehensive software reviews. Learn how we stay transparent & our software review methodology .

The Best Social Media Analytics Software Summary

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

How to Choose Social Media Analytics Software

With so many different social media analytics software available, it can be challenging to make decisions on what social media analytics software is going to be the best fit for your needs.

As you're shortlisting, trialing, and selecting social media analytics software, consider the following:

• What problem are you trying to solve - Start by identifying the social media analytics feature gap you're trying to fill to clarify the features and functionality the social media analytics software needs to provide.
• Who will need to use it - To evaluate cost and requirements, consider who'll be using the software and how many licenses you'll need. You'll need to evaluate if it'll just be the marketing team, or the whole organization that will require access. When that's clear, it's worth considering if you're prioritizing ease of use for all, or speed for your marketing software power users.
• What other tools it needs to work with - Clarify what tools you're replacing, what tools are staying, and the tools you'll need to integrate with, such as accounting, CRM or HR software. You'll need to decide if the tools will need to integrate together, or alternatively, if you can replace multiple tools with one consolidated social media analytics software.
• What outcomes are important - Consider the result that the software needs to deliver to be considered a success. Consider what capability you want to gain, or what you want to improve, and how you will be measuring success. For example, an outcome could be the ability to get greater visibility into performance. You could compare social media analytics software features until you’re blue in the face but if you aren’t thinking about the outcomes you want to drive, you could be wasting a lot of valuable time.
• How it would work within your organization - Consider the software selection alongside your workflows and delivery methodology. Evaluate what's working well, and the areas that are causing issues that need to be addressed. Remember every business is different — don’t assume that because a tool is popular that it'll work in your organization. 

Best Social Media Analytics Software Reviews

Here’s a brief description of each social media analytics software that showcases each tool’s best use case, its noteworthy features, and some pros and cons. I’ve also included screenshots to give you a snapshot of their user interface.

Social Status

Best for automated social media reports

• Free plan available
• From $6.75/month (billed annually)

Social Status is a social media analytics and reporting tool designed for agencies and brands to automate their social media reporting processes.

Why I picked Social Status: Social Status is a social media analytics software that automates social reporting, tracks and analyzes social profiles, ad accounts, competitor profiles, and influencer marketing campaigns. It provides Competitor Analytics, Profile Analytics, Influencer Analytics, and Ads Analytics, allowing users to track and analyze their social profiles, ad accounts, influencer marketing campaigns, and spy on public competitor profiles.

Social Status additionally offers customizable templates, competitor benchmarking, and insights for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Overall, the platform aims to provide actionable insights and help users prove the ROI of their social media activities.

Social Status Standout Features and Integrations

Features include customizable dashboards, exportable data, sentiment analysis, historical data access, scheduled reports, content scheduling insights, hashtag tracking, and audience demographics.

Integrations include support for various social media channels including Facebook Pages, Instagram Professional Profiles, Instagram Stories & Reels, Meta Business Suite, Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Profiles, LinkedIn Company Pages, Twitter (X) Profiles, YouTube Channels, and YouTube Shorts.

• Check out Social Status on their website

Pros and cons

• Offers performance tracking for multiple profiles
• Provides detailed audience demographic insights
• Supports multi-user collaboration
• Report customization only available on higher tier plans
• No functionality for social media management or scheduling

Best for social listening

• 14-day free trial
• From $79/month (annually)

Brand24 is a social media analytics software that offers comprehensive monitoring and analysis of brand mentions across social platforms, enabling businesses to gain insights into their online presence and audience engagement.

Why I picked Brand24: Brand24 shines as a social media analytics software by providing an extensive suite of tools designed to track and analyze online conversations about a brand across multiple social media platforms.

Brand24 aggregates data on brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords in real time, offering businesses a holistic view of their social media presence and audience sentiment. This enables companies to measure the impact of their social media campaigns, identify trends in customer feedback, and engage with their audience more effectively. 

Brand24's analytics include detailed reports on the volume of mentions, sentiment analysis, and the reach of social media conversations, helping businesses to understand their audience better, refine their social media strategies, and improve their overall online reputation.

Brand24 Standout Features and Integrations

Features include social listening, social media monitoring, a mentions feed, discussion volumes chart, marketing analytics, influencer scoring, sentiment analysis, customizable notifications & alerts, data exporting, and data filtering.

Integrations include Slack and SEMrush.

• Check out Brand24 on their website
• Analytics covers blogs and forums as well as social platforms
• Social listening works across almost every platform.
• Exceptionally user-friendly
• Support isn't instantaneous
• Sentiment analysis could be more accurate

Sprout Social

Best for audience insights

• 30-day free trial
• From $199/user/month (billed annually)

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media platform that features advanced analytics and social listening. It makes it easy to learn everything you need to know about your audience to improve your campaigns.

Why I picked Sprout Social: Sprout Social may be an all-in-one platform, but that doesn’t mean its analytics features are subpar. In fact, it features some of the most in-depth reporting and listening tools on the market.

Best of all, it does much of the heavy lifting for you. AI and machine learning technology sift through millions of data points to automatically generate audience insights like trending topics and hashtags. Reports even show how your audience feels about your competitors, and how to differentiate your business.

Sprout Social Standout Features and Integrations

Features include audience analysis, consumer research, influencer recognition, sentiment analysis, trend identification, and performance reports for specific channels and posts.

Integrations include every major social media network, WhatsApp, Google Business Messages, Canva, Bitly, Dropbox, Google Analytics, Hubspot and more.

• Check out Sprout Social on their website
• Great social listening capabilities
• User-friendly interface
• Incredibly robsifteports
• Support can be slow to respond
• Pricing may be prohibitive

Best for measuring ROI

• From $79/user/month

Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media tool that integrates with Google Analytics so you can calculate the true impact of your campaigns.

Why I picked Agorapulse: By helping users to prove the ROI of their social media campaigns, Agorapulse offers a truly all-in-one social media analytics platform. The platform offers all of the analysis features you expect, such as in-depth reports, social listening, and trend insights.

Take things further by connecting Agorapulse to Google Analytics and other platforms to calculate revenue generated by each of your campaigns in an intuitive dashboard that leverages historical data to show how your ROI changes over time.

Agorapulse Standout Features and Integrations

Features include automated ROI reporting, social media response time analysis, trend insights, custom reports, CSV exports, and a mobile app.

Integrations include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

• Check out Agorapulse on their website
• User-friendly layout
• In-depth reports
• Unrivaled ROI reporting
• Doesn’t support every platform (like Pinterest)
• Difficulty scheduling and planning content with the platform

Best for competitor analysis

• 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
• From $239 per month, additional users cost $10 per month.

Rival IQ provides in-depth analysis of every major social channel, with a particular focus on competitive benchmarking. Automated competitor analysis significantly cuts research time.

Why I picked Rival IQ: Rival IQ is the tool for any brand that wants to leverage its rivals’ audiences and benchmark its success. On top of the standard social media reporting features you’d expect, the platform offers extensive competitor analysis so you can track exactly what your competitors are doing.

This includes automated monitoring of your rivals’ presence that helps you identify new opportunities and topics to increase engagement.

Rival IQ Standout Features and Integrations

Features include automated benchmarking and analysis, boosted post detection, position comparison, proactive alerts, in-depth post analysis, and comprehensive social media audits.

Integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. You can also use the Rival IQ API to integrate the platform’s data into other tools.

• Check out Rival IQ on their website
• Real-time insights
• Customizable reporting formats, including slideshows
• Unrivaled competitor analysis
• Lacks social listening
• Lack of historical data

Best for enterprise brands and agencies

• Free trial available
• From $29/user/month

Sendible is a social media analytics platform that lets you manage and monitor your online presence at scale, making it the perfect choice for enterprise brands and agencies.

Why I picked Sendible: Sendible is packed with features directly targeted at agency owners. That includes dedicated client dashboards, automated reporting and enhanced security features like non-password-based connections.

When you’re managing dozens of clients, you don’t want to waste time creating reports. Sendible makes it easy to build in-depth reports in an instant, customizing them with the metrics that matter most to each client.

It also provides the insights agencies need to grow their clients’ followings, like best time to post and most engaged followers.

Sendible Standout Features and Integrations

Features include white label plans, individual dashboards, automated reporting, customized reports, hashtag and keyword monitoring, and engagement reports.

Integrations include every major social media network, YouTube, Google Business Profiles, WordPress, Canva, Dropbox, Google Drive, and GIPHY.

• Check out Sendible on their website
• Easy to find influencers
• Individual dashboard for each client
• Reporting hub
• Can’t manage Pinterest
• Real-time monitoring could be better

Best for customizable dashboards

• 14-day free trial available
• From $19/month

Cyfe is a social media-focused dashboard platform that offers users exceptional visualization capabilities and a single solution when it comes to monitoring and reporting social media performance.

Why I picked Cyfe: Cyfe is the go-to platform for businesses that want to aggregate all of their data (social media and otherwise) in a single dashboard. Collecting and visualizing that much data in one space may sound complicated, but Cyfe is incredibly easy to use.

There are multiple pre-built dashboard templates that you can use to get started, and it only takes a couple of minutes to start pulling in data from your accounts. For those that want to customize the experience, Cyfe lets you customize colors and logos, create branded reports, and launch custom URLs that clients or stakeholders can access without logging in.

Cyfe Standout Features and Integrations

Features include pre-built widgets and starter dashboards, automated reporting and alerts, historical data, custom URLs, and embedded analytics.

Integrations include all major social media platforms, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Moz, HubSpot, YouTube, Shopify and dozens more.

• Check out Cyfe on their website
• Completely customizable
• Easy to get started
• Integrates with over 250 data sources
• No mobile app
• Can’t manage social media channels

Best for getting started

• 14 days free trial
• From $6/user/month

Buffer is an all-in-one social media platform with tools to help you build, manage and track your social presence. Simplicity and value are key differentiators for Buffer. And while other tools may overwhelm you with analysis, Buffer helps you get a broad understanding of your social media performance in a single dashboard.

Why I picked Buffer: If you’re just getting started with social media analysis, Buffer gives you all of the insights you need in an intuitive and easy-to-use tool. Track your performance across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Compare paid and organic campaigns, create white label reports, and find answers to your most burning questions.

Buffer also boasts an insight-backed blog and content library that offers guidance on how to use their tool and become a better marketer.

Buffer Standout Features and Integrations

Features include easy-to-use dashboards, audience demographics, stories and post analytics, white label reports, daily updates, and alerts.

Integrations include every major social media platform, Canva, Zapier, IFTTT, Make, WordPress, Microsoft, Pixlee, SocialBee and more.

• Check out Buffer on their website
• Lets you schedule posts as well as analyze them
• East to connect social accounts
• Limited integration with some social networks
• Lacks more advanced analytic options

Best for real-time tracking and analysis

• 7-day free trial

Why I picked Keyhole: Things change fast in social media, which is why you need a tool that delivers real-time tracking and insights. Keyhole does that and more. You can also monitor what your audiences are saying in real-time through social listening, spy on your competitors, discover top influencers, and create PDF reports.

Keyhole Standout Features and Integrations

Features include hashtags and keywords trackers, influencer tracking, competitor tracking, automated reporting, live stream, sentiment analysis, and demographic analysis.

Integrations include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. You can also create your own integrations using Keyhole’s Social Media Analytics and Media Monitoring API.

• Check out Keyhole on their website
• Excellent social listening
• Easy to use
• Comprehensive range of real-time metrics
• Scheduling functionality could be better
• Data limits on tracking

Best for mid-market and enterprise companies

• From $49/user/month (min 3 seats, billed annually), Hootsuite's pricing reflects its position as a professional-grade tool for social media management.

A comprehensive all-in-one platform, Hootsuite provides no shortage of insights for companies looking to track performance and grow their presence.

Why I picked Hootsuite: The platform has all of the tools large companies need to manage, monitor and grow their social media presence in one place. As well as some of the best publishing functionality on the market, Hootsuite also has seriously in-depth reporting.

Real-time analysis helps you identify top-performing posts and stay ahead of the competition. Social listening features with sentiment analysis help you understand what your audience really thinks. And customizable, in-depth reports let you showcase your results to stakeholders.

Hootsuite Standout Features and Integrations

Features include real-time analysis, customizable reports, competitor analysis, automated alerts, social listening, and customizable dashboards.

Integrations include every major social media network, Google My Business, MailChimp, HubSpot, Canva, Brandwatch, and dozens more.

• Check out Hootsuite on their website
• All-in-one platform
• Competitive intel
• In-depth analytics of every platform
• Can be expensive
• May be overwhelming for smaller businesses or beginner marketers

Other Social Media Analytics Software

Here are a few more worthwhile options that didn’t make the best social media analytics software list:

Best for measuring cross-channel performance

Best for influencer marketing

Best for market research

Best for creating downloadable reports

Best for analyzing social media campaigns as part of the wider customer journey

Best for automatic alerts

Best for analyzing other web 2.0 properties including blogs and forums

Best for companies already using the HubSport suite of tools

Best for blue-chip brands

Best for identifying influencers in your audience

Best for e-commerce brands

Related Marketing Tool Reviews 

If you still haven't found what you're looking for here, check out these tools closely related to digital marketing strategy that we've tested and evaluated.

• Marketing Software
• Marketing Management Software
• Account Based Marketing Software
• Social Media Management Software
• Email Marketing Software

Selection Criteria for Social Media Analytics Software

Selecting the right social media analytics software involves a careful evaluation of what they have to offer. Through extensive personal trials and research, I've developed criteria to guide software buyers towards making an informed decision. 

Core Social Media Analytics Software Functionality : 25% of total weighting score The solution should support these common use cases:

• Tracking engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments)
• Analyzing audience demographics and behavior
• Monitoring brand mentions and sentiment analysis
• Competitor analysis and benchmarking
• Reporting and visualization of data

Additional Standout Features : 25% of total weighting score

These include:

• Advanced sentiment analysis leveraging AI and NLP for deeper insights
• Predictive analytics for forecasting trends and campaign outcomes
• Integration capabilities with CRM and marketing automation tools for streamlined workflows
• Real-time alerts for instant response to social mentions or crises
• Influencer tracking and analysis to identify and engage with brand advocates

Usability : 10% of total weighting score In evaluating usability, I look for:

• An intuitive, clean interface design that simplifies navigation
• Customizable dashboards that allow users to highlight key metrics
• Drag-and-drop features for easy report creation
• Mobile app availability for on-the-go monitoring and analysis

Onboarding : 10% of total weighting score Effective onboarding is key to realizing value quickly:

• Comprehensive training materials such as videos, webinars, and tutorials
• Interactive product tours and easy-to-use templates
• Responsive customer support during the setup process
• A community forum for peer advice and best practices

Customer Support : 10% of total weighting score Strong customer support is essential:

• Multiple channels for support (email, chat, phone)
• A knowledge base with FAQs and troubleshooting guides
• Quick response times and proactive support options
• Dedicated account management for enterprise clients

Value For Money : 10% of total weighting score Value assessment involves:

• Transparent pricing models with no hidden costs
• Flexible plans that scale with business growth
• Free trials or demos to evaluate the tool before purchase
• Features and capabilities that justify the investment

Customer Reviews : 10% of total weighting score Customer feedback provides real-world insights:

• High overall satisfaction scores indicating a positive user experience
• Testimonials highlighting specific benefits and improvements
• Reviews that mention successful resolution of pain points
• Frequent mentions of ease of use, robust features, and excellent support

By meticulously evaluating these criteria, you can select a social media analytics tool that not only meets your immediate needs but also scales with your business, ensuring you derive maximum value from your social media efforts.

Trends in Social Media Analytics Software for 2024

Here are some trends I’ve noticed for social media analytics technology, plus what they might mean for the future of the marketing industry. I sourced countless product updates, press releases, and release logs to tease out the most important insights.

• Integration with Emerging Social Platforms : Analytics tools are expanding their reach beyond traditional platforms like Facebook and Instagram to include newer and niche platforms such as TikTok and Discord. This trend underscores the importance of keeping pace with where audiences are moving and the diversification of social media usage. It addresses the challenge of capturing a complete view of social engagement across a fragmented media landscape.
• Advanced Sentiment Analysis and Emotional Intelligence : Tools are increasingly leveraging AI and NLP to provide deeper sentiment analysis, going beyond positive, neutral, or negative to understand emotions like joy, anger, or disappointment. This evolution speaks to the need for brands to grasp the nuanced emotional impact of their content, enabling more empathetic and targeted marketing strategies.
• Predictive Analytics and Trend Forecasting : The incorporation of predictive analytics into social media analytics tools allows marketers to anticipate trends, content virality, and audience behavior. This feature is a response to the demand for proactive rather than reactive social media strategies, giving brands the edge in a competitive market.
• Enhanced Data Privacy and Compliance Features : In response to increasing global data privacy regulations, analytics tools are prioritizing features that ensure compliance with laws such as GDPR and CCPA. This trend reflects the growing need for brands to manage social media analytics within legal boundaries, safeguarding user privacy while still gaining valuable insights.
• Automated Content Optimization Recommendations : Tools are now offering automated suggestions for content optimization, including the best times to post, content formats that are likely to perform well, and personalized content recommendations. This functionality addresses the challenge of continuously engaging audiences in a content-saturated social landscape.
• Declining Emphasis on Vanity Metrics : There's a noticeable shift away from focusing solely on vanity metrics such as likes and followers towards metrics that measure engagement quality and conversion. This shift aligns with the growing understanding that meaningful engagement drives more value than sheer numbers.

These trends indicate a broader shift towards more sophisticated, ethical, and user-centric approaches in social media analytics.

What Is Social Media Analytics Software?

Social media analytics software is a tool that collects and analyzes data from social media platforms to provide insights into social media performance. It tracks various metrics such as likes, shares, comments, follower growth, and engagement rates. The purpose is to help businesses understand how their content is performing, who their audience is, and how they interact with the content.

Features of Social Media Analytics Software

The key features of social media analytics software encompass a range of functionalities designed to help businesses and organizations leverage their social media presence effectively. Here's a detailed look at these features:

• Data Aggregation : Collects data from various social media platforms to provide a comprehensive view of social interactions. This includes metrics like likes, shares, comments, and more.
• Sentiment Analysis : Uses natural language processing (NLP) to determine the sentiment behind social media posts and comments, helping brands understand public perception towards their products, services, or overall brand image.
• Trend Analysis : Identifies and analyzes trends in social media conversations and engagement. This helps in spotting popular topics or hashtags, enabling brands to engage with current and relevant content.
• Competitor Analysis : Offers comparative insights into competitors' social media strategies. This includes comparing engagement rates, follower growth, and content strategy effectiveness.
• Influencer Identification : Detects and suggests influencers and key opinion leaders relevant to a brand's industry. This feature aids in identifying potential partners for influencer marketing campaigns.
• Engagement Tracking : Monitors how users interact with a brand's social media content, including likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement. This helps in understanding what content resonates best with the audience.
• Campaign Analysis : Measures the performance of social media campaigns across platforms. Metrics such as reach, engagement, conversion rates, and ROI are tracked to assess effectiveness.
• Audience Demographics : Provides insights into the demographics of a brand's social media audience, including age, gender, location, and interests. This information is crucial for tailoring content and advertising strategies.
• Reporting and Visualization : Generates detailed reports and visual dashboards that summarize social media performance metrics and insights, making it easier for teams to understand and act on the data.
• Real-time Alerts and Monitoring : Offers real-time monitoring for mentions of a brand, product, or relevant keywords across social media platforms. Alerts can notify teams of potential issues or opportunities as they arise.
• Content Optimization : Some tools offer recommendations for content optimization, suggesting the best times to post, the types of content likely to engage the audience, and other strategies to enhance social media performance.
• Integration Capabilities : Seamlessly integrates with other tools and platforms, such as CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and content management systems, to streamline workflows and data analysis.

These features collectively enable businesses to craft more effective social media strategies, engage with their audience more meaningfully, and measure the impact of their efforts with precision.

Benefits of Social Media Analytics Software

Social media analytics software has become an indispensable tool for businesses and users aiming to maximize their online presence and engage effectively with their audience. Here are five primary benefits that illustrate the value of social media analytics software:

• Enhanced Audience Understanding : Gain a deep understanding of your audience's demographics, interests, and behavior. This insight allows businesses to tailor content, campaigns, and products to meet the specific needs and preferences of their target audience, resulting in higher engagement rates and customer satisfaction.
• Strategic Content Optimization : Optimize your social media content strategy based on data-driven insights. By analyzing what content performs best, when to post, and which platforms are most effective, businesses can increase their reach and engagement, ensuring that their marketing efforts are not wasted on ineffective strategies.
• Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking : Stay ahead of the competition by understanding their strategies and performance. Social media analytics software provides a clear view of how competitors are engaging with their audience, what content they are posting, and their overall social media presence, enabling businesses to identify opportunities and threats in their industry.
• Measurable ROI on Social Media Efforts : Quantify the impact of social media campaigns and strategies. By tracking metrics such as engagement, conversions, and reach, businesses can understand the direct financial impact of their social media activities, allowing for more accurate budget allocation and marketing investment decisions.
• Crisis Management and Real-time Alerts : Quickly respond to potential crises or negative feedback. Real-time monitoring and alerts enable businesses to address issues promptly, manage their reputation, and maintain a positive image in the public eye, thereby safeguarding their brand's integrity.

By leveraging these benefits, organizations can craft more effective social media strategies, foster stronger connections with their audience, and achieve tangible results from their social media investments.

Cost & Pricing for Social Media Analytics Software

Social media analytics software typically provide a range of functionalities from basic analytics to advanced features like predictive analytics, competitor analysis, and sentiment analysis. Here's a breakdown of the common plan options and their pricing to guide you in making an informed decision.

Plan Comparison Table for Social Media Analytics Software

When selecting a social media analytics software, consider both the scale of your social media efforts and the depth of insights you need. The right plan should not only fit your budget but also provide the features necessary to achieve your specific marketing objectives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Still have questions about finding the best social media analytics software? My frequently asked questions section below may help.

Do I Need to Buy Another Tool for Social Media?

The vast majority of social media analytics tools also have all of the other social media marketing features you need. That includes scheduling posts in advance, managing profiles in one place, and social listening.

Is Hootsuite a social media analytics tool?

Yes, Hootsuite is a social media analytics tool, among its other capabilities. It is a comprehensive platform that allows users to manage their social media channels from a single dashboard, schedule posts, monitor social media traffic, and engage with audiences across various platforms. Hootsuite’s analytics feature provides users with detailed reports and insights into their social media performance, including metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, and the effectiveness of different content types. This enables businesses and individuals to make data-driven decisions to optimize their social media strategies and improve their online presence.

What are the four types of social media analytics?

Social media analytics can be categorized into four primary types:

1. Descriptive Analytics: This type focuses on summarizing historical data to understand what has happened on social media platforms over a specified period. It includes metrics such as likes, shares, comments, post reach, and overall engagement rates. Descriptive analytics helps businesses gauge their current social media performance and understand trends in their audience’s behavior.

2. Diagnostic Analytics: Diagnostic analytics goes deeper to analyze the data and understand why certain things happened. It involves looking at correlations and causations behind social media trends and performances. This could include analyzing why certain posts performed better than others or why there was a spike in engagement on a particular day. It’s about uncovering the factors that influence social media success or failure.

3. Predictive Analytics: Leveraging statistical models and forecast techniques, predictive analytics anticipates future actions and trends on social media platforms. It uses historical data to predict future outcomes, such as potential engagement levels for a planned campaign or predicting the growth of followers. This type of analytics is invaluable for planning future strategies and making informed decisions about content, timing, and targeting.

4. Prescriptive Analytics: This is the most advanced type of analytics, offering recommendations on what actions to take to achieve desired outcomes on social media. It not only predicts what will happen but also suggests ways to influence those outcomes positively. Prescriptive analytics can recommend the best times to post, the types of content likely to generate the most engagement, and strategies to improve social media performance.

These four types of analytics provide a comprehensive toolkit for managing and optimizing social media strategies, enabling businesses to make informed decisions based on past performance, current trends, and future predictions.

Additional Analytics Tool Reviews

Marketing software comes in all shapes and sizes, from social media platform management to website and product reporting. You'll probably need several tools to cover the whole gambit of needs. Here are some other software review lists that I recommend checking out:

• Social Listening Tools
• Marketing Intelligence Software
• Marketing Analytics Tools
• Marketing Measurement Tools
• Marketing Attribution Software
• Marketing Dashboard Software
• Market Intelligence Software
• PR Analytics Tools
• Content Analytics Software
• Performance Marketing Platforms

Learn More About Social Media Marketing

Don’t leave your social media strategy to chance. Use one of the above platforms to analyze the impact of your campaigns in real-time, boost your business’ reach on social and improve your ROI.

If you want more insights into effective social media marketing strategies or trends to grow your business, try one of the following articles:

• How To Refine Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
• 12 Social Media Marketing Trends to Kick Off

Or learn to become a better social media marketer by  subscribing to our newsletter  today.

• Website Planet

6 Top Social Media Analytics Tools for Starters & Marketers [2024]

Short on Time? These Are the Top Social Media Analytics Tools in 2024

• Sprout Social – Over 100 report widgets, dozens of integrations, and the most user-friendly interface.
• eClincher – Scalable pay-as-you-grow plans, 24/7 support, and up to 40 social profiles to connect to.
• SocialPilot – Super cheap plans, engagement monitoring by timezones, and White Label reports.

See 3 More Great Options | Comparison Table

• What We Look For in the Top Social Media Analytics Tools
• Comprehensive analytics. I looked for tools that offer various analytics features, such as audience demographics, engagement rates, best posting times, content performance, and competitor analysis.
• Integration capabilities. I chose the tools that seamlessly integrate with various social media platforms (like Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn) and other marketing tools or customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
• Real-time monitoring and alerts. I selected tools that monitor social media platforms in real time, sending alerts for specific triggers like brand mentions, sentiment changes, or viral content.
• Ease of use. All my picks have an intuitive and easy-to-use interface or a mobile app for on-the-go monitoring and management.
• Value for money. I gave a boost to tools that have all of the above but can also help you get a good ROI with great deals and affordable plans.
• 1. Sprout Social: Most Advanced Social Media Analytics and Insights

• Paid performance reporting. This feature allows you to monitor your social advertising across different channels and audiences, helping you identify which campaigns are most effective and how to optimize future ad spend​​.
• Hashtag tracking. This tracker allows you to discover which hashtags your audience is following. You can then use that information to increase your reach and grow your following​​.
• Post performance report. This feature enables you to analyze cross-channel performance at the post level to understand what content resonates with your audience and why​​.
• Competitor reports. Track and compare your social media performance against your competitors. This can help benchmark your organization’s performance and identify new opportunities​​.
• 2. eClincher: Pay-As-You-Grow Plans for Scalable Social Media Strategies

• Real-time widget reports. You can customize your dashboard to get quick insights into your key performance metrics.
• Built-in template reports. Instantly create a comprehensive overview of your social media and website performance.
• Social listening. Track mentions related to your brand, competitor activities, and prevailing trends within your industry in real time.
• Google Analytics integration. This feature lets you view Google Analytics data without leaving the eClincher dashboard. It also provides insights into the relationship between your social media posts and web traffic.
• 3. SocialPilot: Best Social Media Analytics Tool for Those on a Budget

• Audience demographics. SocialPilot lets you know your audience’s location, gender distribution, age, and behavior.
• White Label reports. You can create and present reports to clients with custom branding.
• Social inbox. This feature provides real-time monitoring of all comments, messages, and posts from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile in one place.
• Automated report generation. You can generate and deliver detailed reports regularly, such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
• 4. Sendible: Social Media and Blog Analytics for Marketing Teams

• Engagement report. Get insight into key metrics such as daily audience growth, content habits, demographics, most engaged posts and pictures, and more.
• Comprehensive platform integration. Sendible supports various social media platforms, including Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and YouTube.
• Topic & Influencers report. You can gauge your performance on key topics versus influencers and identify highly engaged audience members for targeted influencer marketing efforts.
• Google Analytics integration. You can track web data alongside social media performance and get insights into the correlation between social content and web traffic.​
• 5. Hootsuite: Advanced TikTok Analytics and Reporting Tools

• Paid ROI reporting. Monitor the performance of paid social media posts to track return on investment.
• Cross-network comparison. Hootsuite lets you assess performance and engagement across different social networks.
• Report sharing and scheduling. Share insights with teams or schedule automatic report deliveries via email.
• Track brand mentions. Get real-time monitoring of social media for any mentions of your brand.
• 6. Buffer: Affordable Social Media Analytics Tool With a Free Plan

• Tag analysis. Get insights and detailed analytics for the content of every campaign category you’ve created.
• Shopify performance. Integrate sales data, top referral sources, and best-selling products with social media insights and concise performance reports.
• Historical data access. Retrieve and update data from the previous six months across all platforms except Twitter (28 days) and Instagram (30 days).
• Machine learning insights. Get recommendations on your posts’ content, timing, and frequency to improve your social media strategy.
• Improve Your Social Media Strategy With the Best Analytics Tool

What is the best social media analytics tool for marketers?

What can social media analytics tools help you measure, how do i check my social media analytics, what is the best free social media analytics tool.

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14 Best Social Media Research Tools you should be looking for in 2022

Johnny Tong

Apr 22, 2022

Table of Contents

What Is Social Media Research?

Top 14 social media research tools of 2022.

• 1. Surveybot
• 2. Sprout Social
• 3. Hootsuite
• 4. Talkwalker
• 5. Social Mention
• 6. Twitter Analytics
• 7. Facebook Analytics
• 8. Youtube Studio
• 9. Synthesio
• 10. Mentionlytics
• 11. Tweepsmap
• 13. Nexalogy
• 14. Reddit Search

A Few Social Media Research Best Practices

How to select the ideal social media research tool.

• Marketers may want to know how they can improve their product, what kind of content can go viral, what kind of audience to target, etc.
• In contrast, researchers will want to find public opinions on some pressing matters concerning their research.

1.  Surveybot

• Intuitive UI
• Robust Analytics
• Comparatively young as a platform
• Constant updating with demanded features

2.  Sprout Social

• User friendly
• Intuitive Reports
• Steep pricing
• Limited analytics

3.  Hootsuite

• Reliable ‘Free’ Plan
• Ease of Use
• Multi-channel dashboard
• Slow reporting
• Limitations in integrating with Instagram

4.  Talkwalker

• Excellent customer support
• Easy to use
• Multiple dashboards
• Dull Interface

5.  Social Mention

• Real-time data of campaigns
• Ease of use
• Limited filtering capabilities

6 .  Twitter Analytics

• Easy to set up
• Inefficient customer support system
• Insecure login capabilities

7.  Facebook Analytics

• Custom dashboard
• Strong visualization capabilities
• Sophisticated Interface
• Limited integration capabilities

8.  Youtube Studio

• Feature-rich
• Reliable analytics
• Mediocre management of comments
• Only applicable if your content is published on YouTube

9.  Synthesio

• Responsive customer support
• Limited customization in reports

10.  Mentionlytics

• Easy to use and set-up
• Great Customer service
• Limitations in branding reports
• Limited dashboard customization

11.  Tweepsmap

• Deep analytical capabilities
• Excellent customer service
• Lacks the ability to create an integrated campaign
• All the capabilities are limited to Twitter

12.  Pulsar

• Dedicated features to analyze the competition
• Excellent quality of support
• Simple learning curve
• Limited data from social media platforms like Linkedin

13.  Nexalogy

• Powerful API
• Expensive pricing plans
• Limited customer support capabilities
• Mobile app not available

14.  Reddit Search

• Totally free
• Minimalist UI
• Basic tool limited to Reddit
• Define your goal : What are you researching for ⁠— product launch, defining buyer persona, getting insights on target customers, ideas for new products? What exactly? Define!
• Define your target group:  If you are conducting qualitative research (and to some extent even quantitative research), it’s important to know whose opinion is worth taking. This will help you get valuable data and help you plan and decide better (about the tools needed, the social media channels to use, the keywords to pursue, etc.).
• Numbers aren’t everything : The best answers from quantitative social media research may not be the best answers. For example, what attracts the most likes doesn’t always attract the most conversions (your goal). So look beyond the numbers ⁠— probably do something like  sentiment analysis , opinion mining, etc., to not heavily rely on numbers.
• Clean your data : Even if you have defined the goal and the target group to the T, you will receive irrelevant, inaccurate, and/or incomplete data. Therefore, it’s crucial to filter out such data to reach the best conclusion(s).
• Strategize based on conclusions : Especially for businesses that engage in social media research, your job isn’t done once you conclude the research. In fact, the actual job starts after. Do something with the research. Conducted the research for product ideas? Make the product!

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Social media analytics: everything you need to know.

13 min read Learn everything you need to know about social media analytics - from which tool to use to harness the data and insights you generate.

What is social media analytics?

Social Media Analytics is the process of examining data about social conversations to understand and use it.

This type of analysis includes tracking conversations and measuring campaigns. It also involves figuring out how your social activities are influencing your business results. Brands that are best at customer experience often combine social media analytics with customer commentary from surveys, ratings and review sites, call center agent notes, and other customer feedback to get a complete picture of the customer experience.

Companies that are serious about improving customer experience use data from social media analytics tools because they provide a vital view into how consumers really feel about the experience. The insights help them make improvements to the customer journey and guide their business decisions and strategy.

It should be noted that for some people social media analytics is focused on the operational metrics associated with their social media channels. For campaigns and strategies run through social media, it’s common that marketing professionals will analyze their social media metrics – focusing on conversion rates, follower counts, and impressions. And whilst this form of analysis is helpful, all it shows is what happened, not why it happened – which is where listening to conversations happening with or about your company on social media can be invaluable.

Listen to your customers and engage with them across all platforms with Customer Frontlines

Why do you need Social Media Analytics?

Social media analysis goes beyond counting likes and shares. Even counting replies, comments and link clicks isn’t enough. Although these are important KPIs, deep social media analysis shows you why certain Facebook posts get a lot of engagement, or what people keep Tweeting at you about. It tells you which products are pictured on Instagram more often than others.

It is a glimpse into how your customers actually feel about your company, products, and services. Analyzing social media data can provide insights into product strategy, the customer journey, and brand reputation online. It is not just about the numbers, but rather what’s driving those numbers.

And, because social channels are increasingly being used for customer service, social media analytics has become vital for measuring how well you are serving your customers (social customer service). You can examine response times, first contact resolution times, how well bots are resolving concerns, the average handle time, and team performance on KPIs for your customer care agents’ interactions with customers over social media and messaging. With more social media users now than ever – more than half the world – using social media to understand your customers’ relationship with your brands is vital.

This information allows you to spot trends and make predictions that inform your overall strategy for customer experience and business outcomes. And given that only 43% of businesses have centralized cross-platform analytics , it’s something that can help put you ahead of your competitors.

Other benefits include:

• Proven ROI for your brand strategy : Analyzing all social media data – plus add-ons like review monitoring or digital customer care data – helps you understand your customers’ needs and preferences so you can build an effective brand strategy.
• Make more strategic business decisions : You can see clearer paths to success when you’ve got in-depth analysis of how your customers view your brand and interact with your platforms.

It should be noted that “social listening” often encompasses “social media analytics” within the social media management market.

Social media analytics vs social media data

How does this type of analysis differ from social media data?

Social media data is the information you collect from your social media channels that shows how many users interact in some way. For example, you might have numbers of likes and shares, mentions, impressions, clicks, or new followers in your social media data.

Social media intelligence is similar to analytics, but it usually refers to the way in which you monitor your channels. It might refer to the technological solution or method you’re using to gather your social media data. Social listening is the process of learning about your audience. It incorporates social media data.

Social listening is more encompassing than all of these other processes because it not only tracks data and draws insights, but it can also relate them to other areas of the business such as financial outcomes.

Social media analytics as part of customer experience management

Your analysis of social media should form part of a wider effort to understand your customer experience and brand awareness .

More than tracking conversion rates, open rates, likes, shares and more, understanding how these channels serve your wider business purpose is key for progress. A social media analytics tool should be able to illuminate pathways for you to improve the customer experience and inform business, brand, and product strategies. It should gather insights you’ve collated across social media into a single platform and analyze them so you can easily understand the steps to take next.

What should your social media analytics tool include?

There are many social media analytics tools available, but there are some key elements to look out for when deciding on what tool to use.

Analysis of multiple social media channels

Your analysis ideally will show how consumers feel about, and interact with your brand, offering insight into how that impacts your brand. For example, if your consumers are complaining on Twitter, what is the impact of losing them as a customer, and influencing others? How does that affect your brand identity and business objectives?

If your social media analytics tool can’t listen to all the social media accounts you’re running, it won’t provide you with a full picture of your social media presence, including underlying trends and sentiment.

Dashboards and visualization

Your social media analytics tool needs to represent the data it analyzes in a way teams across your business can easily understand. Communicating your insights should be simple and easy – meaning your tool needs to be intuitive to use and easy to manipulate.

Sentiment analysis

Can your social media analytics tool perform complex sentiment analysis on your data? Sentiment analysis can help you understand how your audience demographics really feel about your brand. Rather than just relying on social media data points such as likes and shares, it can analyze comments for customer emotions.

Social media analytics tools with natural language understanding and machine learning built-in can identify the relationships between your social media activity and customers’ prior or subsequent behavior, meaning you can gather critical insights about the customer journey. As much of the content on social media is unstructured data, having a tool that can parse this information and accurately draw insights automatically is key.

Emotion Analysis and Effort Scoring

The social media analytics tools you use should also augment the number of ways you can analyze what customers are saying. Adding effort scoring – how difficult it is to do business with you – capabilities provides businesses with a leading indicator of customer loyalty and churn . Being able to score dozens of emotions provides further insight into customers’ feelings about the customer experience. Granular emotion analysis, effort scoring, and sentiment provide businesses with a suite of leading indicators into how your brands and business are perceived by your customers.

Segmented data

Your social analytics tool should be able to drill deeper into your social media audience through segmentation . Identifying how your customers feel about and interact with your brands – and where they do – can guide social media strategy, as well as overall brand or product strategy to bolster sales.

Overlaying information across business areas

Whether you’re tracking web visitors with the help of Google Analytics or using multiple platforms to monitor social media metrics, your social media analytics tool should be able to pull in all the relevant data from across your business.

Operational data

Your social media analytics tool should be able to pull in your own data to show you how your social data relates to other operational metrics such as sales, web traffic, and more. Your social media analytics tool needs to be able to include your operational data for a deeper understanding of your target audience and their habits.

How to track social media performance with social media analytics tools

1.   gather your social media statistics, operational data, and more.

Whichever of the available social media analytics tools you choose, your first step is to ensure it is canvassing data from all the available and relevant sources.

2.   Set benchmarks

Having a benchmark helps you to see where you can make improvements, and to compare yourself to your competitors. These benchmarks aren’t just for social media performance – they’re to chart the efficacy of your social media campaigns in business terms as well.

3.   Generate a social media analytics report

Creating a social media analytics report should be a simple process with the social media analytics tool you’ve chosen. You should ideally have options for regular reporting, one-off reporting for specific campaigns, and real-time insights on a customizable dashboard with flexible reporting options. This will give you the most chance of pulling the best insights out of the data you’ve collected.

4.   Search for trends and customer behavior

Your social media analytics report is a powerful tool for understanding where to invest for the greatest returns. You should be able to find insights into customer behavior and identify emerging trends in social data. Tracing your customers’ journey from your social media channels to the buying process should be clear to your team.

5.   Take action to improve your social media performance

Ideally, your choice of social media analytics tool will be able to give you actionable insights or automate these actions for you where appropriate. Whether it’s updating your customer experience on your social media platforms, reducing customer effort when transitioning from social media to your website, or ensuring that you close the loop on customer queries, you need to take steps to improve with the insights you now have.

6.   Share and repeat your analysis

Once you’ve enacted these steps, you’ll need to take regular benchmarks and generate reports to ensure that you’ve progressed. Social media trends can be leading indicators of customer needs and wants, so ensure that you can share social media insights and repeat your analysis for the wider business.

Use Qualtrics to advance your social media analytics

In addition to tracking the volume of mentions and other forms of engagement, Qualtrics CustomerXM for Digital gives users access to industry-leading text analytics.

This social media analytics tool looks at everything written about you on social so that the topics and the root causes of all social conversations are revealed. It also provides you the ability to understand your global audience. You’ll know what channels your customers are using, what they’re saying, and how you can and should react to their voice.

Marketers use our CustomerXM for Digital product to monitor campaign performance and attribute spikes in customer social mentions to areas of your business. You can review the social interactions between customers and your staff and automatically score those messages for NLP enrichments like sentiment, emotion, and effort. And, you can pull all this data into a single platform so you can easily access the insights key to improve the customer experience.

Contact center, social media, and CX leaders use Qualtrics CustomerXM for Digital to monitor how their brands are performing online and how to best impact brand strategy.

No matter your role in the organization, to build a good customer-focused strategy, you first need to understand your customers. Qualtrics gives you the social media analytics to do just that.

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Social media analytics is the ability to gather and find meaning in data gathered from social channels to support business decisions—and measure the performance of actions based on those decisions through social media.

Practitioners and analysts alike know social media by its many websites and channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and many others.

Social media analytics is broader than metrics such as likes, follows, retweets, previews, clicks, and impressions gathered from individual channels. It also differs from reporting offered by services that support marketing campaigns such as LinkedIn or Google Analytics. Social media analytics uses specifically designed software platforms that work similarly to web search tools. Data about keywords or topics is retrieved through search queries or web ‘crawlers’ that span channels. Fragments of text are returned, loaded into a database, categorized and analyzed to derive meaningful insights. Social media analytics includes the concept of social listening. Listening is monitoring social channels for problems and opportunities. Social media analytics tools typically incorporate listening into more comprehensive reporting that involves listening and performance analysis.

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IBM points out that with the prevalence of social media: “News of a great product can spread like wildfire. And news about a bad product — or a bad experience with a customer service rep — can spread just as quickly. Consumers are now holding organizations to account for their brand promises and sharing their experiences with friends, co-workers and the public at large.” Social media analytics helps companies address these experiences and use them to:

• Spot trends related to offerings and brands
• Understand conversations — what is being said and how it is being received
• Derive customer sentiment towards products and services
• Gauge response to social media and other communications
• Identify high-value features for a product or service
• Uncover what competitors are saying and its effectiveness
• Map how third-party partners and channels may affect performance

These insights can be used to not only make tactical adjustments, like addressing an angry tweet, they can help drive strategic decisions. In fact, IBM finds social media analytics is now “being brought into the core discussions about how businesses develop their strategies.” These strategies affect a range of business activity:

• Product development - Analyzing an aggregate of Facebook posts, tweets and Amazon product reviews can deliver a clearer picture of customer pain points, shifting needs and desired features. Trends can be identified and tracked to shape the management of existing product lines as well as guide new product development.
• Customer experience - An IBM study discovered “organizations are evolving from product-led to experience-led businesses.” Behavioral analysis can be applied across social channels to capitalize on micro-moments to delight customers and increase loyalty and lifetime value. Branding - Social media may be the world’s largest focus group. Natural language processing and sentiment analysis can continually monitor positive or negative expectations to maintain brand health, refine positioning and develop new brand attributes.
• Competitive Analysis - Understanding what competitors are doing and how customers are responding is always critical. For example, a competitor may indicate that they are foregoing a niche market, creating an opportunity. Or a spike in positive mentions for a new product can alert organizations to market disruptors.
• Operational efficiency – Deep analysis of social media can help organizations improve how they gauge demand. Retailers and others can use that information to manage inventory and suppliers, reduce costs and optimize resources.

The first step for effective social media analytics is developing a goal. Goals can range from increasing revenue to pinpointing service issues. From there, topics or keywords can be selected and parameters such as date range can be set. Sources also need to be specified — responses to YouTube videos, Facebook conversations, Twitter arguments, Amazon product reviews, comments from news sites. It is important to select sources pertinent to a given product, service or brand. Typically, a data set will be established to support the goals, topics, parameters and sources. Data is retrieved, analyzed and reported through visualizations that make it easier to understand and manipulate. These steps are typical of a general social media analytics approach that can be made more effective by capabilities found in social media analytics platforms.

• Natural language processing and machine learning technologies identify entities and relationships in unstructured data — information not pre-formatted to work with data analytics. Virtually all social media content is unstructured. These technologies are critical to deriving meaningful insights.
• Segmentation is a fundamental need in social media analytics. It categorizes social media participants by geography, age, gender, marital status, parental status and other demographics. It can help identify influencers in those categories. Messages, initiatives and responses can be better tuned and targeted by understanding who is interacting on key topics.
• Behavior analysis is used to understand the concerns of social media participants by assigning behavioral types such as user, recommender, prospective user and detractor. Understanding these roles helps develop targeted messages and responses to meet, change or deflect their perceptions.
• Sentiment analysis measures the tone and intent of social media comments. It typically involves natural language processing technologies to help understand entities and relationships to reveal positive, negative, neutral or ambivalent attributes.
• Share of voice analyzes prevalence and intensity in conversations regarding brand, products, services, reputation and more. It helps determine key issues and important topics. It also helps classify discussions as positive, negative, neutral or ambivalent.
• Clustering analysis can uncover hidden conversations and unexpected insights. It makes associations between keywords or phrases that appear together frequently and derives new topics, issues and opportunities. The people that make baking soda, for example, discovered new uses and opportunities using clustering analysis.
• Dashboards and visualization charts, graphs, tables and other presentation tools summarize and share social media analytics findings — a critical capability for communicating and acting on what has been learned. They also enable users to grasp meaning and insights more quickly and look deeper into specific findings without advanced technical skills.

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8 Best Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools to Use in 2024

On this page

• Top 8 Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media
• Socialinsider
• Sprout Social

In the last two decades, social media has been seen as a medium to make friends and engage with people. Today, it serves as a 21st-century marketing avenue. Ask why? With over 4.6 billion users globally, social media provides marketers with the opportunity to widen their audience and reach potential customers without having to invest a fortune.

However, without competition analysis, you are essentially flying blind. As the adage goes, “It’s important to learn from others’ mistakes.” In the marketing world, this also means that you must take note of the failures and achievements of your competitors. That’s where keeping an eye on your competition comes in.

Knowing how your competitors perform on social media can help you improve your brand’s positioning by highlighting its advantages and minimizing its weaknesses.

Now let’s do it the smart way. Say “no” to tedious and time-consuming manual work and “yes” to intelligent tools and technologies. In this blog, we’ll take you through some of the best social media competition analysis tools that you can use in 2024.

What Are Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools?

Competitor analysis is an investigation technique that reveals your competitors’ identities as well as their online product positioning and promotion strategies. This includes evaluating your competitors’ blogs, social media, websites, and SEO strategies, comparing stats, listening to content, stacking businesses’ channels against one another, and checking updates.

For instance, let’s take a look at some of the top names in the beauty industry, such as Sephora, Mac, NYX, Urban Decay, etc. If you are in the beauty industry, then you can perform analysis to learn their number of followers, the demographics of their target market, including their location and industry, as well as several other details.

Does this sound like something only upscale and expensive businesses would do? Fortunately, No. Not any longer.

Every successful social media profile is an outcome of careful preparation, extensive research, and excellent content. In a global survey, 90% of social media marketers who participated said they used social media to market their businesses. So, take a look beneath the surface and explore what your competitors are doing to accomplish success.

How we analyze and select these tools:

​​We have meticulously curated this list of premier social media competitor analysis tools through detailed research and hands-on testing. We considered various factors such as user satisfaction, G2 ratings and reviews, pricing structure, and scalability. We also actively analyzed the abilities of these tools in automation, developing content, visualization, analytics, and collaborative workflows. We have assembled this list to provide marketers with essential insights, enabling them to make well-informed decisions on the best tools to expand their businesses.

1. Agorapulse

for 10 profiles

Mid-sized businesses, mid-sized agencies, and some enterprise brands.

About Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a robust social media planning platform with great social listening and reporting features that top companies like Ogilvy, Confluent Health, and West Virginia University use. Its efficient reporting tool enables a speedy compilation of reports on what’s working and provides information on the platforms and time intervals that perform well.

Agorapulse offers one free plan and four paid plans with a 30-day free trial for each. The four paid plans are called Standard, Professional, Advanced, and Custom, ranging from $49 to $149 for managing 10 social profiles.

Key Features:

• Content Tools for Personalization: Leverage Agorapulse’s robust content tools to customize posts intricately and optimize them for performance before scheduling.
• Real-time Social Monitoring: Stay informed by tracking mentions and discussions related to your brand or industry through Agorapulse’s social monitoring feature.
• Detailed Performance Insights: Access valuable insights into your content’s performance with Agorapulse’s comprehensive reporting, offering detailed analytics for all your posts. Utilize these insights to refine your content strategy for enhanced results.
• Unified Social Inbox: Effectively manage, interact, and organize conversations from various platforms in one central location with Agorapulse’s Social Media Inbox. Streamline your communication and response efforts for efficiency.
• AI-Assisted Writing Support: Enhance productivity with Agorapulse’s AI writing assistant, generating creative ideas and captions within seconds to assist in effortlessly crafting compelling content.

After thoroughly reviewing a multitude of user testimonials about Agorapulse, gathered from reputable platforms like G2 and Capterra, we meticulously scrutinized each one, taking into account every aspect of the tool. Based on this comprehensive analysis, we’ve aggregated the following insights.

• 50% of the AgoraPulse users found the competitor analysis to be a great asset within the tool.
• Three-quarters of users find that data visualization, through charts and graphs, enhances readability and understanding of the provided information.
• Almost all reviewed users found the ability to export reports handy and efficient.
• A significant number of users appreciated the streamlined process and ease of creating different types of posts.
• The UI/UX is the key to offering a great user experience with efficient working and nearly 5 out of every 6 users liked the navigation and ease of use.
• 8.33% of the users suggested potential enhancements in data reporting capabilities.
• Despite having automated reporting abilities, nearly one-third said the tool required more updates and improvements.
• Some people felt the notifications in the social inbox were not timely delivered.
• Several users reported discrepancies in accuracy and details in reporting.
• A minimum of 50% of the users said the tool was ineffective in gathering the competitor analysis data.

Overall Ratings:

Check out the detailed comparison of SocialPilot and Agorapulse

2. Socialinsider

Socialinsider revolves around streamlining processes while saving time and impressing customers. It offers a single and intuitive dashboard for analytics and reporting. This tool is designed to be as simple as possible while still providing all the required social media metrics .

This competitor analysis tools for social media has highly intuitive dashboard that enables you to conduct a faster social media competitor analysis by classifying all of your competitor profiles into projects and providing a synopsis of side-by-side reports and statistics.

When to use this tool

Socialinsider is a straightforward tool for comparing brands’ social media performance. Solopreneurs, agencies, and major businesses can leverage this tool.

Key features – Why should you consider Socialinsider?

• Download social media competitor analysis reports in a matter of minutes
• Examine competitors’ branded hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, and draw insights from landing pages generated through dynamic QR codes to see how their target audience uses them
• Its multichannel measurement feature allows you to determine how much emphasis your competitors place on Meta or any other sponsored posts
• Know everything about your competitors’ social media campaigns with the campaign reporting tool. In addition, the auto-tagging feature enables you to add competitive context to all your social metrics.

Pricing: Socialinsider provides a 14-day free trial. The basic plans begin at US$ 83 per month per user.

• Socialinsider offers an in-depth analysis of the social media activity of competitors, including the most popular posts, engagement rates, and audience demographics
• Social Insider offers outstanding post-purchase support. Their live support chat aims to resolve each problem a customer encounters and does their best to respond to all of their questions
• Socialinsider offers the best blend of reporting, transparent dashboards, and benchmarking
• Socialinsider’s metrics collection and analysis capabilities are very strong. Additionally, its Data Studio API connectivity enables you to create client-specific reports

I was impressed with SocialInsider’s functionality and ease of use. The platform provided in-depth insights on my competitors’ social media activity, including their top-performing posts, engagement rates, and audience demographics.

One of the features I found particularly useful was the ability to track specific keywords and hashtags, which allowed me to stay up-to-date on industry trends and conversations. The platform’s user interface was also intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy for me to navigate and find the information I needed.

Another thing I liked about the platform was the ability to schedule reports to be delivered to my email on a regular basis. It saved me a lot of time and effort as I didn’t have to log in to the platform every time to check my competitors’ performance.

• Socialinsider is expensive
• You can’t view reports that are 6 months older

Jude Karlo G

It’s a bit pricey and takes a while to reset. I do not like that swapping profiles counts as a profile.

3. Rival IQ

Rival IQ as its name implies, enables you to develop more effective social media plans and campaigns by measuring them against those of your competitors. We’re rather certain that you won’t be able to get enough of this all-powerful tool.

When to use this tool?

Rival IQ is recommended for businesses and marketers that perform bulk social media post analysis, social reporting, and social media audits .

Key features – Why should you consider Rival IQ?

• Use its always-on benchmark function to provide a comparative context for all of your social media stats
• You can easily discover where your competitors are concentrating their efforts with the help of Rival IQ’s competitive social media analytics solution
• With its constant social post and profile monitoring, you’ll never be blindsided by a competition
• This tool uses machine learning to determine whether a competitor has promoted a Meta post so you can take swift action or imitate a winning tactic
• Use its Twitter Mentions function to access your Twitter handle mentions for deeper engagement and wiser retweets
• Utilize its popular topic tool to identify the words and subjects that encourage social engagement

Pricing: Rival IQ has three pricing levels, with monthly prices starting at $239, $329, and $519.

• A go-to tool to perform a social media audit and/or competitive audit
• Straightforward UX
• With Rival IQ’s customized landscapes and company filters, you can compare your social performance against that of the entire industry
• Easy monitoring top performing posts

Rival IQ is my GO TO tool whenever I need to perform a social media audit and/or competitive audit. I love how easy it is to set up, how responsive their customer service team is (the chat function is simply tops), and I really value the insights the tool provides around a brands’ social performance. Additionally, Rival IQ has TikTok stats, which very few tools have at the moment, so that has really helped as more brands are on the platform and need reporting around content performance.

• TikTok analytics can be challenging
• Fewer customization options

The aesthetic appeal and the lack of ability to customize it much makes me less excited to use the built in tables and graphs that you can just export. Even though that would be a lot more convenient, I prefer to design my own graphs so that they look as clean and beautiful as the rest of a presentation I may be giving to a client. So being able to customize those would be a great improvement.

4. Sprout Social

An all-in-one social media platform management solution Sprout Social enables you to analyze competitor social media performance from a variety of perspectives and data points. Without the time-consuming manual research and disorganized spreadsheets, you can check out what your competitors post with a click using this social media competitor analysis tool.

Competitive reports of this competitor analysis tools for social media can help you evaluate and improve your social media strategy across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Sprout Social functions almost like a personal marketing department for you, conducting competitive research. Utilize the tool to set benchmarks, acquire competitor knowledge for brands and agencies, and gain useful insights on your social media campaigns.

Key features – Why should you consider Sprout Social?

• Using social listening, Sprou tSocial helps you identify trends
• Through its detailed and quickly generated reports, follow and examine discussions on pertinent subjects to gauge customer opinion of your competitors’ brands
• Say bye to time-consuming manual research and disorganized spreadsheets
• Up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics function that provides deeper insights into your social platforms along with interactive charts and graphs that you can tailor to fit your objectives to identify the words and subjects that encourage social engagement

Pricing: You can use Sprout Social’s 30-day trial to learn the basics of the platform. Once it’s over, pick one of the three pricing tiers, starting at $249 per user monthly.

• The entire platform has excellent UX and has been very carefully designed
• Manage your social media material more easily using post tagging
• Post-scheduling with the content calendar is quite simple
• Reports and analytics provide a wide range of reports and great insights
• The social listening feature is just as effective as a dedicated social listening tool. This helps you save on cost

Honestly, the best thing about sprout is that I can easily navigate all my posts and get them approved by my client. Comparing my analytics with my competitors is the best because it allows me to adjust my strategy to help me do better than what they’re doing.

• If you have a large staff and everyone needs access to the tool, it can get quite expensive very quickly.
• Limited functionalities, such as fewer customization and integrations options

Sprout Social does not offer the same level of customization as other social media management tools. You may not be able to customize the look and feel of your posts or track metrics as specifically as you would like.

5. Hootsuite

for 5 users

Professionals, Small teams, Small-medium businesses, and Enterprises.

About Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an all-encompassing tool that enables you to monitor trending content and focus on competitors’ actions from a single social media dashboard. It’s an incredibly practical tool for monitoring what your competitors publish, produces, and promote on social media.

Hootsuite offers five pricing tiers after a 30-day trial, ranging from $99/month to $249/month, catering to different social account and user needs.

• Post Scheduling: Effortlessly plan and schedule multiple posts for publication at your chosen times with Hootsuite’s intuitive feature.
• Audience Engagement: Utilize Hootsuite’s integrated social inbox to monitor, interact, and employ AI chatbots for automated responses, enhancing customer engagement.
• Analytics: Hootsuite Analytics provides a thorough overview of all your social media activities in one location (Twitter analytics, Meta analytics, Pinterest analytics, etc.)
• Social Insights: As a social intelligence tool, it allows you to keep an eye on mentions and comments made about your business on social media to avert any potential PR-related concerns
• AI-Enhanced Content: Simplify social media caption creation and enhance content generation efficiency with Hootsuite’s AI writing tool.

We went through a hundred user reviews for Hootsuite, gathered from trusted review platforms like G2 and Capterra. After carefully analyzing each of them in respect to all the features of the tool, we have gathered these insights.

• Hootsuite analytics also allows competitor analysis, which proved to be invaluable for 18.18% of users to get insights about their position in the market.
• Users highly appreciate Hootsuite’s capability to schedule a diverse range of content, encompassing images, videos, GIFs, and links.
• The content recycling feature of Hootsuite is highly liked among its users, allowing them to repurpose their successful and evergreen content. The recurring opinion was that resharing these posts gets good engagement to their pages.
• Hootsuite’s overall content management features received a thumbs up from 88.24% due to its ease of use.
• The ability to prioritize messages in Hootssuite’s inbox is appreciated by 15.15% of people as it makes it easier for them to address important interactions with ease.
• A frequently repeated complaint from users was that Hootsuite was only able to retrieve limited historical data, which restricted them from doing long-term analysis.
• 7.10% of users faced problems when they tried to plug in external data sources or integrations into Hootsuite.
• When a high volume of content is concerned, the bulk scheduling capabilities of Hootsuite have inconsistencies, which have led to a lot of hassle and failed publishings for 14.20% of users.
• The lack of content tagging and categorization leaves a major dent in the content management system of Hootsuite, which led to the majority of its users facing difficulties.
• When it came to organizing the Hootsuite inbox, many users said that managing and categorizing a high volume of messages became very difficult for them.

Check out the detailed comparison of SocialPilot and Hootsuite

Mention is your go-to competitive analysis tool that can help you stay ahead of the competition by monitoring your competitors’ web activity closely. It lets you control social media conversations for your brand and your competitors while listening to your audience online. If you want quick access to audience, brand, competitive, and marketing analytics, try Mention.

Maintain your brand reputation and respond to crises timely with Mention’s intuitive web functionalities.

Key features – Why should you consider Mention?

• Mention enables you to quickly track discussions about your brand, your competitors, or your product across more than a billion online sources
• The in-built Mention inbox offers you access to a stream of information that is continuously updated in the feed
• With its advanced keyword search, you can combine keywords and operators without worrying about the rules
• Use monitoring filters to further focus on sources, nations, and languages
• Track your competitors and compare your performance to theirs using Mention’s analytical capabilities
• Use data visualization to obtain comprehensive dashboards and quickly evaluate trends

Pricing: Mention offers four monthly plans starting at $41 a month and a 14-day free trial.

• Mention is easy to set up and offers an intuitive easy to use interface
• Mention automates the posting process, which saves time and resources
• One of the best tools for monitoring. Mention allows you to create alerts and perform searches using various filters.

In my organization, we use Mention frequently to detect critical mentions of our brand and essential information for our marketing. Its user interface is intuitive, making it easy to use and the dashboard relatively easy to use. Thanks to this tool, we find in record time good and bad reviews from our customers in the vastness of the web and social platforms; it also has good tools that bring good points to the management of social networks.

• Not very affordable
• The search option doesn’t always show accurate results

The search option can be modified a lot and can be made much better. It is not something that can be compared to Google but it is not that bad either. Just a little improvement will enhance its functionality manifold.

Keyhole Competitor Analysis & Benchmarking fills in the gap by providing exclusive industry-specific insights that automate the social media report creation process, thereby saving you hours of manual work. Given that this tool simplifies reporting through its beautiful and easy-to-use dashboards, it is trusted by businesses and agencies globally.

Keyhole is the go-to social media competitor analytics tool with its insights on brand, campaign, hashtag, and influencer reporting. Keyhole is a perfect fit for large as well as small organizations as it offers several features like competition benchmarking, social listening, brand and campaign monitoring, influencer analytics, as well as social posting.

Key features – Why should you consider Keyhole?

• Its live dashboard makes it simple to share the most recent reports with your team quickly
• Keyhole’s social monitoring tools let you research the campaigns, influencers, and social media tactics of your competitors
• It updates every measure by establishing a connection with social platform APIs, doing away with the obligation of manual data entry
• Monitor real-time metrics to gauge your performance
• Use social listening to compile all posts that bring up your competitors’ campaigns

Pricing: Starting at $39 per month, Keyhole provides four subscription options.

• Provides an intuitive and easy-to-use social media management dashboard
• Provides in-depth analysis of each social profile
• Helps you discover content strategies
• With Keyhole, you can easily collaborate with your team
• Allows you to schedule your social media posts

I like how easy it is to generate my analytics report for my social media channels. The hashtag tracker is particularly useful and the insights have proven to be of great use for our campaign.

• Limited report customization options
• Customer support can be better

Enhanced features like hashtag tracking are available in paid versions. Their sign-up feature could be better.. It is really hard to get to the pricing section.

Using Emplifi’s competitive benchmarking system, you can quickly compare your performance against competitors, inspirational brands, and industry subcategories. Emplifi offers effective experience solutions across the customer journey by spotting important gaps in how customers interact with your company on social media.

This AI-powered social media competitor analytics tool is perfect for social media performance measurements that help you better your customer experience plan because of its robust analytics and reporting capabilities.

Emplifi is the only solution you need if you want a full-featured customer experience tool that drives your social marketing, social commerce, and customer service.

Key features – Why should you consider Emplifi?

• With the help of Emplifi’s competitive benchmarking tool, you can access billions of social media posts, influencer profiles, and postings from a range of platforms.
• Use Emplifi’s AI content grades to evaluate your competitor’s influencer performance and involvement. This can help you identify possible influencers for your high-impact campaigns
• You can quickly evaluate and assess how your brand is performing in comparison to competitors using historical data and value-driven criteria.
• Its cloud-based social marketing function offers enduring interactions at scale across your social media channels. This is performed by real-time intelligence delivery, performance optimization, and trend analysis.
• Its service cloud feature was designed to help your contact center be more effective and to offer automated customer care via chatbots

Pricing: It offers a free trial and personalized pricing.

• An easy-to-use interface that is adaptable and perfect for large organizations
• Provides accurate results on the analytics front
• Get real-time reports on your campaign’s performance

Emplifi’s interface is easily adaptable, trainable and perfect for large and remote teams. As a social media manager for over 250 social media handles and 10os of community managers, this tool allows me to see a comprehensive view of all accounts. And did I mention their analytics are beautiful. Reporting is a breeze, and the data I get from ads enables me to make strategic decisions on placement and spend.

• Customer service can be better
• The mobile interface can be improved

Customer service usually takes a long time.

Why Is Social Media Competitor Analysis Important?

Nothing is more fulfilling than helping your clients outperform their competitors on social media. This allows you to not only measure your social media success but also refine your marketing approach.

Here are 4 reasons why social media competitor analysis should be a part of your marketing strategy.

Knowing What Your Customers Want

Through social media competitive analysis, you can gain more insight into your ideal customers. You may increase your marketing outcomes by understanding your consumer archetypes since you will learn the following:

• The kind of social media platforms are your customers using
• How do your competitors get more eyeballs to their content and expand their audience size?
• What are the shortfalls of your competitor’s social media strategy?
• What content is trending?

You can combine these insights with insights derived through your audience analysis to better understand your customers. Here, sentiment analysis tools can help you since it gives you an idea of the overall sentiment behind customer interactions.

Develop Revenue-Generating Social Media Strategy

Your ability to develop a successful social media strategy, or to enhance an existing one depends on your ability to comprehend how and why your competitors are outperforming your business.

Social media competition analysis contributes to identifying new opportunities for brand expansion as well as risks that must be managed, ultimately increasing your company’s income.

For instance, regularly conducting a competitive analysis of Meta and other networks will help you stay ahead of the competition despite the aggressive advertising and arbitrary algorithm changes.

Produce Content That Is Trending and Relevant

Let’s face it. Your ideal customers would choose companies whose values and content align with theirs.

A social media competitor analysis will ensure that your ideal customers think of you first. This is because you’ll figure out what kinds and forms of content your customers prefer. Also, you may use the content gaps you see as an opportunity to produce brand-new content that benefits your audience.

Enhanced Brand Messaging and Positioning

Using social media competitive analysis, you will start using uncommon and underutilized social media features and methods once you learn what’s working for your competitors. Further, this allows you to develop a positioning strategy that will set your brand apart from the competitors and help you establish yourself as an authority in your field.

However, this is just an initial step to get you started. Next, let’s move on to some tips and tricks for conducting social media competitor analysis.

Tips for Conducting Social Media Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis for social media is simpler than it seems. How? Here are five methods for using competition analysis, regardless of whether you use Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or YouTube.

Analyze Your Actual Competitors

If you don’t know who your competitors are or which social media platforms they utilize, it’s impossible to assess them on social media. Keep an eye out for both your direct and indirect competitors or those who provide comparable services or products, or those that address the same issue as you. Next, list your top five rivals.

You can learn who your competitors are with Google’s keyword search or free SEO competitive research tool. Once you’ve determined who your competitors are, analyze them based on product, price, location, advertising, reputation management, people, and partnerships.

Focus on Metrics First

Decide what you want before analyzing and comparing the performances of competitors. Always begin with the end in mind, which should be your brand’s objectives.

Identify the responses to questions like:

• What are your social media marketing objectives?
• How do these align with your brand’s overarching objectives?
• How will you track key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge success?
• Who are the ideal customers you hope to attract?

Perform Thorough Analysis

Data analysis is crucial when assessing your social media competitors, but data interpretation is even more essential. If you don’t know how to apply the data gathered for business analytics, everything in your spreadsheet is just lines, numbers, and graphs.

Here, a SWOT analysis is useful. SWOT analysis gives you a thoughtful review of your brand’s opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses to aid in business decision-making.

You can find new opportunities or a gap you can fill to advance your company by evaluating how the findings of your competitive analysis align with your business strategy.

The Bottom Line

It’s time to refine your marketing strategy to create a strong social presence.

Competitor analysis is a crucial component of a marketing strategy. The above tools will allow you to invest more time in analyzing and will help you focus your efforts on expanding your company and gaining an edge over your competitors.

After completing your social media competition analysis, you can accelerate your social media marketing strategy with SocialPIlot ’s unparallel scheduling capabilities.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are social media competitor analysis tools?

Social media competitor analysis tools study your competitors on social media to identify their advantages and disadvantages and compare them with your own.

Mention the top 9 social media competitor analysis tools?

Some of the best social media competitor analysis tools include:

• SocialInsider
• Google Analytics

How do you benefit from social media competitor analysis tools?

By performing competitive analysis through social media competitor analysis tools, you can:

• Track your brand's progress
• Swiftly take note of the new competition
• Check the effectiveness of your social media campaign
• Discover different opportunities for business growth
• Keep your marketing strategy updated

What are some some quick tips to conduct competitive analysis using social media competitor analysis tools?

Here are some quick tips for you to perform competitive analysis using social media competitor analysis tools:

• Discover your competitors using keyword research, google search, etc.
• Gather relevant data
• Use the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) technique
• Include updated and recent data while monitoring your competitor’s social media channels

Are social media competitor analysis tools expensive?

Social media competitor analysis tools come in a variety of price points. Additionally, there are tools that can be used for free but have limited functionality.

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About the Author

Maria Prakkat

Maria Prakkat - An avid reader, and writer, Maria is a Content Marketer at Beaconstac and an ardent knowledge-seeker of anything technology and marketing. She is a fervent supporter of environmental and eco-friendly activities. Maria also aims to write and spread the word on the latest innovation concerning technology and beyond.

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The Social Media Research Foundation is the home of the network analysis tool NodeXL – N etwork O verview D iscovery and E xploration for E x ce l (2016, 2019, 2021 and 365) – extending the familiar spreadsheet so you can collect, analyze and visualize complex social networks from X, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other data sources.

A growing number of academics, market strategists and social media managers from around the world make use of this easy-to-handle tool.  You can, too!

If you can make a pie chart, you can make a network map!

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Mapping, measuring and understanding the landscape of social media is our mission. We support tool projects that enable the collection, analysis and visualization of social media data.

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The Social Media Research foundation is supported by a global network of academics from a wide variety of disciplines.

NodeXL supports all features to conduct professional social network analysis (SNA): Community clustering, influencer detection, content analysis, sentiment analysis, time series analysis and a lot more.

Social network analysis tool NodeXL

Networks are everywhere – but few people have learned how to see them or understand them. Whenever things connect to one another Networks are formed.  People talk to people, businesses trade with businesses, and machines connect to machines: all of these create networks.  Once you learn to see networks you discover that they are everywhere!

Social network analysis (SNA) is a powerful way to organize a connected world.  Network analysis can reveal insights into the ways things (like people!) connect with one another and form groups.

We live in a “Network Age” – but many people cannot “get” a network, do not know where to “put” a network or how to calculate and visualize insights into a network.  For a “Network Age” network skills are not widely found.  For people who do not program, networks are often just out of reach.

Network analysis can be made simpler!  NodeXL is an SNA Tool that places network analysis inside the context of the familiar Excel spreadsheet.  NodeXL adds menus and features to Excel to simplify the tasks of getting network data, storing it, analyzing and visualizing it, and generating reports that share insights into connected structures.

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Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools [Best Rated 2024]

June 3, 2024   •   18 min read

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But selecting the right social media monitoring solution for your unique needs is easier said than done. There are tons of tools in the market, but they come with overlapping feature offerings and tall performance claims. How to pick a winner when all vendors promise winning returns? 

Alright, let's get this show on the road! 

What is a social media monitoring tool? 

Social media monitoring tools for businesses of all sizes , how to find the best social media monitoring software for your business  .

A social media monitoring tool is a platform that enables you to track and analyze online conversations about your brand, competitors or industry. These tools vary in sophistication, from basic keyword-tracking applications to advanced AI-driven platforms that offer real-time insights, sentiment analysis and comprehensive trend tracking across various social channels. 

No matter which tool you choose, it will significantly lighten your workload by offering a clear view of public perception and emerging trends. This allows you to focus more on strategic decision-making and relationship building with your audience. 

Using a social media monitoring tool, you can: 

Monitor mentions: Identify and analyze when and how your brand or products are mentioned across social channels. 

Track competitors: Understand what competitors are doing and how the public responds to them. 

Discover trends: Keep up with trending topics to engage with your audience on what's relevant. 

Generate reports: Share comprehensive data on audience sentiment, media coverage, brand visibility and brand reputation. 

Enhance customer engagement : Respond quickly to customer feedback, showing care and improving relationships. 

While this list isn't exhaustive, we invested significant time in research and consulted with paying customers to arrive at tools that are making waves in 2024. Their insights have contributed to this compilation of social media monitoring tools, giving you the freedom to choose the software that best aligns with your social media requirements. 

⚠️ Important Note for Readers:  

The below tools are in no particular order of ranking or popularity. Still, they are independent picks by Sprinklr’s editorial team based on our research and publicly available information in the review sites. It is crucial to note that software or platforms may evolve over time, and the company may address some of these concerns in newer updates or versions. 

Here's a brief preview of the 10 best social media monitoring tools as of May 2024. 

Sprinklr's social media monitoring platform offers an in-depth understanding of your audience through advanced listening and monitoring capabilities. This tool empowers you to explore your audience’s interests and needs, leveraging unstructured social conversations to drive strategic, data-informed decisions. With Sprinklr, you gain access to real-time insights for competitive benchmarking , crisis management and more, ensuring you stay at the forefront of your industry. Additionally, it leverages advanced AI to analyze unstructured data across 30+ digital channels — providing cross-channel insights that keep you ahead of the competition. 

🚀 Prominent features  

Unlock customer and competitor insights: Analyze real-time customer conversations and explore sentiments about your brand and competitors effortlessly. Delve deeper to understand the underlying causes behind shifts in key performance metrics. 

Protect your brand reputation: Receive immediate alerts on spikes in brand mentions, engagement levels and negative sentiments. This proactive monitoring enables effective crisis management to safeguard your brand's public image. 

Watch Now: Manage Your Brand’s Reputation with 360 Degree Insights

Identify emerging trends: Stay ahead by connecting with your audience through AI-generated themes. This tool helps you initiate relevant conversations that resonate with current and potential customers. 

Wide channel coverage: Expand your monitoring to encompass over 10+ social and review channels, ensuring no critical insight goes unnoticed, regardless of where the conversation is happening. 

Quick query setup and refined listening: Set up specific queries in seconds and refine insights using powerful filters like language, location and message type, focusing on what truly matters to your brand. 

Actionable reports for brand health: Monitor vital brand health metrics and generate competitor reports from a unified dashboard. Access use-case-based reports to drive effective social media strategies and improve your brand’s visibility and reputation. 

  Related Read: What is Brand Monitoring? 3 Key Metrics & 5 Best Tools   

Sprinklr AI capabilities: Sprinklr AI triages incoming messages for faster response times, ensuring brand compliance with AI-powered checks and leverages logo detection to discover user-generated content opportunities. This advanced AI processes data from a vast range of sources, including social media, messaging platforms, news, blogs and review sites, to deliver actionable insights. 

Overall verdict  

Sprinklr's platform stands out in the realm of social media monitoring with its comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance brand management. From real-time insights and wide channel coverage to advanced reporting, trend identification and robust AI and machine learning potential, Sprinklr equips you with the capabilities needed to maintain a proactive stance in your marketing and brand strategy efforts. 

💡 Pro Tip: Whether you're running a startup or leading a large enterprise, finding the right social media monitoring tool can transform your online interactions and brand management. Sprinklr offers two distinct variants to cater to all business sizes — ensuring you find the perfect fit for your needs. 

Self-serve variant: Ideal for smaller teams, this version offers a simple UI, out-of-the-box listening and OpenAI’s GPT integration, making it perfect for effortless social media handling.  

Enterprise solution: Designed for large organizations, this option supports 30+ channels with extensive customizations and an AI-first approach, suited for complex business needs. 

  Find your fit with Sprinklr and simplify your social media strategy today!

  Customer testimonial  

💪 Strengths   “Sprinklr has empowered our organization to make strategic decisions based on a wide array of data. From competitor benchmarking and crisis monitoring to deep dives into internal data, we have utilized Sprinklr daily for the past two years to increase engagement, improve brand health, and gain an edge over our competitors. Sprinklr helps us determine which strategies are effective for us and which are not. This allows us in real time to refine our approach to social. It also allows to monitor what works and what doesn't for our competitors, gleaning critical insights into areas we could leverage for our own success.”  

💡 What could be better   “Sprinklr is extremely customizable to your needs. This does entail a learning curve, which can be steep for novices, but once mastered, it's a powerful tool, and the team is super helpful at onboarding new users and solving problems in real time.” Source  

Trusted by: IKEA, Shell, SAP, Acer, Sonos and Arnott’s Group 

Price: USD 299/seat/month Check full pricing here   Trial: Available for 30 days  

Hootsuite  

Hootsuite's platform transforms social feeds into actionable insights, allowing you to listen effectively to what people are saying about your brand, competitors and the broader industry landscape. By monitoring mentions, keywords and hashtags, Hootsuite helps you tune into your audience's thoughts, feelings and needs.  This comprehensive tool is designed to elevate your social listening and monitoring strategy , making it an invaluable asset for enhancing engagement and refining your social media presence. 

Customizable streams: Set up tailored Streams to monitor specific mentions, keywords and hashtags. This feature enables you to listen actively to discussions relevant to your brand and industry, helping you develop a customer-centric strategy that boosts engagement and sales. 

Reputation management : Quickly identify and respond to negative feedback with dedicated feeds. Protect and enhance your brand reputation by addressing customer concerns directly from your Hootsuite dashboard, saving both time and effort. 

Enhanced engagement: Engage with your community by jumping into relevant conversations across various social networks. Reply to, save and like public comments to position your brand as an industry leader. 

ReviewTrackers Integration: Manage and respond to reviews across over 50 popular sites via the ReviewTrackers integration. This tool simplifies handling online reviews, allowing you to share positive feedback and manage review profiles by location and user. 

Advanced social listening with Hootsuite Insights: For enterprise users, Hootsuite Insights offers a deep dive into social conversations. Search any topic or keyword and apply filters like date, demographics and location to gather rich insights about brand perception and identify brand advocates or thought leaders. 

Hootsuite stands out for its robust integration capabilities and comprehensive social listening features. It is more than just a monitoring tool; it is a powerful platform for social listening that offers real-time insights into millions of online conversations. However, compared to Sprinklr, Hootsuite has some limitations. Its dashboard can be cluttered and overwhelming for new users, requiring a learning curve to fully leverage its features. 

Additionally, its listening capabilities, while powerful, are not as comprehensive as Sprinklr's listening tool . Sprinklr's AI offers deeper sentiment analysis and broader data collection across numerous channels, which makes it more suitable for enterprises needing granular insights. Despite these drawbacks, Hootsuite remains a solid option for businesses seeking a versatile tool that balances social listening and engagement needs. 

Customer testimonial  

💪 Strengths   “Hootsuite has been our tool ever since I started with our team's social media function. We are able to use streams to monitor all of our social media channels, and provides the ease necessary without having to login every single function. Hootsuite Amplify, a feature included with our package, allows us to manage user experience among our subject matter experts, which helps with spreading our brand message.” Source  

💡 What could be better   “Hootsuite has changed ever since the pandemic-- and we have been experiencing a lot of bugs ever since they had challenges with their staff. Customer service is available with our package, but it usually takes a while for issues to be resolved. And to top it all off, Hootsuite now removes features that have been very helpful for us-- such as streams for Amplify. They also keep changing their user interface, removing features that have been very useful for us.” Source  

Price: USD 99/month for up to 10 profiles  Trial: Available for 30 days 

Sprout Social   

Sprout Social offers a robust social listening and monitoring platform that integrates seamlessly into your social media strategy , giving you the power to track and act on important interactions across multiple networks. Designed for businesses looking to streamline their social media management , Sprout Social simplifies tracking mentions, comments and keywords, particularly on major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok. 

Smart inbox: Consolidate all your social media interactions into one streamlined inbox. This feature provides real-time updates of communications with leads, followers and customers, enhancing responsiveness and engagement. 

Crisis management: Equip your team with custom alerts and detailed sentiment analysis to proactively manage potential crises, ensuring you're always prepared to handle sensitive situations with care. 

Competitor comparison and industry analysis: Gain insights into your market position and consumer attitudes towards competitors with tools that help track share of voice (SOV) and identify industry gaps. This feature aids in uncovering new business opportunities and strategic advantages. 

Comprehensive consumer research: Utilize detailed demographic analysis and sentiment research to better understand and engage your target audience. Features like trend identification and influencer recognition further help to refine marketing strategies and capitalize on emerging movements. 

Sprout Social excels in providing a comprehensive toolset for social listening and monitoring, making it an invaluable resource for businesses focused on enhancing their social media engagement and understanding their audience better. Its integration of various analysis tools into one platform makes it a great time-saver and a facilitator for consistent customer experiences. 

However, compared to Sprinklr, Sprout Social may lack some of the more advanced analytical capabilities and broader integration with enterprise-level marketing stacks. While Sprout Social offers excellent tools for day-to-day social media monitoring and engagement, Sprinklr’s solutions provide deeper insights and more extensive data handling, suitable for larger organizations or those with complex global needs. 

Compare now: SPRINKLR vs. SPROUT SOCIAL  

💪 Strengths   “Along with using Brand keywords in Smart inbox and preparing Social Listening queues, it has helped me and my clients to know a lot about not just what people are talking about us but also about our competitors which has helped in our growth.”  

💡 What could be better   “The social listening sentiment is not accurate, and the tool is not able to decipher neutral sentiment. Often time, the neutral sentiment is positive and negative.   

I noticed that the demographic tab is not accurate for Twitter, with some posts being tagged as "France" when the user location or the geo-location is clearly in the US. The social listening sentiment on YouTube is not accurate and trustworthy.” Source  

Price: USD 299/seat/month   Trial: Available for 30 days  

Khoros' social media monitoring software equips brands with the tools necessary to manage a wide range of digital and social media customer service inquiries effectively. Designed to handle high volumes of interactions without compromising on quality, this platform is ideal for businesses looking to protect their brand reputation and enhance customer satisfaction across diverse digital landscapes. 

🚀 Prominent features 

Unified engagement hub: Khoros integrates multiple communication channels into a single engagement hub, allowing customer service agents to seamlessly transition between social channels, messaging apps, reviews, in-app and web messaging and community platforms. This centralization streamlines responses and improves interaction quality. 

Advanced workflows and operational insights: The platform boosts social customer service efficiency by implementing smart workflows and providing insights that help resolve conversations faster and with higher satisfaction rates. 

Crisis detection and mitigation: Monitor changes in social volume, sentiment and specific keywords to quickly identify and address potential crises, ensuring continuous quality customer experiences. 

Secure data exchange: Khoros ensures the secure handling of personal data during social interactions, enabling businesses to address consumer inquiries confidently and compliantly. 

Khoros stands out for its robust capability to manage and monitor digital interactions across a variety of platforms from one consolidated hub. Its advanced features support efficient scaling of social customer service efforts and provide the necessary tools to maintain high-quality customer interactions.  

💪 Strengths   “By connecting all our social media accounts we are able to plan easily and in advance our publications and be sure to monitor all comments that are related to our brand.” Source  

💡What could be better   “I dislike how hard it is to pull data from responses and transform them into a more comprehensive report. It is so manual and wish it was more automated features. I also wish I could pull data directly from posts in the calendar or combine data from multiple posts in a campaign automatically. I wish publishing would be easier with a better ai and we don't have to manually push stories and reels.” Source  

Price: Contact sales/vendor for information  Trial: Information available on request 

Emplifi    

Emplifi’s social monitoring tool, known as Emplifi Listening, is designed to provide comprehensive insights into social media dynamics for modern brands. It offers a 360° view of key audiences, enabling businesses to create content that resonates with their target demographic, deliver engaging social experiences and drive impactful campaigns. 

Interesting Read: How to Create a Social Media Campaign: A Step-By-Step Guide  

Comprehensive insights: It searches and analyzes data across social media, news, blogs and forums, providing deep social and web listening capabilities. 

Social trend spike alerts: Users receive notifications of sudden changes in online activity, ensuring they stay informed and responsive. 

Real-time, multilingual support: With real-time translation for over 100 languages, you can engage with a global audience effectively. 

Powerful AI tools: Automated labeling, sentiment analysis and advanced routing streamline the process of managing social interactions. 

Engagement at the point of purchase: The Ratings & Reviews feature provides diverse feedback and automatically syndicates positive reviews to strengthen your brand’s online reputation. 

Emplifi’s social listening tool excels in its ability to deliver actionable insights through comprehensive analysis and robust AI tools. It stands out with its multilingual support, real-time alerts and integration of ratings and reviews, providing businesses with a seamless strategy across all points of engagement. 

However, compared to Sprinklr, Emplifi could be seen as slightly less versatile in some areas. While it offers excellent multilingual support, it lacks the same breadth of customization and unstructured data processing found in Sprinklr. Moreover, Sprinklr’s unified social monitoring features provide deeper benchmarking capabilities and a broader analysis across digital channels, giving it an edge for brands needing highly specialized insights. 

💪 Strengths   “Custom content labeling, automation labeling, and listening queries all able to be brought into custom dashboards are all *incredible* features. Companies can use these to segment content based on the custom data valuable to them and draw insights easily.” Source  

💡What could be better   “I have been using the dashboards and while they are useful, I think there is still room for improvement. In particular, the Listening section could benefit from a feature that would allow us to download the information in an Excel file. Having this capability would make it much easier to analyze and manipulate the data offline. I hope this is something that could be implemented in the near future.” Source  

Price: USD 2400 annually for up to 10 profiles  Trial: Information available on request 

Hearsay Social   

Hearsay Social is a social media monitoring tool designed to help enterprises, particularly in the financial services sector, to plan, implement, roll out and monitor their social media presence across platforms like Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Part of the broader Hearsay Systems suite, this tool is designed to help financial advisors and insurance agents optimize their social media communication in line with regulations from FINRA, SEC, IIROC, FCA, PRA and others. 

Compliance management: Ensures all social media activities comply with industry regulations. 

Social media integration: Allows for seamless connection with platforms like Facebook, X and LinkedIn. 

Performance metrics: Provides analytics on social media performance, including engagement and reach. 

Event management: Tracks and manages social media events and campaigns. 

Social insights dashboard: Offers a workspace-level view of social media metrics for the past 30 days, including published posts, impressions, likes, comments, shares, link clicks and follower growth. 

Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter

Hearsay Social excels at providing a compliant, user-friendly platform for financial advisors and insurance agents. Its unique focus on regulatory adherence makes it invaluable in industries where legal considerations are paramount. Additionally, while its content curation is helpful, it could benefit from more advanced AI capabilities to match broader audience expectations. 

💡 Quick Tip: Keeping up with the fast-paced demands of the financial industry and staying compliant can be challenging. But what if you had a tool that simplifies all that while keeping your brand ahead of the curve?  

Yes, you heard that right! Meet Sprinklr — trusted by 13 of the top 14 FinServe brands, offering solutions that enhance customer engagement, provide exceptional service and unlock valuable insights to foster trust and loyalty. 

Why Sprinklr for financial services?  

🚀 Digital engagement and sales: Boost revenue with localized, AI-driven campaigns that empower advisors to drive sales through social channels. Identify and convert leads more effectively with Sprinklr’s advanced AI capabilities. 

📞 Omnichannel customer service: Enhance customer satisfaction with a seamless omnichannel experience, providing consistent service across 30+ channels, from social media to live chat. 

🔒 Compliance and crisis management: Ensure compliance with financial regulations like GDPR and FINRA and manage potential crises proactively with AI-powered monitoring and alerts. 

Ready to take your financial services to the next level? Learn more right here ! 

💪 Strengths   “The customer support tries to make everything possible and product development is very quick to make all change requests possible. The platform innovates itself on a regular basis. We are very happy with the platform due to its easy-to-use interface and the compliant use for social media.”  

💡 What could be better   “There often glitches, quirks, UX/UI improvements needed, and a lack our ideas and recommendations being implemented.” Source  

Agorapulse is designed to provide brands with deep insights into their online presence and the dynamics of their industry. This tool offers the capability to monitor conversations across social media, news sites and blogs, allowing businesses to fine-tune their strategies based on real-time data and trends. It's particularly effective for those looking to enhance their competitive edge through comprehensive social listening. 

Comprehensive monitoring: Agorapulse enables brands to create actionable searches to monitor mentions across social networks, news websites and millions of blogs. This helps businesses understand how they're perceived and what's being said about their competitors. 

Sentiment analysis and brand health: Track and analyze changes in mention volumes, engagement and sentiment over time. This feature helps brands navigate their strategy by understanding public sentiment — positive, negative and neutral. 

Industry insight mining: Use hashtag and keyword searches to uncover current and upcoming trends relevant to your industry, helping to ensure your content remains ahead of the curve. 

Competitive analysis: Set up dedicated searches to monitor competitors, providing valuable insights into their activities and uncovering opportunities for differentiation. 

Reporting: Include findings on mention volumes and sentiments in reports to inform and navigate your social media strategy. 

Agorapulse is a robust tool for businesses that want to harness the power of social listening to drive their marketing and engagement strategies. With features like sentiment analysis, competitive and industry insights and influencer recognition, Agorapulse provides a comprehensive suite of tools to help brands stay informed and reactive to the social media landscape. While Agorapulse offers excellent capabilities for social listening and campaign analysis, businesses requiring advanced data processing and broader digital marketing integration might find Sprinklr's extensive platform more aligned with their needs. 

💪 Strengths   “Their social listening feature ensures I never miss a mention, be it direct or indirect. This helps us tap into potential leads, manage our reputation, and respond promptly to customer queries and concerns.” Source  

💡 What could be better   “The platform doesn't support every social media network. For brands using lesser-known or niche platforms, this could be a drawback. Although their web platform is pretty solid, the mobile app has occasionally been glitchy and not as intuitive as I would have liked.” Source  

Price: USD 49/user/month for up to 10 profiles  Trial: Available for 30 days 

Rival IQ delivers a powerful social listening and monitoring platform that enables brands to effectively monitor online conversations, analyze customer sentiment and track competitors with precision. This tool simplifies the collection and interpretation of vast amounts of data from various online sources, making it accessible even for teams without dedicated data experts. By providing deep insights into brand health and market trends, Rival IQ helps brands stay responsive and informed in a dynamic digital environment.  

🌩️ Is a crisis clouding your brand's bright future?  

In a world where a brand's reputation can change with a tweet, staying one step ahead of potential crises isn't just smart; it's essential. Imagine having the power to detect emerging risks before they escalate, ensuring your brand remains trusted and resilient no matter what comes your way.  

Here's how you can safeguard your brand's health using a tool:   

🔍 Proactive crisis detection: Identify and respond to emerging risks early with AI-powered monitoring tools. 

📈 Real-time brand health monitoring: Keep track of your brand's mentions, sentiment and engagement across multiple channels. 

⚡ Swift crisis response: Quickly route insights and respond to critical messages while maintaining brand compliance. 

📊 Comprehensive reporting: Analyze the effectiveness of your crisis response and refine your strategies with detailed post-crisis reports. 

 And if you're wondering where to find such a comprehensive solution, look no further. Sprinklr’s Crisis Detection & Brand Health Monitoring platform is tailor-made for marketing teams. It offers an end-to-end crisis management system that integrates seamlessly across 30+ social and digital channels, leveraging advanced AI to deliver actionable insights with exceptional accuracy.  

Ready to protect and propel your brand?  

Comprehensive data analysis: Rival IQ aggregates data from millions of websites, including major platforms like Reddit, X and Quora. This extensive reach allows brands to gain a holistic view of their online presence and consumer perceptions. 

AI-powered search: Utilize ChatGPT-powered search capabilities to bypass complex Boolean queries and set up custom searches with ease. This feature simplifies deep data dives into consumer conversations and brand mentions. 

Advanced sentiment analysis: With state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tools powered by Quid, brands can quickly discern the emotions and behaviors their content evokes, allowing for more targeted engagement strategies. 

Trend monitoring and alerts: Monitor post volumes, brand mentions and industry trends with Rival IQ’s always-on alerting system. This ensures that brands never miss crucial shifts in conversation or sentiment, keeping them proactive rather than reactive. 

Influencer and advocacy identification: Spot and engage with key influencers, advocates and detractors, leveraging insights to foster partnerships or address public relations challenges. 

End-to-end strategies for discovering influencers and decoding impact

Rival IQ stands out for its comprehensive approach to social monitoring, providing brands with the tools necessary to monitor their digital footprint and adapt quickly to consumer sentiment and market changes. The integration of AI-powered search and advanced sentiment analysis allows even non-data-savvy teams to make informed decisions that enhance their social media strategies.  While Rival IQ offers excellent functionalities for trend tracking and sentiment analysis, it faulters in handling cross-channel data aggregation and advanced predictive analytics. 

💪 Strengths   “Rival IQ is such a great find because not only can I monitor content performance for brands I work with but I can also look at my brand vs. competitors. The tool, out of the box, provides insights around performance, areas to improve upon, and sends alerts on breakout posts from competitors. It also tells you if a post was likely "boosted" which is also insightful in today's pay-to-play environment. Probably the most helpful thing is that it also tracks TikTok data along with all the other data sources. It makes my job easier because I can get my information from one source, rather than cobbling it together from multiple data sources.”  

💡 What could be better   “A lot of companies had no historic data and RivalIQ could only begin capturing data from the time you commence tracking.” Source  

Price: USD 239/month   Trial: Available for 14 days  

Mention revolutionizes how brands monitor the web and manage social media through a comprehensive, all-encompassing tool. Designed to deliver instant insights, Mention analyzes mentions from over a billion sources daily, equipping teams with the necessary tools to gain full visibility into brands, trends and influential figures. This powerful tool simplifies the complexity of online monitoring, allowing you to track and respond to conversations in real-time with precision and ease. 

Extensive monitoring capabilities: Mention offers keyword-based and page-based monitoring alerts, capturing data from an expansive array of web and social sources, including major platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X, as well as forums, blogs and news sites. 

Advanced query building: Users can create simple to complex queries with an intuitive query builder that supports Boolean logic, enhancing the precision of monitoring and focusing on highly relevant insights. 

Real-time tracking and alerts: Stay updated with a live feed of mentions and receive spike alerts for unusually high volumes of activity, ensuring no critical information is missed. 

Sentiment analysis and influence indicators: Automatically analyze the sentiment of each mention and assess the influence of sources, helping to prioritize responses and strategize more effectively. 

Integration and collaboration: Seamlessly integrate Mention with existing marketing stacks like Slack and Zapier and utilize collaborative features to enhance productivity and team response. 

Mention stands out as a highly capable social listening and monitoring tool that provides brands with critical insights into their online presence and industry movements. With its robust data analysis, real-time updates and flexible integration capabilities, Mention is ideal for marketers who need to stay on top of trends and manage their reputation meticulously. While Mention excels in real-time data tracking and user-friendly features, it doesn’t offer extensive cross-channel analytics and predictive capabilities that modern organizations seek. 

💪 Strengths   “Mention allows us to create alerts and allow us to perform searches with our filters. We can easily monitor the profiles of our brand. With the searched keywords we can easily review and digest the email list. Their dashboards is very simple to use and we do not have to learn many skills to use their dashboards. There are exceptional packages for the filters and Boolean search. It has a simple interface and is very easy to navigate.”  

💡 What could be better   “It misses some places and does not cover all the areas where your business name was mentioned. I found that it did not capture abbreviations or mentions on websites that are not very famous. In one example, my previous company had been cited 160 times, but it did not even show half of them.”  Source  

💡Pro Tip: Don’t let your brand mentions slip through the cracks. Sprinklr’s advanced monitoring capabilities excel in capturing a wide range of mentions, including those on obscure sites and abbreviated references. With Sprinklr, you can ensure that no mention goes unnoticed, whether it’s structured, unstructured, tagged or untagged. 

Price: USD 149/month   Trial: Available for 14 days 

The next entrant in our list of leading social media monitoring tools is Keyhole. Keyhole's social listening and monitoring tool offers an in-depth analysis of social media conversations to help brands understand and engage their audience effectively. Designed to deconstruct conversations around specific hashtags and keywords, Keyhole provides real-time data and insights that are essential for optimizing campaigns and measuring their impact. 

Real-time hashtag and keyword tracking: Keyhole provides instant data and analysis on any conversation, enabling you to gauge and report your social media impact swiftly across all campaigns and channels. 

Influencer and campaign monitoring: Keyhole helps you find and vet the most impactful influencers within your industry, providing insights into their audiences and engagement levels. This feature allows you to compare all your influencers in one dashboard, helping you optimize your influencer marketing strategies . 

AI-driven sentiment analysis: Understand how your audience feels about your brand and competitors with Keyhole's sentiment analysis tool. This feature enables you to gauge customer sentiment and use the data to improve overall engagement and brand perception. 

Historical data and QuickTrends: With Keyhole, you can access historical data to track previous campaigns or generate last-minute reports. The QuickTrends feature provides a high-level overview of any topic across social media and the web, helping you stay updated on industry trends and conversations. 

Volume predictions and alerts: Keyhole's volume predictions alert you when posts are trending, enabling quick reactions to capitalize on engagement opportunities. 

Keyhole offers a robust set of features for social media monitoring and listening, making it a valuable tool for brands looking to understand and engage their audience effectively. Its real-time tracking, influencer analysis and sentiment insights provide comprehensive data to optimize campaigns and measure their impact.  However, it has been noted for having less comprehensive tracking options, which may not meet the needs of all users. Additionally, Keyhole’s focus is primarily on X, Instagram and Facebook, potentially limiting for businesses that utilize a broader range of social platforms. Users have also reported a steeper learning curve due to a complex interface and customer support response times can be slow, which could be a significant drawback for businesses requiring timely assistance. 

💪 Strengths   “I've been using Keyhole almost since the beginning and what I love best is the flexibility in the data that can be tracked and captured. It has made evaluating ROI of different campaigns and tactics much easier.”  

💡 What could be better   “It is a steep price for a singular item like hashtag tracking. I also wish they did a bit better job with the sign-up feature it is really hard to get to the pricing section.” Source  

Price: USD 194.25/month   Trial: Available for 14 days 

If you're on the hunt for the right social media monitoring software for your business, following these structured steps will guide you to the best choice: 

Clarify your objectives  

Determine key requirements: Specify what outcomes you want from a monitoring tool, whether it's for brand reputation management , competitor analysis or market trend identification. 

Integration potential: Make sure the tool can connect seamlessly with your existing systems and provide a unified workflow. 

📢Good to know: Sprinklr offers extensive integration options, allowing you to connect with the software tools your business already utilizes. By unifying your data on a single platform, Sprinklr enables cross-team collaboration with ease — enhancing workflows across engagement, sales marketing, advertising and customer care.  

This seamless integration empowers your teams to work together more effectively, driving better results for your business. 

  Learn more about our integration capabilities ! 

Start with research  

Explore options: Start by exploring the variety of social media monitoring tools available. Consider platforms known for their robust monitoring capabilities. 

Perform feature analysis: Assess the features each tool offers. Focus on essential elements like sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, real-time alerts and comprehensive data reporting. 

AI advantages: Consider tools that leverage AI for enhanced monitoring efficiency. These can offer predictive insights into brand reputation and customer sentiment shifts. 

Test and trial 

Try before you buy: Take advantage of free trials or demo versions to see how the tools function firsthand. 

Evaluate compatibility: During the trial period, verify that the tool aligns with your daily social media workflows and overall strategy. 

Check usability 

Prioritize ease of use: Choose software that's intuitive, reducing the learning curve for your team. Opt for self-serve tools that can be implemented right out of the box, with one-click widgets for adding channels and teams to it. 

Seek out experiences: Read case studies and testimonials to better understand how others view the tool's usability and efficiency. 

Plan your growth 

Future-proof your choice: Make sure the software can scale up as your business and social media needs expand. 

Explore expansion paths: Look into the upgrade paths and understand how easily you can expand features or switch to higher plans. 

Consider support resources 

Customer support quality: Evaluate the quality of customer support through responsiveness and problem resolution. 

Access to training: Ensure that the software provider offers comprehensive tutorials, guides and resources to help you onboard the tool. 

Protect your data 

Security protocols: Investigate the data security measures in place, ensuring compliance with industry standards. 

Privacy policies: Confirm that the software adheres to strict privacy practices to protect user data, especially if you operate in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. 

Make the final call 

Compare your notes and select the tool that aligns best with your monitoring needs, offering the best overall value. 

Final Verdict  

"Having the right tools in your arsenal makes all the difference," and this is especially true for social media monitoring. With the right platform, you'll be able to uncover valuable insights from conversations across networks, monitor brand sentiment and stay one step ahead of your competitors. And a comprehensive social media monitoring tool like Sprinklr equips you with the intelligence and agility needed to master your strategy like never before. 

Frequently Asked Questions

A social media monitoring tool is software that helps individuals or businesses listen to and analyze conversations about their brand, competitors and industry across social media platforms. 

The best social media management tool depends on your specific needs, budget and goals. Popular choices include Sprinklr, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Mention, each offering unique features.  

Evaluate your primary monitoring requirements and desired features like sentiment analysis, real-time alerts and keyword tracking 

Take free trials to gauge usability and feature set 

Make sure the tool integrates seamlessly with your existing workflow 

Information overload and data accuracy are common challenges. To address this, it’s crucial to:  

Define specific goals  

Refine your monitoring criteria 

Train your team to interpret insights effectively 

An intuitive dashboard also helps simplify the data analysis process. 

With so many choices, selecting the right tool can be challenging. Here are a few tips: 

Ensure the tool has an intuitive interface for easy onboarding 

Check for essential features like real-time alerts, influencer identification and customizable reports 

Confirm it integrates well with your existing software to enable a smooth workflow 

Consider user reviews and take advantage of free trials to test its capabilities before making a decision 

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Article Author

Aishwarya Suresh

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Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms

• Open access
• Published: 26 July 2014
• Volume 30 , pages 89–116, ( 2015 )

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• Bogdan Batrinca 1 &
• Philip C. Treleaven 1  

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This paper is written for (social science) researchers seeking to analyze the wealth of social media now available. It presents a comprehensive review of software tools for social networking media, wikis, really simple syndication feeds, blogs, newsgroups, chat and news feeds. For completeness, it also includes introductions to social media scraping, storage, data cleaning and sentiment analysis. Although principally a review, the paper also provides a methodology and a critique of social media tools. Analyzing social media, in particular Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, has become a major research and business activity due to the availability of web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services. This has led to an ‘explosion’ of data services, software tools for scraping and analysis and social media analytics platforms. It is also a research area undergoing rapid change and evolution due to commercial pressures and the potential for using social media data for computational (social science) research. Using a simple taxonomy, this paper provides a review of leading software tools and how to use them to scrape, cleanse and analyze the spectrum of social media. In addition, it discussed the requirement of an experimental computational environment for social media research and presents as an illustration the system architecture of a social media (analytics) platform built by University College London. The principal contribution of this paper is to provide an overview (including code fragments) for scientists seeking to utilize social media scraping and analytics either in their research or business. The data retrieval techniques that are presented in this paper are valid at the time of writing this paper (June 2014), but they are subject to change since social media data scraping APIs are rapidly changing.

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1 Introduction

Social media is defined as web-based and mobile-based Internet applications that allow the creation, access and exchange of user-generated content that is ubiquitously accessible (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010 ). Besides social networking media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook), for convenience, we will also use the term ‘social media’ to encompass really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, blogs, wikis and news, all typically yielding unstructured text and accessible through the web. Social media is especially important for research into computational social science that investigates questions (Lazer et al. 2009 ) using quantitative techniques (e.g., computational statistics, machine learning and complexity) and so-called big data for data mining and simulation modeling (Cioffi-Revilla 2010 ).

This has led to numerous data services, tools and analytics platforms. However, this easy availability of social media data for academic research may change significantly due to commercial pressures. In addition, as discussed in Sect. 2 , the tools available to researchers are far from ideal. They either give superficial access to the raw data or (for non-superficial access) require researchers to program analytics in a language such as Java.

1.1 Terminology

We start with definitions of some of the key techniques related to analyzing unstructured textual data:

Natural language processing —(NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Specifically, it is the process of a computer extracting meaningful information from natural language input and/or producing natural language output.

News analytics —the measurement of the various qualitative and quantitative attributes of textual (unstructured data) news stories. Some of these attributes are: sentiment , relevance and novelty .

Opinion mining —opinion mining (sentiment mining, opinion/sentiment extraction) is the area of research that attempts to make automatic systems to determine human opinion from text written in natural language.

Scraping —collecting online data from social media and other Web sites in the form of unstructured text and also known as site scraping, web harvesting and web data extraction.

Sentiment analysis —sentiment analysis refers to the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials.

Text analytics —involves information retrieval (IR), lexical analysis to study word frequency distributions, pattern recognition, tagging/annotation, information extraction, data mining techniques including link and association analysis, visualization and predictive analytics.

1.2 Research challenges

Social media scraping and analytics provides a rich source of academic research challenges for social scientists, computer scientists and funding bodies. Challenges include:

Scraping —although social media data is accessible through APIs, due to the commercial value of the data, most of the major sources such as Facebook and Google are making it increasingly difficult for academics to obtain comprehensive access to their ‘raw’ data; very few social data sources provide affordable data offerings to academia and researchers. News services such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg typically charge a premium for access to their data. In contrast, Twitter has recently announced the Twitter Data Grants program, where researchers can apply to get access to Twitter’s public tweets and historical data in order to get insights from its massive set of data (Twitter has more than 500 million tweets a day).

Data cleansing —cleaning unstructured textual data (e.g., normalizing text), especially high-frequency streamed real-time data, still presents numerous problems and research challenges.

Holistic data sources —researchers are increasingly bringing together and combining novel data sources: social media data, real-time market & customer data and geospatial data for analysis.

Data protection —once you have created a ‘big data’ resource, the data needs to be secured, ownership and IP issues resolved (i.e., storing scraped data is against most of the publishers’ terms of service), and users provided with different levels of access; otherwise, users may attempt to ‘suck’ all the valuable data from the database.

Data analytics —sophisticated analysis of social media data for opinion mining (e.g., sentiment analysis) still raises a myriad of challenges due to foreign languages, foreign words, slang, spelling errors and the natural evolving of language.

Analytics dashboards —many social media platforms require users to write APIs to access feeds or program analytics models in a programming language, such as Java. While reasonable for computer scientists, these skills are typically beyond most (social science) researchers. Non-programming interfaces are required for giving what might be referred to as ‘deep’ access to ‘raw’ data, for example, configuring APIs, merging social media feeds, combining holistic sources and developing analytical models.

Data visualization —visual representation of data whereby information that has been abstracted in some schematic form with the goal of communicating information clearly and effectively through graphical means. Given the magnitude of the data involved, visualization is becoming increasingly important.

1.3 Social media research and applications

Social media data is clearly the largest, richest and most dynamic evidence base of human behavior, bringing new opportunities to understand individuals, groups and society. Innovative scientists and industry professionals are increasingly finding novel ways of automatically collecting, combining and analyzing this wealth of data. Naturally, doing justice to these pioneering social media applications in a few paragraphs is challenging. Three illustrative areas are: business, bioscience and social science.

The early business adopters of social media analysis were typically companies in retail and finance. Retail companies use social media to harness their brand awareness, product/customer service improvement, advertising/marketing strategies, network structure analysis, news propagation and even fraud detection. In finance, social media is used for measuring market sentiment and news data is used for trading. As an illustration, Bollen et al. ( 2011 ) measured sentiment of random sample of Twitter data, finding that Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) prices are correlated with the Twitter sentiment 2–3 days earlier with 87.6 percent accuracy. Wolfram ( 2010 ) used Twitter data to train a Support Vector Regression (SVR) model to predict prices of individual NASDAQ stocks, finding ‘significant advantage’ for forecasting prices 15 min in the future.

In the biosciences, social media is being used to collect data on large cohorts for behavioral change initiatives and impact monitoring, such as tackling smoking and obesity or monitoring diseases. An example is Penn State University biologists (Salathé et al. 2012 ) who have developed innovative systems and techniques to track the spread of infectious diseases, with the help of news Web sites, blogs and social media.

Computational social science applications include: monitoring public responses to announcements, speeches and events especially political comments and initiatives; insights into community behavior; social media polling of (hard to contact) groups; early detection of emerging events, as with Twitter. For example, Lerman et al. ( 2008 ) use computational linguistics to automatically predict the impact of news on the public perception of political candidates. Yessenov and Misailovic ( 2009 ) use movie review comments to study the effect of various approaches in extracting text features on the accuracy of four machine learning methods—Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, Maximum Entropy and K-Means clustering. Lastly, Karabulut ( 2013 ) found that Facebook’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) exhibits peaks and troughs in-line with major public events in the USA.

1.4 Social media overview

For this paper, we group social media tools into:

Social media data —social media data types (e.g., social network media, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and news, etc.) and formats (e.g., XML and JSON). This includes data sets and increasingly important real-time data feeds, such as financial data, customer transaction data, telecoms and spatial data.

Social media programmatic access —data services and tools for sourcing and scraping (textual) data from social networking media, wikis, RSS feeds, news, etc. These can be usefully subdivided into:

Data sources, services and tools —where data is accessed by tools which protect the raw data or provide simple analytics. Examples include: Google Trends, SocialMention, SocialPointer and SocialSeek, which provide a stream of information that aggregates various social media feeds.

Data feeds via APIs —where data sets and feeds are accessible via programmable HTTP-based APIs and return tagged data using XML or JSON, etc. Examples include Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook.

Text cleaning and storage tools —tools for cleaning and storing textual data. Google Refine and DataWrangler are examples for data cleaning.

Text analysis tools —individual or libraries of tools for analyzing social media data once it has been scraped and cleaned. These are mainly natural language processing, analysis and classification tools, which are explained below.

Transformation tools —simple tools that can transform textual input data into tables, maps, charts (line, pie, scatter, bar, etc.), timeline or even motion (animation over timeline), such as Google Fusion Tables, Zoho Reports, Tableau Public or IBM’s Many Eyes.

Analysis tools —more advanced analytics tools for analyzing social data, identifying connections and building networks, such as Gephi (open source) or the Excel plug-in NodeXL.

Social media platforms —environments that provide comprehensive social media data and libraries of tools for analytics. Examples include: Thomson Reuters Machine Readable News, Radian 6 and Lexalytics.

Social network media platforms —platforms that provide data mining and analytics on Twitter, Facebook and a wide range of other social network media sources.

News platforms —platforms such as Thomson Reuters providing commercial news archives/feeds and associated analytics.

2 Social media methodology and critique

The two major impediments to using social media for academic research are firstly access to comprehensive data sets and secondly tools that allow ‘deep’ data analysis without the need to be able to program in a language such as Java. The majority of social media resources are commercial and companies are naturally trying to monetize their data. As discussed, it is important that researchers have access to open-source ‘big’ (social media) data sets and facilities for experimentation. Otherwise, social media research could become the exclusive domain of major companies, government agencies and a privileged set of academic researchers presiding over private data from which they produce papers that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Recently, there has been a modest response, as Twitter and Gnip are piloting a new program for data access, starting with 5 all-access data grants to select applicants.

2.1 Methodology

Research requirements can be grouped into: data, analytics and facilities.

Researchers need online access to historic and real-time social media data, especially the principal sources, to conduct world-leading research:

Social network media —access to comprehensive historic data sets and also real-time access to sources, possibly with a (15 min) time delay, as with Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg financial data.

News data —access to historic data and real-time news data sets, possibly through the concept of ‘educational data licenses’ (cf. software license).

Public data —access to scraped and archived important public data; available through RSS feeds, blogs or open government databases.

Programmable interfaces —researchers also need access to simple application programming interfaces (APIs) to scrape and store other available data sources that may not be automatically collected.

2.1.2 Analytics

Currently, social media data is typically either available via simple general routines or require the researcher to program their analytics in a language such as MATLAB, Java or Python. As discussed above, researchers require:

Analytics dashboards —non-programming interfaces are required for giving what might be termed as ‘deep’ access to ‘raw’ data.

Holistic data analysis —tools are required for combining (and conducting analytics across) multiple social media and other data sets.

Data visualization —researchers also require visualization tools whereby information that has been abstracted can be visualized in some schematic form with the goal of communicating information clearly and effectively through graphical means.

2.1.3 Facilities

Lastly, the sheer volume of social media data being generated argues for national and international facilities to be established to support social media research (cf. Wharton Research Data Services https://wrds-web.wharton.upenn.edu ):

Data storage —the volume of social media data, current and projected, is beyond most individual universities and hence needs to be addressed at a national science foundation level. Storage is required both for principal data sources (e.g., Twitter), but also for sources collected by individual projects and archived for future use by other researchers.

Computational facility —remotely accessible computational facilities are also required for: a) protecting access to the stored data; b) hosting the analytics and visualization tools; and c) providing computational resources such as grids and GPUs required for processing the data at the facility rather than transmitting it across a network.

2.2 Critique

Much needs to be done to support social media research. As discussed, the majority of current social media resources are commercial, expensive and difficult for academics to obtain full access.

In general, access to important sources of social media data is frequently restricted and full commercial access is expensive.

Siloed data —most data sources (e.g., Twitter) have inherently isolated information making it difficult to combine with other data sources.

Holistic data —in contrast, researchers are increasingly interested in accessing, storing and combining novel data sources: social media data, real-time financial market & customer data and geospatial data for analysis. This is currently extremely difficult to do even for Computer Science departments.

2.2.2 Analytics

Analytical tools provided by vendors are often tied to a single data set, maybe limited in analytical capability, and data charges make them expensive to use.

2.2.3 Facilities

There are an increasing number of powerful commercial platforms, such as the ones supplied by SAS and Thomson Reuters, but the charges are largely prohibitive for academic research. Either comparable facilities need to be provided by national science foundations or vendors need to be persuaded to introduce the concept of an ‘educational license.’

3 Social media data

Clearly, there is a large and increasing number of (commercial) services providing access to social networking media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia) and news services (e.g., Thomson Reuters Machine Readable News). Equivalent major academic services are scarce.We start by discussing types of data and formats produced by these services.

3.1 Types of data

Although we focus on social media, as discussed, researchers are continually finding new and innovative sources of data to bring together and analyze. So when considering textual data analysis, we should consider multiple sources (e.g., social networking media, RSS feeds, blogs and news) supplemented by numeric (financial) data, telecoms data, geospatial data and potentially speech and video data. Using multiple data sources is certainly the future of analytics.

Broadly, data subdivides into:

Historic data sets —previously accumulated and stored social/news, financial and economic data.

Real-time feeds —live data feeds from streamed social media, news services, financial exchanges, telecoms services, GPS devices and speech.

Raw data —unprocessed computer data straight from source that may contain errors or may be unanalyzed.

Cleaned data —correction or removal of erroneous (dirty) data caused by disparities, keying mistakes, missing bits, outliers, etc.

Value-added data —data that has been cleaned, analyzed, tagged and augmented with knowledge.

3.2 Text data formats

The four most common formats used to markup text are: HTML, XML, JSON and CSV.

HTML —HyperText Markup Language (HTML) as well-known is the markup language for web pages and other information that can be viewed in a web browser. HTML consists of HTML elements, which include tags enclosed in angle brackets (e.g., <div>), within the content of the web page.

XML —Extensible Markup Language (XML)—the markup language for structuring textual data using <tag>…<\tag> to define elements.

JSON —JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange and is derived from JavaScript.

CSV —a comma-separated values (CSV) file contains the values in a table as a series of ASCII text lines organized such that each column value is separated by a comma from the next column’s value and each row starts a new line.

For completeness, HTML and XML are so-called markup languages (markup and content) that define a set of simple syntactic rules for encoding documents in a format both human readable and machine readable. A markup comprises start-tags (e.g., <tag>), content text and end-tags (e.g., </tag>).

Many feeds use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), the lightweight data-interchange format, based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. JSON is a language-independent text format that uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. JSON’s basic types are: Number, String, Boolean, Array (an ordered sequence of values, comma-separated and enclosed in square brackets) and Object (an unordered collection of key:value pairs). The JSON format is illustrated in Fig.  1 for a query on the Twitter API on the string ‘UCL,’ which returns two ‘text’ results from the Twitter user ‘uclnews.’

JSON Example

Comma-separated values are not a single, well-defined format but rather refer to any text file that: (a) is plain text using a character set such as ASCII, Unicode or EBCDIC; (b) consists of text records (e.g., one record per line); (c) with records divided into fields separated by delimiters (e.g., comma, semicolon and tab); and (d) where every record has the same sequence of fields.

4 Social media providers

Social media data resources broadly subdivide into those providing:

Freely available databases —repositories that can be freely downloaded, e.g., Wikipedia ( http://dumps.wikimedia.org ) and the Enron e-mail data set available via http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/ .

Data access via tools —sources that provide controlled access to their social media data via dedicated tools, both to facilitate easy interrogation and also to stop users ‘sucking’ all the data from the repository. An example is Google’s Trends. These further subdivided into:

Free sources —repositories that are freely accessible, but the tools protect or may limit access to the ‘raw’ data in the repository, such as the range of tools provided by Google.

Commercial sources —data resellers that charge for access to their social media data. Gnip and DataSift provide commercial access to Twitter data through a partnership, and Thomson Reuters to news data.

Data access via APIs —social media data repositories providing programmable HTTP-based access to the data via APIs (e.g., Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia).

4.1 Open-source databases

A major open source of social media is Wikipedia, which offers free copies of all available content to interested users (Wikimedia Foundation 2014 ). These databases can be used for mirroring, database queries and social media analytics. They include dumps from any Wikimedia Foundation project: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/ , English Wikipedia dumps in SQL and XML: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/ , etc.

Another example of freely available data for research is the World Bank data, i.e., the World Bank Databank ( http://databank.worldbank.org/data/databases.aspx ) , which provides over 40 databases, such as Gender Statistics, Health Nutrition and Population Statistics, Global Economic Prospects, World Development Indicators and Global Development Finance, and many others. Most of the databases can be filtered by country/region, series/topics or time (years and quarters). In addition, tools are provided to allow reports to be customized and displayed in table, chart or map formats.

4.2 Data access via tools

As discussed, most commercial services provide access to social media data via online tools, both to control access to the raw data and increasingly to monetize the data.

4.2.1 Freely accessible sources

Google with tools such as Trends and InSights is a good example of this category. Google is the largest ‘scraper’ in the world, but they do their best to ‘discourage’ scraping of their own pages. (For an introduction of how to surreptitious scrape Google—and avoid being ‘banned’—see http://google-scraper.squabbel.com .) Google’s strategy is to provide a wide range of packages, such as Google Analytics, rather than from a researchers’ viewpoint the more useful programmable HTTP-based APIs.

Figure  2 illustrates how Google Trends displays a particular search term, in this case ‘libor.’ Using Google Trends you can compare up to five topics at a time and also see how often those topics have been mentioned and in which geographic regions the topics have been searched for the most.

Google Trends

4.2.2 Commercial sources

There is an increasing number of commercial services that scrape social networking media and then provide paid-for access via simple analytics tools. (The more comprehensive platforms with extensive analytics are reviewed in Sect. 8 .) In addition, companies such as Twitter are both restricting free access to their data and licensing their data to commercial data resellers, such as Gnip and DataSift.

Gnip is the world’s largest provider of social data. Gnip was the first to partner with Twitter to make their social data available, and since then, it was the first to work with Tumblr, Foursquare, WordPress, Disqus, StockTwits and other leading social platforms. Gnip delivers social data to customers in more than 40 countries, and Gnip’s customers deliver social media analytics to more than 95 % of the Fortune 500. Real-time data from Gnip can be delivered as a ‘Firehose’ of every single activity or via PowerTrack, a proprietary filtering tool that allows users to build queries around only the data they need. PowerTrack rules can filter data streams based on keywords, geo boundaries, phrase matches and even the type of content or media in the activity. The company then offers enrichments to these data streams such as Profile Geo (to add significantly more usable geo data for Twitter), URL expansion and language detection to further enhance the value of the data delivered. In addition to real-time data access, the company also offers Historical PowerTrack and Search API access for Twitter which give customers the ability to pull any Tweet since the first message on March 21, 2006.

Gnip provides access to premium (Gnip’s ‘Complete Access’ sources are publishers that have an agreement with Gnip to resell their data) and free data feeds (Gnip’s ‘Managed Public API Access’ sources provide access to normalized and consolidated free data from their APIs, although it requires Gnip’s paid services for the Data Collectors) via its dashboard (see Fig.  3 ). Firstly, the user only sees the feeds in the dashboard that were paid for under a sales agreement. To select a feed, the user clicks on a publisher and then chooses a specific feed from that publisher as shown in Fig.  3 . Different types of feeds serve different types of use cases and correspond to different types of queries and API endpoints on the publisher’s source API. After selecting the feed, the user is assisted by Gnip to configure it with any required parameters before it begins collecting data. This includes adding at least one rule. Under ‘Get Data’ – > ‘Advanced Settings’ you can also configure how often your feed queries the source API for data (the ‘query rate’). Choose between the publisher’s native data format and Gnip’s Activity Streams format (XML for Enterprise Data Collector feeds).

Gnip Dashboard, Publishers and Feeds

4.3 Data feed access via APIs

For researchers, arguably the most useful sources of social media data are those that provide programmable access via APIs, typically using HTTP-based protocols. Given their importance to academics, here, we review individually wikis, social networking media, RSS feeds, news, etc.

4.3.1 Wiki media

Wikipedia (and wikis in general) provides academics with large open-source repositories of user-generated (crowd-sourced) content. What is not widely known is that Wikipedia provides HTTP-based APIs that allows programmable access and searching (i.e., scraping) that returns data in a variety of formats including XML. In fact, the API is not unique to Wikipedia but part of MediaWiki’s ( http://www.mediawiki.org/ ) open-source toolkit and hence can be used with any MediaWiki-based wikis.

The wiki HTTP-based API works by accepting requests containing one or more input arguments and returning strings, often in XML format, that can be parsed and used by the requesting client. Other formats supported include JSON, WDDX, YAML, or PHP serialized. Details can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allcategories&acprop=size&acprefix=hollywood&format=xml .

The HTTP request must contain: a) the requested ‘action,’ such as query, edit or delete operation; b) an authentication request; and c) any other supported actions. For example, the above request returns an XML string listing the first 10 Wikipedia categories with the prefix ‘hollywood.’ Vaswani ( 2011 ) provides a detailed description of how to scrape Wikipedia using an Apache/PHP development environment and an HTTP client capable of transmitting GET and PUT requests and handling responses.

4.3.2 Social networking media

As with Wikipedia, popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, make a proportion of their data accessible via APIs.

Although many social networking media sites provide APIs, not all sites (e.g., Bing, LinkedIn and Skype) provide API access for scraping data. While more and more social networks are shifting to publicly available content, many leading networks are restricting free access, even to academics. For example, Foursquare announced in December 2013 that it will no longer allow private check-ins on iOS 7, and has now partnered with Gnip to provide a continuous stream of anonymized check-in data. The data is available in two packages: the full Firehose access level and a filtered version via Gnip’s PowerTrack service. Here, we briefly discuss the APIs provided by Twitter and Facebook.

4.3.2.1 Twitter

The default account setting keeps users’ Tweets public, although users can protect their Tweets and make them visible only to their approved Twitter followers. However, less than 10 % of all the Twitter accounts are private. Tweets from public accounts (including replies and mentions) are available in JSON format through Twitter’s Search API for batch requests of past data and Streaming API for near real-time data.

Search API —Query Twitter for recent Tweets containing specific keywords. It is part of the Twitter REST API v1.1 (it attempts to comply with the design principles of the REST architectural style, which stands for Representational State Transfer) and requires an authorized application (using oAuth, the open standard for authorization) before retrieving any results from the API.

Streaming API —A real-time stream of Tweets, filtered by user ID, keyword, geographic location or random sampling.

One may retrieve recent Tweets containing particular keywords through Twitter’s Search API (part of REST API v1.1) with the following API call: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=APPLE and real-time data using the streaming API call: https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json .

Twitter’s Streaming API allows data to be accessed via filtering (by keywords, user IDs or location) or by sampling of all updates from a select amount of users. Default access level ‘Spritzer’ allows sampling of roughly 1 % of all public statuses, with the option to retrieve 10 % of all statuses via the ‘Gardenhose’ access level (more suitable for data mining and research applications). In social media, streaming APIs are often called Firehose—a syndication feed that publishes all public activities as they happen in one big stream. Twitter has recently announced the Twitter Data Grants program, where researchers can apply to get access to Twitter’s public tweets and historical data in order to get insights from its massive set of data (Twitter has more than 500 million tweets a day); research institutions and academics will not get the Firehose access level; instead, they will only get the data set needed for their research project. Researchers can apply for it at the following address: https://engineering.twitter.com/research/data-grants .

Twitter results are stored in a JSON array of objects containing the fields shown in Fig.  4 . The JSON array consists of a list of objects matching the supplied filters and the search string, where each object is a Tweet and its structure is clearly specified by the object’s fields, e.g., ‘created_at’ and ‘from_user’. The example in Fig.  4 consists of the output of calling Twitter’s GET search API via http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=financial%20times&rpp=1&include_entities=true&result_type=mixed where the parameters specify that the search query is ‘financial times,’ one result per page, each Tweet should have a node called ‘entities’ (i.e., metadata about the Tweet) and list ‘mixed’ results types, i.e., include both popular and real-time results in the response.

Example Output in JSON for Twitter REST API v1

4.3.2.2 Facebook

Facebook’s privacy issues are more complex than Twitter’s, meaning that a lot of status messages are harder to obtain than Tweets, requiring ‘open authorization’ status from users. Facebook currently stores all data as objects Footnote 1 and has a series of APIs, ranging from the Graph and Public Feed APIs to Keyword Insight API. In order to access the properties of an object, its unique ID must be known to make the API call. Facebook’s Search API (part of Facebook’s Graph API) can be accessed by calling https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=QUERY&type=page . The detailed API query format is shown in Fig.  5 . Here, ‘QUERY’ can be replaced by any search term, and ‘page’ can be replaced with ‘post,’ ‘user,’ ‘page,’ ‘event,’ ‘group,’ ‘place,’ ‘checkin,’ ‘location’ or ‘placetopic.’ The results of this search will contain the unique ID for each object. When returning the individual ID for a particular search result, one can use https://graph.facebook.com/ID to obtain further page details such as number of ‘likes.’ This kind of information is of interest to companies when it comes to brand awareness and competition monitoring.

Facebook Graph API Search Query Format

The Facebook Graph API search queries require an access token included in the request. Searching for pages and places requires an ‘app access token’, whereas searching for other types requires a user access token.

Replacing ‘page’ with ‘post’ in the aforementioned search URL will return all public statuses containing this search term. Footnote 2 Batch requests can be sent by following the procedure outlined here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/batch/ . Information on retrieving real-time updates can be found here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/realtime/ . Facebook also returns data in JSON format and so can be retrieved and stored using the same methods as used with data from Twitter, although the fields are different depending on the search type, as illustrated in Fig.  6 .

Facebook Graph API Search Results for q=’Centrica’ and type=’page’

4.3.3 RSS feeds

A large number of Web sites already provide access to content via RSS feeds. This is the syndication standard for publishing regular updates to web-based content based on a type of XML file that resides on an Internet server. For Web sites, RSS feeds can be created manually or automatically (with software).

An RSS Feed Reader reads the RSS feed file, finds what is new converts it to HTML and displays it. The program fragment in Fig.  7 shows the code for the control and channel statements for the RSS feed. The channel statements define the overall feed or channel, one set of channel statements in the RSS file.

Example RSS Feed Control and Channel Statements

4.3.4 Blogs, news groups and chat services

Blog scraping is the process of scanning through a large number of blogs, usually daily, searching for and copying content. This process is conducted through automated software. Figure  8 illustrates example code for Blog Scraping. This involves getting a Web site’s source code via Java’s URL Class, which can eventually be parsed via Regular Expressions to capture the target content.

Example Code for Blog Scraping

4.3.5 News feeds

News feeds are delivered in a variety of textual formats, often as machine-readable XML documents, JSON or CSV files. They include numerical values, tags and other properties that tend to represent underlying news stories. For testing purposes, historical information is often delivered via flat files, while live data for production is processed and delivered through direct data feeds or APIs. Figure  9 shows a snippet of the software calls to retrieve filtered NY Times articles.

Scraping New York Times Articles

Having examined the ‘classic’ social media data feeds, as an illustration of scraping innovative data sources, we will briefly look at geospatial feeds.

4.3.6 Geospatial feeds

Much of the ‘geospatial’ social media data come from mobile devices that generate location- and time-sensitive data. One can differentiate between four types of mobile social media feeds (Kaplan 2012 ):

Location and time sensitive —exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location at one specific point-in time (e.g., Foursquare).

Location sensitive only —exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location, which are tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g., Yelp and Qype)

Time sensitive only —transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices to increase immediacy (e.g., posting Twitter messages or Facebook status updates)

Neither location or time sensitive —transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g., watching a YouTube video or reading a Wikipedia entry)

With increasingly advanced mobile devices, notably smartphones, the content (photos, SMS messages, etc.) has geographical identification added, called ‘geotagged.’ These geospatial metadata are usually latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data or place names. GeoRSS is an emerging standard to encode the geographic location into a web feed, with two primary encodings: GeoRSS Geography Markup Language (GML) and GeoRSS Simple.

Example tools are GeoNetwork Opensource—a free comprehensive cataloging application for geographically referenced information, and FeedBurner—a web feed provider that can also provide geotagged feeds, if the specified feeds settings allow it.

As an illustration Fig.  10 shows the pseudo-code for analyzing a geospatial feed.

Pseudo-code for Analyzing a Geospatial Feed

5 Text cleaning, tagging and storing

The importance of ‘quality versus quantity’ of data in social media scraping and analytics cannot be overstated (i.e., garbage in and garbage out ). In fact, many details of analytics models are defined by the types and quality of the data. The nature of the data will also influence the database and hardware used.

Naturally, unstructured textual data can be very noisy (i.e., dirty). Hence, data cleaning (or cleansing, scrubbing) is an important area in social media analytics. The process of data cleaning may involve removing typographical errors or validating and correcting values against a known list of entities. Specifically, text may contain misspelled words, quotations, program codes, extra spaces, extra line breaks, special characters, foreign words, etc. So in order to achieve high-quality text mining, it is necessary to conduct data cleaning at the first step: spell checking, removing duplicates, finding and replacing text, changing the case of text, removing spaces and non-printing characters from text, fixing numbers, number signs and outliers, fixing dates and times, transforming and rearranging columns, rows and table data, etc.

Having reviewed the types and sources of raw data, we now turn to ‘cleaning’ or ‘cleansing’ the data to remove incorrect, inconsistent or missing information. Before discussing strategies for data cleaning, it is essential to identify possible data problems (Narang 2009 ):

Missing data —when a piece of information existed but was not included for whatever reason in the raw data supplied. Problems occur with: a) numeric data when ‘blank’ or a missing value is erroneously substituted by ‘zero’ which is then taken (for example) as the current price; and b) textual data when a missing word (like ‘not’) may change the whole meaning of a sentence.

Incorrect data —when a piece of information is incorrectly specified (such as decimal errors in numeric data or wrong word in textual data) or is incorrectly interpreted (such as a system assuming a currency value is in $ when in fact it is in £ or assuming text is in US English rather than UK English).

Inconsistent data —when a piece of information is inconsistently specified. For example, with numeric data, this might be using a mixture of formats for dates: 2012/10/14, 14/10/2012 or 10/14/2012. For textual data, it might be as simple as: using the same word in a mixture of cases, mixing English and French in a text message, or placing Latin quotes in an otherwise English text.

5.1 Cleansing data

A traditional approach to text data cleaning is to ‘pull’ data into a spreadsheet or spreadsheet-like table and then reformat the text. For example, Google Refine Footnote 3 is a standalone desktop application for data cleaning and transformation to various formats. Transformation expressions are written in proprietary Google Refine Expression Language (GREL) or JYTHON (an implementation of the Python programming language written in Java). Figure  11 illustrates text cleansing.

Text Cleansing Pseudo-code

5.2 Tagging unstructured data

Since most of the social media data is generated by humans and therefore is unstructured (i.e., it lacks a pre-defined structure or data model), an algorithm is required to transform it into structured data to gain any insight. Therefore, unstructured data need to be preprocessed, tagged and then parsed in order to quantify/analyze the social media data.

Adding extra information to the data (i.e., tagging the data) can be performed manually or via rules engines, which seek patterns or interpret the data using techniques such as data mining and text analytics. Algorithms exploit the linguistic, auditory and visual structure inherent in all of the forms of human communication. Tagging the unstructured data usually involve tagging the data with metadata or part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Clearly, the unstructured nature of social media data leads to ambiguity and irregularity when it is being processed by a machine in an automatic fashion.

Using a single data set can provide some interesting insights. However, combining more data sets and processing the unstructured data can result in more valuable insights, allowing us to answer questions that were impossible beforehand.

5.3 Storing data

As discussed, the nature of the social media data is highly influential on the design of the database and possibly the supporting hardware. It would also be very important to note that each social platform has very specific (and narrow) rules around how their respective data can be stored and used. These can be found in the Terms of Service for each platform.

For completeness, databases comprise:

Flat file —a flat file is a two-dimensional database (somewhat like a spreadsheet) containing records that have no structured interrelationship, that can be searched sequentially.

Relational database —a database organized as a set of formally described tables to recognize relations between stored items of information, allowing more complex relationships among the data items. Examples are row-based SQL databases and column-based kdb + used in finance.

noSQL databases —a class of database management system (DBMS) identified by its non-adherence to the widely used relational database management system (RDBMS) model. noSQL/newSQL databases are characterized as: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontally scalable.

5.3.1 Apache (noSQL) databases and tools

The growth of ultra-large Web sites such as Facebook and Google has led to the development of noSQL databases as a way of breaking through the speed constraints that relational databases incur. A key driver has been Google’s MapReduce, i.e., the software framework that allows developers to write programs that process massive amounts of unstructured data in parallel across a distributed cluster of processors or stand-alone computers (Chandrasekar and Kowsalya 2011 ). It was developed at Google for indexing Web pages and replaced their original indexing algorithms and heuristics in 2004. The model is inspired by the ‘Map’ and ‘Reduce’ functions commonly used in functional programming. MapReduce (conceptually) takes as input a list of records, and the ‘Map’ computation splits them among the different computers in a cluster. The result of the Map computation is a list of key/value pairs. The corresponding ‘Reduce’ computation takes each set of values that has the same key and combines them into a single value. A MapReduce program is composed of a ‘Map()’ procedure for filtering and sorting and a ‘Reduce()’ procedure for a summary operation (e.g., counting and grouping).

Figure  12 provides a canonical example application of MapReduce. This example is a process to count the appearances of each different word in a set of documents (MapReduce 2011 ).

The Canonical Example Application of MapReduce

5.3.1.1 Apache open-source software

The research community is increasingly using Apache software for social media analytics. Within the Apache Software Foundation, three levels of software are relevant:

Cassandra/hive databases —Apache Cassandra is an open source (noSQL) distributed DBMS providing a structured ‘key-value’ store. Key-value stores allow an application to store its data in a schema-less way. Related noSQL database products include: Apache Hive, Apache Pig and MongoDB, a scalable and high-performance open-source database designed to handle document-oriented storage. Since noSQL databases are ‘structure-less,’ it is necessary to have a companion SQL database to retain and map the structure of the corresponding data.

Hadoop platform —is a Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. An application is broken down into numerous small parts (also called fragments or blocks) that can be run on systems with thousands of nodes involving thousands of terabytes of storage.

Mahout —provides implementations of distributed or otherwise scalable analytics (machine learning) algorithms running on the Hadoop platform. Mahout Footnote 4 supports four classes of algorithms: a) clustering (e.g., K-Means, Fuzzy C-Means) that groups text into related groups; b) classification (e.g., Complementary Naive Bayes classifier) that uses supervised learning to classify text; c) frequent itemset mining takes a set of item groups and identifies which individual items usually appear together; and d) recommendation mining (e.g., user- and item-based recommenders) that takes users’ behavior and from that tries to find items users might like.

6 Social media analytics techniques

As discussed, opinion mining (or sentiment analysis) is an attempt to take advantage of the vast amounts of user-generated text and news content online. One of the primary characteristics of such content is its textual disorder and high diversity. Here, natural language processing, computational linguistics and text analytics are deployed to identify and extract subjective information from source text. The general aim is to determine the attitude of a writer (or speaker) with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document.

6.1 Computational science techniques

Automated sentiment analysis of digital texts uses elements from machine learning such as latent semantic analysis, support vector machines, bag-of-words model and semantic orientation (Turney 2002 ). In simple terms, the techniques employ three broad areas:

Computational statistics —refers to computationally intensive statistical methods including resampling methods, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, local regression, kernel density estimation and principal components analysis.

Machine learning —a system capable of the autonomous acquisition and integration of knowledge learnt from experience, analytical observation, etc. (Murphy 2012 ). These sub-symbolic systems further subdivide into:

Supervised learning such as Regression Trees, Discriminant Function Analysis, Support Vector Machines.

Unsupervised learning such as Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), K-Means.

Machine Learning aims to solve the problem of having huge amounts of data with many variables and is commonly used in areas such as pattern recognition (speech, images), financial algorithms (credit scoring, algorithmic trading) (Nuti et al. 2011 ), energy forecasting (load, price) and biology (tumor detection, drug discovery). Figure  13 illustrates the two learning types of machine learning and their algorithm categories.

Machine Learning Overview

Complexity science —complex simulation models of difficult-to-predict systems derived from statistical physics, information theory and nonlinear dynamics. The realm of physicists and mathematicians.

These techniques are deployed in two ways:

Data mining —knowledge discovery that extracts hidden patterns from huge quantities of data, using sophisticated differential equations, heuristics, statistical discriminators (e.g., hidden Markov models), and artificial intelligence machine learning techniques (e.g., neural networks, genetic algorithms and support vector machines).

Simulation modeling —simulation-based analysis that tests hypotheses. Simulation is used to attempt to predict the dynamics of systems so that the validity of the underlying assumption can be tested.

6.1.1 Stream processing

Lastly, we should mention stream processing (Botan et al 2010 ). Increasingly, analytics applications that consume real-time social media, financial ‘ticker’ and sensor networks data need to process high-volume temporal data with low latency. These applications require support for online analysis of rapidly changing data streams. However, traditional database management systems (DBMSs) have no pre-defined notion of time and cannot handle data online in near real time. This has led to the development of Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs) (Hebrail 2008 )—processing in main memory without storing the data on disk—that handle transient data streams on-line and process continuous queries on these data streams. Example commercial systems include: Oracle CEP engine, StreamBase and Microsoft’s StreamInsight (Chandramouli et al. 2010 ).

6.2 Sentiment analysis

Sentiment is about mining attitudes, emotions, feelings—it is subjective impressions rather than facts. Generally speaking, sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude expressed by the text writer or speaker with respect to the topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document (Mejova 2009 ). Pang and Lee ( 2008 ) provide a thorough documentation on the fundamentals and approaches of sentiment classification and extraction, including sentiment polarity, degrees of positivity, subjectivity detection, opinion identification, non-factual information, term presence versus frequency, POS (parts of speech), syntax, negation, topic-oriented features and term-based features beyond term unigrams.

6.2.1 Sentiment classification

Sentiment analysis divides into specific subtasks:

Sentiment context —to extract opinion, one needs to know the ‘context’ of the text, which can vary significantly from specialist review portals/feeds to general forums where opinions can cover a spectrum of topics (Westerski 2008 ).

Sentiment level —text analytics can be conducted at the document, sentence or attribute level.

Sentiment subjectivity —deciding whether a given text expresses an opinion or is factual (i.e., without expressing a positive/negative opinion).

Sentiment orientation/polarity —deciding whether an opinion in a text is positive , neutral or negative .

Sentiment strength —deciding the ‘strength’ of an opinion in a text: weak , mild or strong .

Perhaps, the most difficult analysis is identifying sentiment orientation/polarity and strength— positive (wonderful, elegant, amazing, cool), neutral (fine, ok) and negative (horrible, disgusting, poor, flakey, sucks) due to slang.

A popular approach is to assign orientation/polarity scores (+1, 0, −1) to all words: positive opinion (+1), neutral opinion (0) and negative opinion (−1). The overall orientation/polarity score of the text is the sum of orientation scores of all ‘opinion’ words found. However, there are various potential problems in this simplistic approach, such as negation (e.g., there is nothing I hate about this product). One method of estimating sentiment orientation/polarity of the text is pointwise mutual information (PMI) a measure of association used in information theory and statistics.

6.2.2 Supervised learning methods

There are a number of popular computational statistics and machine learning techniques used for sentiment analysis. For a good introduction, see (Khan et al 2010 ). Techniques include:

Naïve Bayes (NB) —a simple probabilistic classifier based on applying Bayes’ theorem with strong (naive) independence assumptions (when features are independent of one another within each class).

Maximum entropy (ME) —the probability distribution that best represents the current state of knowledge is the one with largest information-theoretical entropy.

Support vector machines (SVM) —are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data and recognize patterns, used for classification and regression analysis.

Logistic regression (LR) model —is a type of regression analysis used for predicting the outcome of a categorical (a variable that can take on a limited number of categories) criterion variable based on one or more predictor variables.

Latent semantic analysis —an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text (Kobayashi and Takeda 2000 ).

The bag-of-words model is a simplifying representation commonly used in natural language processing and IR, where a sentence or a document is represented as an unordered collection of words, disregarding grammar and even word order. This is a model traditionally applied to sentiment analysis thanks to its simplicity.

6.2.2.1 Naïve Bayes classifier (NBC)

As an example of sentiment analysis, we will describe briefly a Naive Bayes classifier (Murphy 2006 ). The Naive Bayes classifier is general purpose, simple to implement and works well for a range of applications. It classifies data in two steps:

Training step —using the training samples, the method estimates the parameters of a probability distribution, assuming features are conditionally independent given the class.

Analysis/testing step —For any unseen test sample, the method computes the posterior probability of that sample belonging to each class. The method then classifies the test sample according to the largest posterior probability.

Using the Naïve Bayes classifier, the classifier calculates the probability for a text to belong to each of the categories you test against. The category with the highest probability for the given text wins:

Figure  14 provides an example of sentiment classification using a Naïve Bayes classifier in Python. There are a number of Naïve Bayes classifier programs available in Java, including the jBNC toolkit ( http://jbnc.sourceforge.net ), WEKA ( www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka ) and Alchemy API ( www.alchemyapi.com/api/demo.html ).

Sentiment Classification Example using Python

We next look at the range of Social Media tools available, starting with ‘tools’ and ‘toolkits,’ and in the subsequent chapter at ‘comprehensive’ social media platforms. Since there are a large number of social media textual data services, tools and platforms, we will restrict ourselves examining a few leading examples.

7 Social media analytics tools

Opinion mining tools are crowded with (commercial) providers, most of which are skewed toward sentiment analysis of customer feedback about products and services. Fortunately, there is a vast spectrum of tools for textual analysis ranging from simple open-source tools to libraries, multi-function commercial toolkits and platforms. This section focuses on individual tools and toolkits for scraping, cleaning and analytics, and the next chapter looks at what we call social media platforms that provide both archive data and real-time feeds, and as well as sophisticated analytics tools.

7.1 Scientific programming tools

Popular scientific analytics libraries and tools have been enhanced to provide support for sourcing, searching and analyzing text. Examples include: R—used for statistical programming, MATLAB—used for numeric scientific programming, and Mathematica—used for symbolic scientific programming (computer algebra).

Data processing and data modeling, e.g., regression analysis, are straightforward using MATLAB, which provides time-series analysis, GUI and array-based statistics. MATLAB is significantly faster than the traditional programming languages and can be used for a wide range of applications. Moreover, the exhaustive built-in plotting functions make it a complex analytics toolkit. More computationally powerful algorithms can be developed using it in conjunction with the packages (e.g., FastICA in order to perform independent component analysis).

Python can be used for (natural) language detection, title and content extraction, query matching and, when used in conjunction with a module such as scikit-learn, it can be trained to perform sentiment analysis, e.g., using a Naïve Bayes classifier.

Another example, Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Applications) is an open-source project that analyzes ‘big data’ and discovers information that is relevant to the user.

7.2 Business toolkits

Business Toolkits are commercial suites of tools that allow users to source, search and analyze text for a range of commercial purposes.

SAS Sentiment Analysis Manager, part of the SAS Text Analytics program, can be used for scraping content sources, including mainstream Web sites and social media outlets, as well as internal organizational text sources, and creates reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, customers and competitors in real time.

RapidMiner (Hirudkar and Sherekar 2013 ), a popular toolkit offering an open-source Community Edition released under the GNU AGPL and also an Enterprise Edition offered under a commercial license. RapidMiner provides data mining and machine learning procedures including: data loading and transformation (Extract, Transform, Load, a.k.a. ETL), data preprocessing and visualization, modeling, evaluation, and deployment. RapidMiner is written in Java and uses learning schemes and attribute evaluators from the Weka machine learning environment and statistical modeling schemes from the R project.

Other examples are Lexalytics that provides a commercial sentiment analysis engine for many OEM and direct customers; and IBM SPSS Statistics is one of the most used programs for statistical analysis in social science.

7.3 Social media monitoring tools

Social media monitoring tools are sentiment analysis tools for tracking and measuring what people are saying (typically) about a company or its products, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape.

In the area of social media monitoring examples include: Social Mention, ( http://socialmention.com/ ), which provides social media alerts similarly to Google Alerts; Amplified Analytics ( http://www.amplifiedanalytics.com/ ), which focuses on product reviews and marketing information; Lithium Social Media Monitoring; and Trackur, which is an online reputation monitoring tool that tracks what is being said on the Internet.

Google also provides a few useful free tools. Google Trends shows how often a particular search-term input compares to the total search volume. Another tool built around Google Search is Google Alerts—a content change detection tool that provides notifications automatically. Google also acquired FeedBurner—an RSS feeds management—in 2007.

7.4 Text analysis tools

Text analysis tools are broad-based tools for natural language processing and text analysis. Examples of companies in the text analysis area include: OpenAmplify and Jodange whose tools automatically filter and aggregate thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media.

There are also a large number of freely available tools produced by academic groups and non-governmental organizations (NGO) for sourcing, searching and analyzing opinions. Examples include Stanford NLP group tools and LingPipe, a suite of Java libraries for the linguistic analysis of human language (Teufl et al 2010 ).

A variety of open-source text analytics tools are available, especially for sentiment analysis. A popular text analysis tool, which is also open source, is Python NLTK—Natural Language Toolkit ( www.nltk.org/ ), which includes open-source Python modules, linguistic data and documentation for text analytics. Another one is GATE ( http://gate.ac.uk/sentiment ).

We should also mention Lexalytics Sentiment Toolkit which performs automatic sentiment analysis on input documents. It is powerful when used on a large number of documents, but it does not perform data scraping.

Other commercial software for text mining include: AeroText, Attensity, Clarabridge, IBM LanguageWare, SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys, Language Computer Corporation, STATISTICA Text Miner and WordStat.

7.5 Data visualization tools

The data visualization tools provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities and allow different types of users to gain insights from the ‘big’ data. The users can perform exploratory analysis through interactive user interfaces available on the majority of devices, with a recent focus on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). The data visualization tools help the users identify patterns, trends and relationships in the data which were previously latent. Fast ad hoc visualization on the data can reveal patterns and outliers, and it can be performed on large-scale data sets frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop or Amazon Kinesis. Two notable visualization tools are SAS Visual Analytics and Tableau.

7.6 Case study: SAS Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Analytics

SAS is the leading advanced analytics software for BI, data management and predictive analytics. SAS Sentiment Analysis (SAS Institute 2013 ) automatically rates and classifies opinions. It also performs data scraping from Web sites, social media and internal file systems. Then, it processes in a unified format to evaluate relevance with regard to its pre-defined topics. SAS Sentiment Analysis identifies trends and emotional changes. Experts can refine the sentiment models through an interactive workbench. The tool automatically assigns sentiment scores to the input documents as they are retrieved in real time.

SAS Sentiment Analysis combines statistical modeling and linguistics (rule-based natural language processing techniques) in order to output accurate sentiment analysis results. The tool monitors and evaluates sentiment changes over time; it extracts sentiments in real time as the scraped data is being retrieved and generates reports showing patterns and detailed reactions.

The software identifies where (i.e., on what channel) the topic is being discussed and quantifies perceptions in the market as the software scrapes and analyzes both internal and external content about your organization (or the concept you are analyzing) and competitors, identifying positive, neutral, negative or ‘no sentiment’ texts in real time.

SAS Sentiment Analysis and SAS Social Media Analytics have a user-friendly interface for developing models; users can upload sentiment analysis models directly to the server in order to minimize the manual model deployment. More advanced users can use the interactive workbench to refine their models. The software includes graphics to illustrate instantaneously the text classification (i.e., positive, negative, neutral or unclassified) and point-and-click exploration in order to drill the classified text into detail. The tool also provides some workbench functionality through APIs, allowing for automatic/programmatic integration with other modules/projects. Figure  15 illustrates the SAS Social Media Analytics graphical reports, which provide user-friendly sentiment insights. The SAS software has crawling plugins for the most popular social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Bing, LinkedIn, Flickr and Google. It can also be customized to crawl any Web site using the mark-up matcher; this provides a point-and-click interface to indicate what areas need to be extracted from an HTML or XML. SAS Social Media Analytics gathers online conversations from popular networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), blogs and review sites (e.g., TripAdvisor and Priceline), and scores the data for influence and sentiment. It provides visualization tools for real-time tracking; it allows users to submit customized queries and returns a geographical visualization with brand-specific commentary from Twitter, as illustrated in Fig.  16 .

Graphical Reports with Sentiment Insights

SAS Visualization of Real-Time Tracking via Twitter

8 Social media analytics platforms

Here, we examine comprehensive social media platforms that combine social media archives, data feeds, data mining and data analysis tools. Simply put, the platforms are different from tools and toolkits since platforms are more comprehensive and provide both tools and data.

They broadly subdivide into:

News platforms —platforms such as Thomson Reuters providing news archives/feeds and associated analytics and targeting companies such as financial institutions seeking to monitor market sentiment in news.

Social network media platforms —platforms that provide data mining and analytics on Twitter, Facebook and a wide range of other social network media sources. Providers typically target companies seeking to monitor sentiment around their brands or products.

8.1 News platforms

The two most prominent business news feed providers are Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.

Computer read news in real time and provide automatically key indicators and meaningful insights. The news items are automatically retrieved, analyzed and interpreted in a few milliseconds. The machine-readable news indicators can potentially improve quantitative strategies, risk management and decision making.

Examples of machine-readable news include: Thomson Reuters Machine Readable News, Bloomberg’s Event-Driven Trading Feed and AlphaFlash (Deutsche Börse’s machine-readable news feed). Thomson Reuters Machine Readable News (Thomson Reuters 2012a , b , c ) has Reuters News content dating back to 1987, and comprehensive news from over 50 third-parties dating back to 2003, such as PR Newswire, Business Wire and the Regulatory News Service (LSE). The feed offers full text and comprehensive metadata via streaming XML.

Thomson Reuters News Analytics uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to score news items on tens of thousands of companies and nearly 40 commodities and energy topics. Items are measured across the following dimensions:

Author sentiment —metrics for how positive, negative or neutral the tone of the item is, specific to each company in the article.

Relevance —how relevant or substantive the story is for a particular item.

Volume analysis —how much news is happening on a particular company.

Uniqueness —how new or repetitive the item is over various time periods.

Headline analysis —denotes special features such as broker actions, pricing commentary, interviews, exclusives and wrap-ups.

8.2 Social network media platforms

Attensity, Brandwatch, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (previously called Radian6) and Sysomos MAP (Media Analysis Platform) are examples of social media monitoring platforms, which measure demographics, influential topics and sentiments. They include text analytics and sentiment analysis on online consumer conversations and provide user-friendly interfaces for customizing the search query, dashboards, reports and file export features (e.g., to Excel or CSV format). Most of the platforms scrape a range of social network media using a distributed crawler that targets: micro-blogging (Twitter via full Twitter Firehose), blogs (Blogger, WordPress, etc.), social networks (Facebook and MySpace), forums, news sites, images sites (Flickr) and corporate sites. Some of the platforms provide multi-language support for widely used languages (e.g., English, French, German, Italian and Spanish).

Sentiment analysis platforms use two main methodologies. One involves a statistical or model-based approach wherein the system learns to assess sentiment by analyzing large quantities of pre-scored material. The other method utilizes a large dictionary of pre-scored phrases.

RapidMiner Footnote 5 is a platform which combines data mining and data analysis, which, depending on the requirements, can be open source. It uses the WEKA machine learning library and provides access to data sources such as Excel, Access, Oracle, IBM, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Text files.

Mozenda provides a point-and-click user interface for extracting specific information from the Web sites and allows automation and data export to CSV, TSV or XML files.

DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data from the leading social networks and millions of other sources, enabling clients to aggregate, filter and gain insights and discover trends from the billions of public social conversations. Once the data is aggregated and processed (i.e., DataSift can filter and add context, such as enrichments—language processing, geodata and demographics—and categorization—spam detection, intent identification and machine learning), the customers can use pre-built integrations with popular BI tools, application and developer tools to deliver the data into their businesses, or use the DataSift APIs to stream real-time data into their applications.

There are a growing number of social media analytics platforms being founded nowadays. Other notable platforms that handle sentiment and semantic analysis of Web and Web 2.0-sourced material include Google Analytics, HP Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer), IBM SPSS Modeler, Adobe SocialAnalytics, GraphDive, Keen IO, Mass Relevance, Parse.ly, ViralHeat, Socialbakers, DachisGroup, evolve24, OpenAmplify and AdmantX.

Recently, more and more specific social analytics platforms have emerged. One of them is iSpot.tv which launched its own social media analytics platform that matches television ads with mentions on Twitter and Facebook. It provides real-time reports about when and where an ad appears, together with what people are saying about it on social networks (iSpot.tv monitors almost 80 different networks).

Thomson Reuters has recently announced that it is now incorporating Twitter sentiment analysis for the Thomson Reuters Eikon market analysis and trading platform, providing visualizations and charts based on the sentiment data. In the previous year, Bloomberg incorporated tweets related to specific companies in a wider data stream.

8.3 Case study: Thomson Reuters News Analytics

Thomson Reuters News Analytics (TRNA) provides a huge news archive with analytics to read and interpret news, offering meaningful insights. TRNA scores news items on over 25,000 equities and nearly 40 topics (commodities and energy). The platform scrapes and analyzes news data in real time and feeds the data into other programs/projects or quantitative strategies.

TRNA uses an NLP system from Lexalytics, one of the linguistics technology leaders, that can track news sentiment over time, and scores text across the various dimensions as mentioned in Sect. 8.1 .

The platform’s text scoring and metadata has more than 80 fields (Thomson Reuters 2010 ) such as:

Item type —stage of the story: Alert, Article, Updates or Corrections.

Item genre —classification of the story, i.e., interview, exclusive and wrap-up.

Headline —alert or headline text.

Relevance —varies from 0 to 1.0.

Prevailing sentiment —can be 1, 0 or −1.

Positive, neutral, negative —more detailed sentiment indication.

Broker action —denotes broker actions: upgrade, downgrade, maintain, undefined or whether it is the broker itself

Price/market commentary —used to flag items describing pricing/market commentary

Topic codes —describes what the story is about, i.e., RCH = Research, RES = Results, RESF = Results Forecast, MRG = Mergers and Acquisitions

A snippet of the news sentiment analysis is illustrated in Fig.  17 .

Thomson Reuters News Discovery Application with Sentiment Analysis

In 2012, Thomson Reuters extended its machine-readable news offering to include sentiment analysis and scoring for social media. TRNA’s extension is called Thomson Reuters News Analytics (TRNA) for Internet News and Social Media, which aggregates content from over four million social media channels and 50,000 Internet news sites. The content is then analyzed by TRNA in real time, generating a quantifiable output across dimensions such as sentiment, relevance, novelty volume, category and source ranks. This extension uses the same extensive metadata tagging (across more than 80 fields).

TRNA for Internet News and Social Media is a powerful platform analyzing, tagging and filtering millions of public and premium sources of Internet content, turning big data into actionable ideas. The platform also provides a way to visually analyze the big data. It can be combined with Panopticon Data Visualization Software in order to reach meaningful conclusions more quickly with visually intuitive displays (Thomson Reuters 2012a , b , c ), as illustrated in Fig.  18 .

Combining TRNA for Internet News and Social Media with Panopticon Data Visualization Software

Thomson Reuters also expanded the News Analytics service with MarketPsych Indices (Thomson Reuters 2012a , b , c ), which allows for real-time psychological analysis of news and social media. The Thomson Reuters MarketPsych Indices (TRMI) service gains a quantitative view of market psychology as it attempts to identify human emotion and sentiment. It is a complement to TRNA and uses NLP processing created by MarketPsych ( http://www.marketpsych.com ), a leading company in behavioral psychology in financial markets.

Behavioral economists have extensively investigated whether emotions affect markets in predictable ways, and TRMI attempts to measure the state of ‘emotions’ in real time in order to identify patterns as they emerge. TRMI has two key indicator types:

Emotional indicators (sentiments) —emotions such as Gloom , Fear , Trust , Uncertainty , Innovation , Anger , Stress , Urgency , Optimism and Joy .

Buzz metrics —they indicate how much something is being discussed in the news and social media and include macroeconomic themes (e.g., Litigation, Mergers, Volatility, Financials sector, Airlines sector and Clean Technology sector )

The platform from Thomson Reuters allows the exploitation of news and social media to be used to spot opportunities and capitalize on market inefficiencies (Thomson Reuters 2013 ).

9 Experimental computational environment for social media

As we have discussed in Sect. 2 methodology and critique, researchers arguably require a comprehensive experimental computational environment/facility for social media research with the following attributes:

Data scraping —the ability through easily programmable APIs to scrape any type of social media (social networking media, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, news, etc.).

Data streaming —to access and combine real-time feeds and archived data for analytics.

Data storage —a major facility for storing principal data sources and for archiving data collected for specific projects.

Data protection/security —the stored data needs to be protected to stop users attempting to ‘suck it out’ off the facility. Access to certain data sets may need to be restricted and charges may be levied on access (cf. Wharton Research Data Services).

Programmable interfaces —researchers need access to simple application programming interfaces (APIs) to scrape and store other available data sources that may not be automatically collected.

9.2 Analytics

Analytics dashboards —non-programming interfaces are required for giving what might be referred to as ‘deep’ access to ‘raw’ data.

Programmable analytics —programming interfaces are also required so users can deploy advanced data mining and computer simulation models using MATLAB, Java and Python.

Stream processing —facilities are required to support analytics on streamed real-time data feeds, such as Twitter feeds, news feeds and financial tick data.

High-performance computing —lastly the environment needs to support non-programming interfaces to MapReduce/Hadoop, NoSQL databases and Grids of processors.

Decentralized analytics —if researchers are to combine social media data with highly sensitive/valuable proprietary data held by governments, financial institutions, retailers and other commercial organizations, then the environment needs in the future to support decentralized analytics across distributed data sources and in a highly secure way.

Realistically, this is best facilitated at a national or international level.

To provide some insight into the structure of an experimental computational environment for social media (analytics), below we present the system architecture of the UCL SocialSTORM analytics platform developed by Dr. Michal Galas and his colleagues (Galas et al. 2012 ) to University College London (UCL).

University College London’s social media streaming, storage and analytics platform (SocialSTORM) is a cloud-based ‘central hub’ platform, which facilitates the acquisition of text-based data from online sources such as Twitter, Facebook, RSS media and news. The system includes facilities to upload and run Java-coded simulation models to analyze the aggregated data, which may comprise scraped social data and/or users’ own proprietary data.

9.3 System architecture

Figure  19 shows the architecture of the SocialSTORM platform, and the following section outlines the key components of the overall system. The basic idea is that each external feed has a dedicated connectivity engine (API) and this streams data to the message bus, which handles internal communication, analytics and storage.

SocialSTORM Platform Architecture

Connectivity engines —the connectivity modules communicate with the external data sources, including Twitter and Facebook’s APIs, financial blogs, various RSS and news feeds. The platform’s APIs are continually being expanded to incorporate other social media sources as required. Data is fed into SocialSTORM in real time, including a random sample of all public updates from Twitter, providing gigabytes of text-based data every day.

Messaging bus —the message bus serves as the internal communication layer which accepts the incoming data streams (messages) from the various connectivity engines, parses these (from either JSON or XML format) to an internal representation of data in the platform, distributes the information across all the interested modules and writes the various data to the appropriate tables of the main database.

Data warehouse —the database supports terabytes of text-based entries, which are accompanied by various types of metadata to expand the potential avenues of research. Entries are organized by source and accurately time-stamped with the time of publication, as well as being tagged with topics for easy retrieval by simulation models. The platform currently uses HBase, but in future might use Apache Cassandra or Hive.

Simulation manager —the simulation manager provides an external API for clients to interact with the data for research purposes, including a web-based GUI whereby users can select various filters to apply to the data sets before uploading a Java-coded simulation model to perform the desired analysis on the data. This facilitates all client-access to the data warehouse and also allows users to upload their own data sets for aggregation with UCL’s social data for a particular simulation. There is also the option to switch between historical mode (which mines data existing at the time the simulation is started) and live mode (which ‘listens’ to incoming data streams and performs analysis in real time).

9.4 Platform components

The platform comprises the following modules, which are illustrated in Fig.  20 :

Environment System Architecture and Modules

Back-end services —this provides the core of the platform functionalities. It is a set of services that allow connections to data providers, propagation processing and aggregation of data feeds, execution and maintenance of models, as well as their management in a multiuser environment.

Front-end client APIs —this provides a set of programmatic and graphical interfaces that can be used to interact with a platform to implement and test analytical models. The programmatic access provides model templates to simplify access to some of the functionalities and defines generic structure of every model in the platform. The graphic user interface allows visual management of analytical models. It enables the user to visualize data in various forms, provides data watch grid capabilities, provides a dynamic visualization of group behavior of data and allows users to observe information on events relevant to the user’s environment.

Connectivity engine —this functionality provides a means of communication with the outside world, with financial brokers, data providers and others. Each of the outside venues utilized by the platform has a dedicated connector object responsible for control of communication. This is possible due to the fact that each of the outside institutions provide either a dedicated API or is using a communication protocol (e.g., the FIX protocol and the JSON/XML-based protocol). The platform provides a generalized interface to allow standardization of a variety of connectors.

Internal communication layer —the idea behind the use of the internal messaging system in the platform draws from the concept of event-driven programming. Analytical platforms utilize events as a main means of communication between their elements. The elements, in turn, are either producers or consumers of the events. The approach significantly simplifies the architecture of such system while making it scalable and flexible for further extensions.

Aggregation database —this provides a fast and robust DBMS functionality, for an entry-level aggregation of data, which is then filtered, enriched, restructured and stored in big data facilities. Aggregation facilities enable analytical platforms to store, extract and manipulate large amounts of data. The storage capabilities of the Aggregation element not only allow replay of historical data for modeling purposes, but also enable other, more sophisticated tasks related to functioning of the platform including model risk analysis, evaluation of performance of models and many more.

Client SDK —this is a complete set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that enable development, implementation and testing of new analytical models with use of the developer’s favorite IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The SDK allows connection from the IDE to the server side of the platform to provide all the functionalities the user may need to develop and execute models.

Shared memory —this provides a buffer-type functionality that speeds up the delivery of temporal/historical data to models and the analytics-related elements of the platform (i.e., the statistical analysis library of methods), and, at the same time, reduces the memory usage requirement. The main idea is to have a central point in the memory (RAM) of the platform that will manage and provide a temporal/historical data from the current point of time up to a specified number of timestamps back in history). Since the memory is shared, no model will have to keep and manage history by itself. Moreover, since the memory is kept in RAM rather than in the files or the DBMS, the access to it is instant and bounded only by the performance of hardware and the platform on which the buffers work.

Model templates —the platform supports two generic types of models: push and pull. The push type registers itself to listen to a specified set of data streams during initialization, and the execution of the model logic is triggered each time a new data feed arrives to the platform. This type is dedicated to very quick, low-latency, high-frequency models and the speed is achieved at the cost of small shared memory buffers. The pull model template executes and requests data on its own, based on a schedule. Instead of using the memory buffers, it has a direct connection to the big data facilities and hence can request as much historical data as necessary, at the expense of speed.

10 Conclusions

As discussed, the easy availability of APIs provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services has led to an ‘explosion’ of data services and software tools for scraping and sentiment analysis, and social media analytics platforms. This paper surveys some of the social media software tools, and for completeness introduced social media scraping, data cleaning and sentiment analysis.

Perhaps, the biggest concern is that companies are increasingly restricting access to their data to monetize their content. It is important that researchers have access to computational environments and especially ‘big’ social media data for experimentation. Otherwise, computational social science could become the exclusive domain of major companies, government agencies and a privileged set of academic researchers presiding over private data from which they produce papers that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Arguably what is required are public-domain computational environments and data facilities for quantitative social science, which can be accessed by researchers via a cloud-based facility.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Michal Galas who led the design and implementation of the UCL SocialSTORM platform with the assistance of Ilya Zheludev, Kacper Chwialkowski and Dan Brown. Dr. Christian Hesse of Deutsche Bank is also acknowledged for collaboration on News Analytics.

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Batrinca, B., Treleaven, P.C. Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms. AI & Soc 30 , 89–116 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0549-4

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Received : 25 February 2014

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Published : 26 July 2014

Issue Date : February 2015

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0549-4

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10 Best AI Social Media Tools 2024

eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More .

Artificial intelligence (AI) social media tools are software built to enhance and optimize social media marketing efforts in a wide variety of ways.

These AI social media apps help automate content creation, scheduling, monitoring, engagement, and audience-targeting tasks. Some AI tools even offer advanced capabilities that enable analyzing data, identifying trends, making data-driven recommendations, and helping businesses better understand and reach their target audience on social media platforms.

Our review of the top AI social media software evaluated several platforms and selected the best options to help you discover the right tool for your company.

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Top AI Social Media Software Comparison

See how the best AI social media software compare in terms of pricing, the segment they serve, and their features.

HubSpot: Best for Social Media ROI Reporting

Overall rating: 4.5.

HubSpot is a provider of inbound marketing and sales software. It helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It offers various marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM tools. HubSpot’s platform includes email marketing, social media management, website analytics, lead nurturing, and more.

HubSpot has an artificial intelligence social media post generator that helps businesses create, refine, and automate their social media posts. With this generative AI tool , you can overcome writer’s block, generate more leads, and save time by having the AI assist with the imagination and creation of social media content for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. The AI social media post generator not only helps you rewrite but also expand upon your initial post ideas, ensuring the content is engaging, relevant, and tailored to your brand’s tone of voice.

HubSpot’s AI social media post generator is great for marketers who want to analyze the performance of their social media posts and track their return on investment. It provides easy-to-use reporting capabilities that allow users to monitor and assess the engagement metrics of their AI-assisted posts on various social media platforms.

Pros and Cons

• Free Tools: Free for up to 5 users.
• Starter: $15 per month per seat when paid upfront, or $20 per month per seat when paid monthly.
• Professional: Starts at $800 per month when paid upfront. It includes three seats and additional seats cost $45 per month. When paid monthly, it costs $890 per month. It includes three seats and additional seats cost $50 per month.
• Enterprise: Starts at $3,600 per month. It includes five seats and additional seats cost $75 per month.
• SEO recommendations and optimizations.
• Reporting dashboard.
• Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp integration.
• Multi-language content creation.
• A/B testing.

To see a list of the leading generative AI apps, read our guide: Top 20 Generative AI Tools and Apps 2024

ContentStudio: Best for Post Scheduling

Overall rating: 4.5/5.

ContentStudio helps creators manage and publish content across various digital channels, such as websites, social media, and email marketing. It typically provides AI tools for creating, scheduling, optimizing, and analyzing content to help businesses enhance their online presence and engage with their audience.

From AI-generated captions and images to hashtag suggestions and emoji integration, ContentStudio offers a range of tools to enhance your social media presence. Additionally, you can manage your social campaigns, schedule posts, and analyze performance all in one place.

ContentStudio’s hands-free scheduling feature helps you plan, create, and schedule posts automatically published to the proper channels at the right time.

A 14-day free trial is available.

• Starter: $20 per month when billed annually or $25 per month when billed monthly. One user only.
• Pro: $40 per month when billed annually or $49 per month when billed monthly. Two users only.
• Agency small: $80 per month when billed annually or $99 per month when billed monthly. Five users only.
• Agency medium: $160 per month when billed annually or $199 per month when billed monthly. 10 users only.
• Agency large: $240 per month when billed annually or $299 per month when billed monthly. 20 users only.
• Supported social networks include X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more
• Publishing to blogs
• Planning and collaboration capabilities
• Analytics and reporting
• Content and influencer discovery
• AI assistant
• AI caption generator

Hootsuite: Best for Brand Social Listening

Overall rating: 4.3/5.

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows users to manage all their accounts from one centralized dashboard. With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts, engage with your audience, monitor analytics, and run social media advertising campaigns. It also offers features for social listening, collaboration among team members, and reporting on social media performance.

With Hootsuite’s AI-powered real-time monitoring and social listening capabilities, you can track mentions of your brand, company, products, and competitors to stay informed and respond effectively. The tool provides crisis management capability, including automatic alerts and response planning, to help you navigate any unexpected situations or spikes in social activity.

The platform supports Instagram (business and personal profiles), Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups), LinkedIn (profiles and pages), and YouTube channels.

A 30-day free trial is available.

• Professional: $99 per month — one user only
• Team: $249 per month for up to 3 users
• Enterprise custom: Custom quote. Starts with five users
• LinkedIn page target audience
• Content discovery streams
• Asset and content library
• Team productivity reporting
• Bulk scheduling

Synthesia: Best for Creating Video Content

Overall rating: 4.2/5.

Synthesia is an AI video generation platform designed to help you create realistic videos from text input. It can be used for various applications, such as making personalized videos, virtual avatars, and digital storytelling. It can also be used to create marketing videos, e-learning content, and visual content for social media.

You can create videos by inputting your script, customizing the visuals, and generating the video. The platform offers over 160 AI avatars and 120 languages for voiceovers. Synthesia allows users to collaborate with their team by sharing the video for feedback and then either downloading the video in .mp4 format, getting a shareable link, or using an embed code to share it.

• Starter: $22 per month, billed annually, or $29 monthly
• Creator: $67 per month, billed annually, or $89 monthly
• Enterprise: Custom quote
• Supports 120 languages plus voices
• Offers 140+ AI avatars
• Auto-generated closed captions
• Lets you create professional-looking product explainers

Sprout Social: Best for Performance Analytics

Overall rating: 4.1/5.

Sprout Social is commonly used by marketing and social media teams to streamline their social media marketing efforts. It allows them to schedule posts, track performance metrics, monitor mentions, and engage with their audience across various social media platforms.

Sprout Social incorporates AI and automation features to help businesses streamline their social media management tasks. These capabilities include sentiment and textual analysis, which can help identify trends and patterns in social media conversations. Sprout’s integration with OpenAI enables the automation of manual tasks, allowing teams to focus on high-impact work that requires human decision-making.

Sprout Social stands out for its robust performance analytics capabilities. It provides detailed insights into the performance of your social media campaigns, helping you track key metrics such as engagement, reach, and conversion rates.

• Standard: $199 per seat/month billed annually or $249 per seat/month billed monthly.
• Professional: $299 per seat/month billed annually or $399 per seat/month billed monthly.
• Advanced: $399 per seat/month billed annually or $499 per seat/month billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Custom quote.
• Social reporting for Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn
• Digital asset and content library
• Support influencer marketing
• Sentiment in the smart inbox and reviews
• Provides competitive reports for Instagram, Facebook, and X

Jasper AI: Best for AI-Assisted Content Generation

Overall rating: 4/5.

If you need an advanced tool to generate AI-assisted social media posts, Jasper AI could be a suitable solution. Jasper AI is an AI-powered content creation platform that helps businesses and individuals generate high-quality written content. It uses natural language processing (NLP) technology to assist in creating blog posts, articles, social media posts, and other written content.

Jasper AI offers AI-charged social media tools that can help you create captions, repurpose content at scale, generate assets for marketing campaigns, remix content, access over 50 templates for various skills like writing headlines and blog posts, and utilize an AI chatbot for tasks, research, and answering questions through conversational interfaces.

A 7-day free trial is available.

• Creator: $39 per month/seat billed annually or $49 per month/seat billed monthly
• Pro: $59 per month/seat billed annually or $69 per month/seat billed monthly
• Business: Custom quote
• Support over 30 languages
• Company knowledge hub
• Document collaboration
• Includes plagiarism checker
• Offers 50+ templates

Flick: Best for Instagram Users

Overall rating: 3.7/5.

While Flick supports and works with various social media platforms, it is primarily known as a powerful tool for Instagram users.

From data analytics and hashtag performance tracking to audience insights and content scheduling, Flick provides users with the resources to improve their social media strategy and engagement. The tool offers advanced hashtag research and management tools, including hashtag collections, suggested hashtags, hashtag search, and smart auditing. You can access hashtag metrics, analyze hashtag performance, and use the randomizer feature to discover new hashtags for your content.

In terms of scheduling, Flick supports Instagram (Posts & Reels), Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn, allowing you to plan and publish content across multiple platforms from one centralized dashboard. Flick provides insights into the best times to post on Instagram, a feed preview for visualizing how posts will appear on the platform, and the ability to create draft posts for future scheduling.

• Solo: £11 per month when billed yearly or £14 per month when billed month-to-month (limited to one user)
• Pro: £24 per month when billed yearly or £30 per month when billed month-to-month (limited to two users)
• Agency: £55 per month when billed yearly or £68 per month when billed month-to-month (up to 20 users)
• Content scheduling
• Offers analytics tools to track account performance, content engagement (including Feed, Stories, and Reels), audience activity, and hashtag performance for Instagram users
• The media library feature enables you to store and organize your visual assets for easy access when creating posts

Upgrow: Best for Growing Instagram Account

UpGrow is an AI-powered social media growth service that automatically helps users gain real Instagram followers. It uses AI models , paid advertising, micro-interactions, and real-human engagement to attract and engage followers to your Instagram account. UpGrow uses advanced AI algorithms and data-driven insights to target the right audience, optimize profiles, and create engaging content to attract followers.

UpGrow also offers features like location targeting, niche and interest targeting, age and gender filters, language targeting, and a viral content library to help users enhance their Instagram presence.

Pros and cons

• Basic Plan: $59 per month for one year or $69 per month for the first month
• Pro Plan: $99 per month for one year or $99 per month for the first month
• Turbo Plan: $179 per month for one year or $199 per month for the first month
• The monthly follower count depends on your subscription plan
• Real-time analytics
• Language targeting
• Smart auto-targeting
• AI profile optimization
• Niche and interest targeting

Circleboom: Best for Managing X Accounts

Circleboom is a social media management AI tool that helps users manage their X accounts by providing features such as scheduling posts, monitoring analytics, and managing followers. It also offers tools for finding new followers, cleaning up inactive accounts, and analyzing engagement on X.

Circleboom primarily focuses on managing X accounts, providing analytics, follower insights, and tools to find and eliminate fake or inactive accounts, and helping users find new peers on the platform. Circleboom Publish allows users to schedule and publish content across various social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.

Twitter (X) management:

• Free forever: No cost for one profile
• Limited Plan: $9.99 per month billed annually or $27.99 month-to-month
• Pro: $16.99 per month billed annually or $35.99 month-to-month
• Plus: $23.99 per month billed annually or $45.99 month-to-month
• Premium: $29.99 per month billed annually or $55.99 month-to-month

Overall social media publishing:

• Pro: $24.99 per month billed annually or $29.99 month-to-month
• Premium: $34.99 per month billed annually or $44.99 month-to-month
• Business: $79.99 per month billed annually or $89.99 month-to-month
• Enterprise: $209.99 per month billed annually or $249.99 month-to-month
• Chat GPT-4 integration
• X followers insights
• Account analytics
• Advanced X search
• User analytics

Canva: Best for Creating Social Media Assets

Overall rating: 3.5/5.

Canva is an online graphic design platform that allows you to create visual content, such as flyers, posters, social media posts, and presentations. It offers a user-friendly interface with pre-designed templates, drag-and-drop functionality, and a wide range of design elements and customization options.

Canva offers templates for popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and Pinterest. With these templates, you can easily create content for your social media profiles, such as posts, stories, cover photos, and ads.

Canva’s social media templates help you ensure your content meets each platform’s specific size and layout requirements, making it easier to create professional-looking posts. Canva offers a library of images, icons, fonts, and other design elements that can be used to customize social media graphics and make them eye-catching.

• Canva free: No cost for one person
• Canva Pro: $119.99 per year for one person or $14.99 month-to-month for one person
• Canva for teams: $119.90 per year for one person or $11.99 month-to-month for one person (requires a minimum of two people)
• Canva enterprise: Custom quote
• Generate on-brand copy with AI
• Offers over 100 million photos, videos, graphics, and audio
• Plan and schedule social content
• Provides over 20 AI-powered design tools
• Real-time collaboration
• Offers up to 1TB of cloud storage

How to Choose the Best AI Social Media Software for Your Business

To discover the best AI social media software for your business, you must first identify your business needs, as the right tool will significantly depend on your specific social media strategy.

Our analysis found that Canva is ideal for those looking for affordable, DIY software to create their digital assets. Synthesia is ideal for video generation, while Jasper can help you generate AI-assisted content. Those looking to manage and grow their social media followers should consider Upgrow, Flick, and Circleboom.

Note that some of these tools can be used in combination, meaning their capacity can be boosted further when used in tandem with other top AI social media tools.

How We Evaluated AI Social Media Software

To evaluate AI social media software, we looked at several key factors.

Feature set – 35%

The feature set of the AI social media software is crucial in determining its capabilities and effectiveness. Hence, it was given the highest weight of 35%. The key capabilities we considered include:

• Assists with problem solving
• Automates scheduling and publishing
• Processes data to understand audience response
• Uses AL/ML to predict performance

Pricing – 25%

Pricing was given a 25% weighting, as we wanted to ensure that the software was affordable and provided good value for its features.

Ease of use – 25%

Ease of use is another key aspect when evaluating AI social media software. We assessed the software’s user-friendliness, including the interface design, navigation, and customization options.

Support – 15%

Good customer support is essential when using any software, including AI social media software. We evaluated the level of support provided by the software vendor, including the availability of support channels, response times, and helpfulness of support staff.

AI Social Media Tools: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are ai social media tools.

AI social media tools are AI-powered software built to automate and optimize social media marketing tasks and strategies. These tools can help businesses analyze data, plan and schedule posts, engage with followers, and optimize a business’s social media strategy.

AI social media tools can also help automate responses to comments and messages, track sentiment, and identify potential influencers or brand advocates.

Are AI tools capable of analyzing social media engagement?

Yes, AI tools are fully capable of analyzing social media engagement. They can track metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and followers and provide insights on user engagement, sentiment, and trends. AI tools can also analyze audience demographics and behaviors to help businesses better understand and target their audience.

What features do social media AI tools typically offer?

Some standard features of social media AI tools include sentiment analysis, influencer identification, automated posting and scheduling, audience segmentation, social listening, and performance analytics.

Bottom Line: AI Social Media Tools Are Reshaping Social Media 

The right AI software can transform the way businesses interact with their audience online, leading to increased engagement, brand loyalty, and success. Moreover, AI social media apps are reshaping social media by enabling users of these tools to become exponentially more effective at leveraging the power of social media.

Clearly, by leveraging the power of AI, organizations can greatly improve their social media reach and achieve far better results. AI social media software can help companies maintain consistent online presence, from creating personalized content to analyzing data and optimizing campaigns. Choosing the best AI social media software can give companies a competitive edge, drive engagement, and increase ROI.

For a full portrait of the AI vendors serving a wide array of business needs, read our in-depth guide:  150+ Top AI Companies 2024

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Which social media platforms are most common, who uses each social media platform, find out more, social media fact sheet.

Many Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves. Explore the patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape.

To better understand Americans’ social media use, Pew Research Center surveyed 5,733 U.S. adults from May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023. Ipsos conducted this National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) for the Center using address-based sampling and a multimode protocol that included both web and mail. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race and ethnicity, education and other categories.

Polls from 2000 to 2021 were conducted via phone. For more on this mode shift, read our Q&A.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology ­­­.

A note on terminology: Our May-September 2023 survey was already in the field when Twitter changed its name to “X.” The terms  Twitter  and  X  are both used in this report to refer to the same platform.

YouTube and Facebook are the most-widely used online platforms. About half of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, and smaller shares use sites or apps such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter (X) and BeReal.

Note: The vertical line indicates a change in mode. Polls from 2012-2021 were conducted via phone. In 2023, the poll was conducted via web and mail. For more details on this shift, please read our Q&A . Refer to the topline for more information on how question wording varied over the years. Pre-2018 data is not available for YouTube, Snapchat or WhatsApp; pre-2019 data is not available for Reddit; pre-2021 data is not available for TikTok; pre-2023 data is not available for BeReal. Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown.

Source: Surveys of U.S. adults conducted 2012-2023.

Usage of the major online platforms varies by factors such as age, gender and level of formal education.

% of U.S. adults who say they ever use __ by …

• RACE & ETHNICITY
• POLITICAL AFFILIATION

This fact sheet was compiled by Research Assistant  Olivia Sidoti , with help from Research Analyst  Risa Gelles-Watnick , Research Analyst  Michelle Faverio , Digital Producer  Sara Atske , Associate Information Graphics Designer Kaitlyn Radde and Temporary Researcher  Eugenie Park .

Follow these links for more in-depth analysis of the impact of social media on American life.

• Americans’ Social Media Use  Jan. 31, 2024
• Americans’ Use of Mobile Technology and Home Broadband  Jan. 31 2024
• Q&A: How and why we’re changing the way we study tech adoption  Jan. 31, 2024

Find more reports and blog posts related to  internet and technology .

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8 ways to use social media for market research

Written by by Annette Chacko

Published on  May 30, 2023

Reading time  9 minutes

As marketers, it’s our job to know our target audience’s needs and preferences. It’s why we conduct market research every year to better understand what our customers want and uncover new business opportunities. But traditional market research is no longer enough now that consumer preferences and market dynamics can change overnight.

While focus groups and annual surveys are still useful touchpoints, they reveal little about current events or trending topics among consumers. Social media is overflowing with these in-the-moment insights—it’s market research on steroids. That’s why 93% of business leaders say social media data and insights will be their company’s primary source of business intelligence.

But this dynamic and rich data source hasn’t been fully harnessed. You need to use social media market research to uncover critical customer, competitor and industry insights to maintain an accurate pulse on your market while keeping costs low.

What is social media market research and why is it valuable?

Social media market research is the practice of gathering historical and real-time data from social media channels to improve your business. It gives you critical insights from qualitative data (comments and posts) and quantitative metrics (likes and shares).

While it can be done natively, intelligent tools driven by artificial intelligence, like Sprout, make the process of gathering social intelligence:

• Cost-effective: It’s more affordable than traditional methods like surveys and focus groups that can cost thousands of dollars depending on the size and complexity of the research project.
• Quick: Where traditional market research takes time, social media updates in real-time for immediate results, anytime you want.
• Comprehensive: With over 4.76 billion social media users in 2023 , gather vast and diverse social listening data to analyze conversations and extract more accurate insights about your brand and the entire industry.

Sprout enables you to research different social platforms at the same time and analyze the information in one centralized platform to inform data-driven marketing strategies across the organization.

The benefits of using social media for market research

According to The Harris Poll data in The 2023 State of Social Media report, 90% of business leaders agree that their company’s success will depend on how effectively it can use social media data and insights to inform business strategy.

Social media market research is the tool that will enable you to harness the data that will transform every part of your business , including:

Becoming more customer-centric

Our report also revealed that 91% of business leaders said social insights had an impact on gaining a better understanding of their customers. The granular insight social media marketing research provides into your consumer base helps you develop customer-centric strategies that build stronger relationships, increase retention and improve your growth rate.

Managing brand reputation

Social media research gives you data-driven insights into how your target audience perceives your brand. That’s why 94% of business leaders look at social media insights to build and manage brand reputation.

Keeping ahead of competitors

Ninety-two percent of business leaders say social media insights help improve their brand’s competitive positioning. Social data taps into deep competitor insights , such as what people like about competing brands and how customers respond to them. All of which guide how you can differentiate yourself from the pack.

Predicting future trends and filling market gaps

Market research through social listening helps you know where consumers are going next, per 89% of business leaders, who said that social insights impacted how they predict future trends. Social media market research gives you a holistic view of the market so you can identify emerging trends and plan long-term and short-term growth campaigns. And so, enabling you to take advantage of market gap opportunities and expand your market share in a focused way.

Optimizing your business with less spend

Seventy-six percent of business leaders say that social media insights have positively impacted moving their businesses forward with reduced budgets. With close to five billion people on social media, it provides a cost-effective way to magnify your brand, engage with customers and reach out to new audiences. It helps brands personalize campaigns and customer care more precisely and at scale.

8 insights you can glean from social media market research

Social listening data is a valuable source of market intelligence. But with all that raw data at your disposal, it can be challenging to sift through the noise to capture what is truly important and can make a real impact on your business strategy.

Here are eight actionable insights you should pull from your social media market research and how to find them.

1. Audience intent to know what customers want

Social media market research gives you valuable insights into customer intent when they mention you or your competitors. Deep dive into social listening data to get to know your audience on a personal level, from how they feel about certain topics to what influences their purchase decisions.

How to find it: Build out your community management strategy using social networks. Also, leverage platforms like Reddit to know what your audience is talking about and respond to threads directly. Capabilities like Sprout’s social media engagement tool help you capture customer sentiment from social listening across networks and seamlessly adjust your social strategy accordingly, in one place.

2. How customers use your products and services

Social media chatter gives you an insider’s look into how your customers are using your product and services and what new opportunities are out there for you.

By researching their brand and products through social listening, Lodge Cast Iron learned how customers actually use their cookware. They discovered a new segment of customers, vegans, which led them to create more vegan recipes to better engage with them and their interests.

How to find: Search for your brand and the name of your product on social platforms like Twitter or Instagram to learn how customers actually use your goods and services. Sites like Reddit are also great to tap into customer feedback, including conversations and communities relevant to your brand or products. With a tool like Sprout Social, you can easily monitor all this data including branded keywords and phrases to stay up to date with what customers have to say.

3. What existing customers like and dislike about your brand

Social media listening tools help you understand what people like and dislike about your product and services. In fact, business leaders surveyed by The Harris Poll said that 42% of their company’s product development is influenced by social media data insights.

Customer comments are often not as simple as “I like [brand]” or “I don’t like [brand]”. Some are indirect, don’t tag your handle or misspell your brand name. Analyze all comments through sentiment analysis with a smart social media intelligence platform like Sprout to get a clear idea of what customers expect from you and distinct insights on how to address them.

How to find: There are several ways you can find feedback about your brand. Search for branded keywords and phrases organically on social, or peruse the reviews section on platforms like Facebook, TripAdvisor and Google. Beyond these searches, your inbox is a great space to find customer feedback. It’s also a good idea to reach out to sales or customer service teams who hear directly from customers about their likes and dislikes.

4. Competitor intelligence to know where you stand

Insights from social media market research guide your competitor strategy for both short-term and long-term campaigns. In fact, 92% of marketers in The 2023 State of Social Media report say that social insights play a role in improving their brand’s competitive positioning.

Understand your competitors’ content and ad strategy, track how the market responds to them and know where you are in terms of audience segmentation.

How to find: Identify your competitors and monitor their social presence across their different social channels. With Sprout Social, you can set up a competitive analysis report across various social networks including review websites, like Google My Business, to track competitor benchmarks and understand your customers’ attitudes toward the competition.

5. What customers expect from you in the future

Consumers frequently take to social to share what they want from brands in the future. A brand may receive a request for a future store location or a coffee company might see comments asking for a specific roast or drink to come back on the menu. At Sprout, we often field Tweets from customers with new feature requests that we pass along to our product team for consideration down the road.

Another way to solicit feedback about what customers want from your brand is to simply ask. You’d be surprised how many people respond with their thoughts and ideas to a question published on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

How to find: One place to find this information is right in your inbox. With Sprout’s tagging capabilities , you can label and sort messages by type as they come through, making it easy to pass along product requests to the appropriate teams.

6. Trends your audience is interested in

Be attentive to market drivers and use them to catapult your brand strategy. Take how Netflix used the nostalgia marketing trend for their popular TV show, Stranger Things. The show capitalized on people’s fond memories of days past while using children as the main protagonists to cover a wide age segment.

To harness trends successfully, it’s important to map out your business objectives, data analysis plans and baseline metrics before you start scrolling for inspiration.

How to find: Explore social media networks and other tools like Google Trends to keep a pulse on what’s hot. Also, use Sprout’s listening tool to identify trends and topics in your industry and among customers through keywords. Uncover keywords and terms most used by your target audience and discover related topics frequently mentioned with any terms you’re currently tracking.

7. What content resonates with your audience

With millions of posts published on social daily, you need to be strategic to capture your audience’s attention. Take stock of your existing content to see what themes or content formats fuel your performance goals.

If in-feed video gets you more impressions than text posts, consider investing more in video production. If your goal is to drive conversations, refer to posts with high engagement (likes, comments or shares). And don’t be afraid to ask your audience directly what topics or social content they want to see from you.

How to find: Sprout’s Post Performance Report helps you break down the types of content you’ve published and identify which performed the best. For more granular insights, sort the data by impressions, engagement and clicks to determine what formats and themes are most effective on specific networks.

8. Find who to partner with

Social media market research helps you find the right influencers or content creators to collaborate with. Insights can tell you if they match your brand values, have similar audience types and create content that consistently engages. Your co-creators can also play a key role in product development to expand your reach.

For example, Target offered influencer Tabitha Brown a first-of-its-kind deal following her first year working with the retailer. Their exclusive Tabitha Brown collections include clothing, swimwear, accessories, home and office products, food and kitchenware.

How to find: Monitor collaborations to see how their content is performing and get insights to make tweaks to remain aligned with goals. Also, track your lead conversions and see if you are getting enough return on investment (ROI).

How to share social media market research findings org-wide

Social insights provide rich insights that benefit the whole org including product teams, customer care, sales and support.

To share your findings with these various teams, your data needs to present a holistic narrative and connect your data to company goals to highlight its true impact, without being complicated. This type of strategic data storytelling requires effective visualization elements like charts, graphs and word clouds that synthesize the data alongside other business intelligence. This enables all stakeholders to understand the larger picture, with insights from every key business channel.

Sprout creates presentation-ready charts and graphs that break down customer, competitor and industry insights from across social networks. Also, combine these insights with your Tableau data for a more comprehensive omnichannel view.

With these combined insights you can:

• Track social KPIs org-wide and measure against benchmarks.
• Share crucial product experience insights with the product development teams.
• Inform marketing teams of any negative brand buzz.
• Collaborate with the broader marketing teams to refine messaging and content marketing strategies.

Better research starts with social

When brands demonstrate they understand their customers’ wants and needs, they stand to strengthen their bottom line and develop customers for life. Thanks to social media market research, brands have access to fast and reliable insights that deepen their understanding of what their customers want and expect. From identifying new opportunities to improving customer relationships, data from social empowers you to make smarter decisions that contribute to your business goals.

Ready to turn your social data into valuable insights about your industry and customers? Download this worksheet to learn how to conduct quick and valuable market research in under 90 minutes.

• Social Media Analytics
• Social Media Strategy

6 must-have social media dashboard templates for brands

• Leveling Up

Why you need to share an executive summary of your social media reports with leadership

The social media metrics to track in 2024 (and why)

The journey of a data point: Turning numbers into social media intelligence

• Now on slide

Build and grow stronger relationships on social

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This paper is in the following e-collection/theme issue:

Published on 5.6.2024 in Vol 26 (2024)

Examining the Effectiveness of Social Media for the Dissemination of Research Evidence for Health and Social Care Practitioners: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Authors of this article:

• Sarah Roberts-Lewis 1 , PhD   ; 
• Helen Baxter 2, 3 , PhD   ; 
• Gill Mein 4 , BSc   ; 
• Sophia Quirke-McFarlane 5 , MSc   ; 
• Fiona J Leggat 1 , PhD   ; 
• Hannah Garner 6 , BSc   ; 
• Martha Powell 3 , BSc   ; 
• Sarah White 1 , PhD   ; 
• Lindsay Bearne 1, 3 , PhD  

1 Population Health Research Institute, St George’s University of London, London, United Kingdom

2 Bristol Population Health Science Institute, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

3 National Institute of Health and Care Research, London, United Kingdom

4 Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education, St George's University of London, London, United Kingdom

5 School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

6 Department of Physiotherapy, St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom

Corresponding Author:

Sarah Roberts-Lewis, PhD

Population Health Research Institute

St George’s University of London

Cranmer Terrace

London, SW17 0RE

United Kingdom

Phone: 44 20 8725 0368

Email: [email protected]

Background: Social media use has potential to facilitate the rapid dissemination of research evidence to busy health and social care practitioners.

Objective: This study aims to quantitatively synthesize evidence of the between- and within-group effectiveness of social media for dissemination of research evidence to health and social care practitioners. It also compared effectiveness between different social media platforms, formats, and strategies.

Methods: We searched electronic databases for articles in English that were published between January 1, 2010, and January 10, 2023, and that evaluated social media interventions for disseminating research evidence to qualified, postregistration health and social care practitioners in measures of reach, engagement, direct dissemination, or impact. Screening, data extraction, and risk of bias assessments were carried out by at least 2 independent reviewers. Meta-analyses of standardized pooled effects were carried out for between- and within-group effectiveness of social media and comparisons between platforms, formats, and strategies. Certainty of evidence for outcomes was assessed using the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations) framework.

Results: In total, 50 mixed-quality articles that were heterogeneous in design and outcome were included (n=9, 18% were randomized controlled trials [RCTs]). Reach (measured in number of practitioners, impressions, or post views) was reported in 26 studies. Engagement (measured in likes or post interactions) was evaluated in 21 studies. Direct dissemination (measured in link clicks, article views, downloads, or altmetric attention score) was analyzed in 23 studies (8 RCTs). Impact (measured in citations or measures of thinking and practice) was reported in 13 studies. Included studies almost universally indicated effects in favor of social media interventions, although effect sizes varied. Cumulative evidence indicated moderate certainty of large and moderate between-group effects of social media interventions on direct dissemination (standardized mean difference [SMD] 0.88; P =.02) and impact (SMD 0.76; P <.001). After social media interventions, cumulative evidence showed moderate certainty of large within-group effects on reach (SMD 1.99; P <.001), engagement (SMD 3.74; P <.001), and direct dissemination (SMD 0.82; P =.004) and low certainty of a small within-group effect on impacting thinking or practice (SMD 0.45; P =.02). There was also evidence for the effectiveness of using multiple social media platforms (including Twitter, subsequently rebranded X; and Facebook), images (particularly infographics), and intensive social media strategies with frequent, daily posts and involving influential others. No included studies tested the dissemination of research evidence to social care practitioners.

Conclusions: Social media was effective for disseminating research evidence to health care practitioners. More intense social media campaigns using specific platforms, formats, and strategies may be more effective than less intense interventions. Implications include recommendations for effective dissemination of research evidence to health care practitioners and further RCTs in this field, particularly investigating the dissemination of social care research.

Trial Registration: PROSPERO International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews CRD42022378793; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=378793

International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID): RR2-10.2196/45684

Introduction

It is essential that health and social care practitioners access contemporary, high-quality research evidence to help them deliver the best evidence-based clinical care and improve patient outcomes [ 1 - 5 ]. Rapid dissemination, by active approaches using specific channels and planned strategies, is recommended [ 6 , 7 ].

Social media may facilitate rapid dissemination to busy practitioners, allowing them to access and interpret research evidence efficiently [ 8 - 10 ]. Because social media are widely used and not limited in space and time [ 8 , 11 ], they have the potential to overcome barriers to dissemination, including reaching practitioners with limited professional opportunities or time constraints and filtering the exponentially increasing volume of research evidence produced every year [ 9 , 12 - 14 ]. Currently, closed social media channels, such as private and invitation-only groups, are often used by practitioners for day-to-day communications, clinical information sharing, and targeted clinical education, whereas open social media channels that can be accessed by everybody are used for reputation development; public health education; and, increasingly, research dissemination [ 9 , 10 , 15 - 26 ].

However, the effectiveness of open social media for the dissemination of research evidence to health and social care practitioners is largely unknown [ 27 ]. Existing reviews have narratively synthesized potential uses, benefits and risks, similarities and differences, and qualitative experiences of social media or provided commentaries on the mechanisms of research dissemination by social media [ 10 , 22 , 23 , 28 ]. No reviews have conducted a meta-analysis to quantitatively test the effectiveness of social media for the dissemination of research evidence to health and social care practitioners. To inform evidence-based recommendations, the evidence for using social media to disseminate research evidence must be investigated.

The primary research question was as follows: “How effective is open social media as a way to disseminate research evidence to practitioners?” The objective of this systematic review was to quantitatively synthesize and meta-analyze evidence of the effectiveness of social media for the dissemination of research evidence to health and social care practitioners by evaluating both between-group comparisons of social media versus no social media and within-group comparisons of before-after social media campaigns. The social media platforms, formats, and strategies used were also identified, and their effectiveness was compared to understand the most effective social media intervention characteristics for the dissemination of research evidence to practitioners.

The protocol was registered on the International Register of Systematic Review (PROSPERO; CRD42022378793) and published a priori [ 29 ]. It was reported in accordance with the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidance [ 30 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 1 ).

Eligibility Criteria

Articles published between January 1, 2010, and January 10, 2023, were eligible for inclusion if they investigated research evidence targeted at health and social care practitioners that was shared using open social media. Articles were included if they quantitatively compared social media versus no social media (either between-group comparisons or before-after social media within-group comparisons) or if they compared social media platforms, formats, or strategies. Eligible study designs included randomized controlled trials (RCTs), case-controlled comparisons, crossover, nonrandomized group comparisons, before-after comparisons, cohort comparisons, and case reports. Eligible outcomes of interest included reach, engagement, direct dissemination, and impact. Definitions of the eligibility criteria terms are shown in Textbox 1 .

Articles were not eligible for inclusion if they only compared social media effectiveness in terms of the topic or specialty of the research evidence–related social media post or posts. Excluded study designs included protocols, reviews, studies using only qualitative methods, opinion pieces, and conference abstracts with no linked full-text article. Articles were excluded if they preceded 2010 (refer to the protocol by Roberts-Lewis et al [ 29 ]), were not available in English, or did not feature research evidence–related social media of relevance to postregistration health or social care practitioners (eg, only targeting students, service users, or the public or featuring non–health and social care research topics). Articles were also excluded if the social media campaign was targeted at practitioners for purposes other than the dissemination of research evidence (eg, delivering multisource clinical education courses, organizational information, administrative tasks, practical peer support, day-to-day interpersonal clinical communication, professional identity, or reputation promotion). Finally, articles that did not provide sufficient quantitative empirical data on reach, engagement, direct dissemination, or impact were excluded.

Definitions

• Research evidence: this was defined as published, peer-reviewed empirical human health and social care research findings that have met the publication standards of their specialty, presented as an original research article (primary research), a group of original research articles identified and synthesized systematically (secondary research), or evidence drawn together for evidence-based guidelines or clinical recommendations. Where research evidence was posted on social media, it either included a direct link to an open-access article or research information that had been summarized in the form of abstracts, microblogs, blogs, press articles, infographics, or educational videos.
• Targeted: by this we mean research evidence or social media posts that were professionally relevant to health and social care practitioners. Evidence was eligible if it was produced specifically for practitioners or when evidence was relevant to practitioners but other audiences such as the public also had access.
• Practitioners: these were postregistration health and social care professionals, collectively or as individual professions including but not limited to nurses, doctors, social workers, midwives, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, radiographers, and paramedics.
• Open social media: we defined open social media as internet-based social networking and media sharing platforms that allow any user to create and exchange user-generated content, making one-to-many posts and interacting by responding to others’ posts. Our definition did not include mass media press articles, wikis, and blogs with no or limited facility for user interactions. Our definition also did not include purely communication-based apps, fee-paying, or closed, invite-only social media groups that could not be freely joined by any interested user. However, both noninteractional and closed social media groups were considered within our definition if they were highlighted on, or accessible via, open social media.
• Platforms: these were defined as open social networking and media sharing sites and apps, including but not limited to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WeChat, Tumblr, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter (subsequently rebranded X), and LinkedIn.
• Formats: these were a variety of media types, including but not limited to text, illustrative pictures, visual abstracts, infographics, videos, and podcasts.
• Strategies: these were the ways in which research evidence–related social media posts were delivered, including but not limited to a schedule of open sharing to the entire forum (frequency and timing), influencer endorsement, @mentions and #tagging, accessible special interest groups (eg, journal clubs), and live social media events (eg, tweet chats).
• Reach: this was defined as the number of practitioners reached by research evidence–related social media post or posts (eg, those following the social media account or participating in a social media event) or the social media analytics including the number of impressions (the number of times a post appears on social media feeds), views (the number of times a post is opened from social media feeds), or accesses (the number of times a post is accessed in any other way, eg, via a search engine).
• Engagement: this was measured by the number of positive responses (ie, likes) or interactions (such as shares, comments, reposting, or new posts) generated by a research evidence–related social media post.
• Direct dissemination: this was measured by the number of times an original piece of research evidence was accessed (eg, by link click from a social media post), viewed (eg, on an HTML web page), downloaded (eg, as a PDF document) or the altmetric attention score accumulated by original research articles.
• Impact: this included two discrete subcategories for the purposes of this review—(1) academic impact, the number of citations received by an original research evidence article or the journal impact factor, and (2) practical impact, measures of practitioners’ changes in thinking or practice (eg, confidence, knowledge, or behavior change) after exposure to research evidence–related social media post or posts.

Information Sources

Six electronic databases were searched (MEDLINE [Ovid], PsycINFO [Ovid], CINAHL plus [EBSCO], and ERIC [EBSCO] as well as LISTA and OpenGrey). The date of the last search was January 10, 2023. Bibliographies of relevant reviews and included articles were searched for citations and PubMed, Elicit, and Google Scholar were used for reference harvesting.

Search Strategy

For full search strategies, refer to Multimedia Appendix 2 and the protocol by Roberts-Lewis et al [ 29 ]. Key search terms were grouped as follows:

• Practitioner groups, for example, health and social care staff and individual disciplines
• Research evidence, information, and knowledge
• Social media, network, web, sharing, and named platforms and formats
• Dissemination, reach, engagement, and impact
• Quantitative, evaluation, comparison, and named outcomes

Selection Process

Records from the electronic and citation searches were exported to EndNote Online (Clarivate) for deduplication and then imported to Rayyan software (Rayyan Systems) for title, abstract, and full-text screening.

Title and abstract screening were carried out by 2 independent reviewers (SRL and SQM). There was 92% agreement (κ=0.87) on eligibility decisions and 100% agreement after discussion.

Full-text screening was carried out by at least 2 of 5 independent reviewers (SRL, SQM, LB, HG, and FJL). There was 84% agreement (κ=0.83) on full-text inclusion decisions and 100% agreement after discussion.

Data Collection

Data from the included studies were extracted independently by at least 2 of 5 reviewers (see the Selection Process section) using a data extraction form developed a priori [ 29 ]. The accuracy of data extraction was confirmed by comparison between extraction forms, returning to the original article to resolve any disparity.

The variables collected were study characteristics including the number and description of subjects; social media platforms, formats, and strategies; study design; comparisons; and outcomes. For each outcome of interest, means, SDs, and sample sizes were extracted for each comparison. When these data were missing, they were calculated from other reported statistics using recommended methods [ 31 ], where possible.

For studies that reported multiple outcome measures, only outcomes of interest were collected (reach, engagement, direct dissemination, and impact). Different measures for the same outcome were prioritized for inclusion in meta-analyses according to the a priori protocol [ 29 ]. Subsequent additions were made to the prioritization order to account for heterogeneous data reported in the included studies; these included aggregated total interactions, other types of post interactions, and the measurement time frame according to the most common time frames for each outcome of interest ( Textbox 2 ).

Outcome and prioritizations

• Number of practitioners after 1 week
• (1) Impressions, (2) views, and (3) accesses after 1 month
• Number of positive responses (ie, likes) after 1 week
• Number of post interactions—(1) total interactions (including shares, comments, and other interactions); (2) shares; (3) comments; (4) new posts, and (5) other post interactions—after 1 month
• (1) Link clicks and (2) article views after 1 month
• Article downloads after 1 month
• Altmetric attention score after 1 month
• (1) Citations and (2) impact factor after 1 year
• Any measures of thinking or practice after any time frame

Risk of Bias Assessment

The 34-item (5-domain) Cochrane Risk of Bias 2.0 tool was used to rate the quality of the RCTs as lower risk of bias, some concerns, or higher risk of bias [ 32 ]. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (score range 0-9) was used to assess the risk of bias in nonrandomized designs [ 33 ]. A score of ≤3 was considered high risk of bias, scores between 4 and 6 were considered medium risk of bias, and a score of ≥7 was considered low risk of bias [ 33 ]. Risk of bias was assessed independently by at least 2 reviewers and data were checked for accuracy by a third reviewer.

Data Synthesis

The included studies were summarized narratively in text, tables, and figures. Quantitative comparisons were made using calculated standardized mean differences (SMDs), CIs, and P values for each comparison. SMD effect sizes were calculated using Hedges g to accommodate the heterogeneity of outcomes. Effect sizes of >0.8 were defined as large, ≥0.5 to 0.8 as moderate, and <0.5 as small [ 34 ]. Outcome effect sizes were presented as SMD, 95% CIs, z -test, and P value.

For outcomes where group means, SDs, and sample sizes were obtained from at least 2 studies, pooled effect sizes were calculated using random effects models in RevMan (version 5.3; The Cochrane Collaboration). The heterogeneity of pooled data was assessed using I 2 . Funnel plots were assessed visually for each meta-analysis to check for publication bias.

For pooled data with I 2 >75%, subgroup analyses were planned; however, these were not possible due to the heterogeneous characteristics of the social media interventions in the included studies or an insufficient number of studies to achieve ≥80% statistical power [ 35 ]. Therefore, studies were ordered according to effect size, and the common characteristics of social media strategies in the studies with the largest effect sizes were narratively synthesized. Although no sensitivity analysis was planned a priori, evidence from RCTs and studies with low risk of bias was given greater weighting in the narrative synthesis than nonrandomized studies and those with high risk of bias.

Certainty Assessment

For each outcome, the certainty of the evidence base was evaluated based on the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations) approach [ 36 ] and categorized as high, moderate, low, or very low [ 37 , 38 ].

In total, 6461 records were identified, 555 full-text reports were screened, and 50 articles were included ( Figure 1 ).

Included Studies

A total of 50 studies published between 2013 and 2022 were included; 9 were RCTs [ 39 - 48 ]. In total, 26 studies included nonrandomized comparisons [ 49 - 74 ], 12 studies were before-after comparisons [ 75 - 86 ], and 3 were case studies [ 87 - 89 ]. A total of 10 studies included both between-group comparisons and before-after analyses [ 40 , 44 , 45 , 47 , 51 , 53 , 60 , 63 , 70 , 74 ]. For study descriptions, refer to Multimedia Appendix 3 [ 39 - 89 ].

A total of 36 studies investigated the impact of social media on journal articles, with samples ranging from a single journal article [ 88 ] to 15,078 articles from multiple journals [ 54 ]. In total, 8 studies focused on research blogs [ 40 , 76 , 87 ] and microblogs [ 47 , 49 , 57 , 82 , 85 ], 4 studies examined research conference social media posts and hashtags [ 71 , 74 , 86 , 89 ], 2 studies investigated clinical guidelines [ 60 , 63 ], and 1 study tested research-related posts linked to health care hashtags [ 62 ].

Half of the studies explored multiple social media platforms and the other half of the studies examined a single platform. Twitter was used in all but 1 study [ 85 ], Facebook was used in 23 studies [ 40 , 42 - 44 , 47 , 48 , 53 , 57 , 60 , 63 , 64 , 67 - 70 , 76 , 77 , 80 - 82 , 85 , 89 ], LinkedIn was used in 8 studies [ 40 , 48 , 60 , 63 , 64 , 68 , 87 , 89 ], Instagram was used in 6 studies [ 57 , 62 , 67 , 68 , 76 , 87 ], and YouTube was used in 5 studies [ 58 , 60 , 63 , 64 , 87 ], whereas TikTok [ 87 ], Weibo [ 39 ], Google+ [ 64 ], Tumblr [ 81 ], and Spotify [ 87 ] were each used in 1 study. The most common media formats examined were text posts, which usually included links and images. Journal clubs or tweet chats were included in 9 studies [ 51 , 60 , 62 , 74 , 75 , 77 , 78 , 80 , 81 ], and video media were used in 6 studies [ 52 , 60 , 62 , 63 , 73 , 78 ]. The social media campaign duration ranged from 1 hour [ 51 ] to 5.5 years [ 54 ].

Outcomes measurement duration ranged from 3 days [ 86 , 89 ] to 4 years [ 64 ]. Typically, outcomes were measured after 1 month [ 42 - 44 , 48 , 52 , 53 , 56 , 60 , 63 , 67 , 75 - 81 , 83 - 85 , 87 ] or 1 to 2 weeks [ 39 - 41 , 45 , 47 , 51 , 68 , 74 , 82 , 88 ]. Citations were measured after ≥1 year, except in 1 study that reported citations after 6 months [ 61 ].

Risk of Bias

In total, 5 RCTs had low risk of bias [ 39 , 41 - 43 , 45 , 46 ], 3 RCTs had some concerns [ 40 , 44 , 48 ], and 1 RCT had high risk of bias [ 47 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ). The most common reasons for risk of bias included insufficient information provided about the allocation sequence, handling of missing data, or prioritization of multiple eligible outcome measurement time points. In total, 11 nonrandomized studies had low risk of bias [ 49 , 50 , 55 - 57 , 63 , 65 , 70 , 72 , 79 , 81 ]; 25 nonrandomized studies had moderate risk of bias [ 51 - 54 , 58 , 59 , 61 , 62 , 64 , 66 - 69 , 71 , 73 - 78 , 80 , 82 - 85 ]; and 5 nonrandomized studies had high risk of bias [ 60 , 86 - 89 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ). The most common reasons for risk of bias included targeted selection of studies for social media sharing and incomplete reporting of data handling. Funnel plots did not indicate a high risk of publication bias in pooled data.

In total, reach was evaluated in 26 studies (2 RCTs [ 41 , 45 ]). A total of 10 studies evaluated reach by reporting the numbers of practitioners receiving posts [ 41 , 45 , 66 , 67 , 75 , 78 , 79 , 84 , 86 , 89 ]. In total, 23 studies evaluated reach using social media analytics (17 in impressions [ 41 , 45 , 49 , 51 , 53 , 56 , 57 , 66 , 68 , 73 , 75 , 78 , 83 , 85 , 86 , 88 , 89 ]; 6 in views [ 62 , 63 , 76 , 79 , 81 , 87 ]; and none by reporting accesses).

Effects of Social Media Compared to No Social Media on Reach

There were insufficient studies comparing the reach of social media interventions versus no social media for pooled data analyses.

Evidence from individual studies included 1 RCT [ 45 ] with a low risk of bias that found a large between-group effect on the number of physicians reached by tweeted articles in a coordinated campaign, including a team with 12 social media accounts, 4 articles tweeted per day, and @mentions of authors and relevant institutions, compared to not tweeted articles (112 cardiothoracic surgery research articles; SMD 4.03, 95% CI 3.37-4.68; P <.001). Similarly, 1 nonrandomized study [ 63 ] with a low risk of bias reported a large between-group effect on views in favor of YouTube videos marketed by paid social media advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with relevant event hashtags, compared to video views in the absence of social media marketing (12 videos about tracheostomy safety; SMD 2.53, 95% CI 1.41-3.64; P <.001; Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

Within-Group Effects of Social Media on Reach

Pooled findings indicated large within-group effects on reach after social media interventions compared to before in both number of practitioners (SMD 2.03, 95% CI 0.97-3.10; P <.001; I 2 =53%; GRADE moderate) [ 75 , 78 , 79 , 84 ] and impressions or views (SMD 1.99, 95% CI 1.23-2.75; P <.001; I 2 =95%; GRADE moderate) [ 45 , 53 , 56 , 63 , 75 , 76 , 78 , 79 , 81 , 83 , 85 ]. The largest effects were reported in studies featuring social media marketing and scheduling tools [ 63 , 83 ] and multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr) [ 63 , 76 , 81 ]; at least 1 post per day [ 76 , 79 , 81 , 83 , 84 ], including regular blogs [ 76 , 79 , 81 ] or microblogs [ 85 ]; posts coordinated with established live journal clubs, relevant events, hashtags, and @mentions [ 45 , 63 , 75 , 78 , 83 ]; and campaigns lasting 6 months to 4.5 years [ 76 , 81 , 85 ]. Smaller effects were reported by studies featuring one-off or less well-established tweet chats or events [ 75 , 78 ], 1 to 2 posts per month [ 53 , 56 , 75 , 78 ], and campaigns using a single social media platform (Twitter) [ 56 , 75 , 78 , 79 ] ( Figure 2 [ 45 , 53 , 56 , 63 , 75 , 76 , 78 , 79 , 81 , 83 - 85 ]).

Between-Group Effects of Different Platforms, Formats, and Strategies on Reach

Pooled findings indicated a large between-group effect on impressions and views in favor of Twitter (vs Facebook and Instagram; SMD 1.87, 95% CI 1.54-2.21; P <.001; I 2 =0%; GRADE low) and Facebook (vs Instagram; SMD 1.19, 95% CI 0.64-1.75; P <.001; I 2 =46%; GRADE low) [ 57 , 68 ]. However, no effect was shown between platforms in the number of practitioners who were followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram [ 67 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

Pooled findings showed a large effect on impressions in favor of posts with images, in particular, infographics, compared to no images (SMD 1.63, 95% CI 0.04-3.22; P =.04; I 2 =95%; GRADE low; Multimedia Appendix 3 ) [ 41 , 45 , 49 , 56 ].

Pooled findings indicated a large effect on reach in favor of strategies using social media influencers or organizations compared to using standard social media user accounts (SMD 1.02, 95% CI 0.04-1.99; P =.04; I 2 =100%; GRADE low) [ 66 , 73 ]. One RCT follow-up study [ 46 ] also reported that tweeting at 1 PM (EST, United States) generated the highest reach and tweeting at 9 PM generated the lowest reach to physicians ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

A total of 21 studies (including 3 RCTs [ 41 , 45 , 47 ]) evaluated engagement (6 studies examined likes [ 45 , 47 , 49 , 51 , 83 , 88 ]; 11 studies investigated total engagements, including shares, comments, and other interactions [ 41 , 45 , 49 , 51 , 53 , 54 , 67 , 71 - 73 , 78 ]; 7 studies assessed only post shares [ 47 , 49 , 52 , 56 , 68 , 83 , 84 ]; and 2 studies reported on other post interactions only [ 63 , 75 ]). No included studies evaluated comments or reposts alone.

Effects of Social Media Compared to No Social Media on Engagement

There were insufficient studies comparing the engagement of social media interventions versus no social media for pooled data analyses.

Evidence from individual studies included just 1 nonrandomized study [ 63 ] with a low risk of bias that reported a large between-group effect on interaction time spent watching YouTube videos marketed by paid social media advertising compared to video interaction time in the absence of social media marketing (12 videos about tracheostomy safety; SMD 2.36, 95% CI 1.27-3.44; P <.001).

Within-Group Effects of Social Media on Engagement

Pooled findings indicated large within-group effects on engagement after social media interventions compared to before. Effects were significant for post interactions (SMD 3.74, 95% CI 2.02-5.46; P <.001; I 2 =96%; GRADE moderate) [ 45 , 53 , 63 , 75 , 78 , 83 , 84 ] but not for likes (SMD 3.18, 95% CI –0.25 to 6.62; P =.07; I 2 =98%; GRADE low) [ 45 , 83 , 85 ]. The largest effects on engagement were evident in social media campaigns established over 3 to 18 months, usually featuring coordinated, paid social media strategies; daily posts; visually appealing formats; topical hashtags; and @mentions targeting relevant organizations, government resources, and events [ 53 , 63 , 83 - 85 ]. Large effects on engagement were also observed in studies featuring a series of live journal clubs [ 75 , 78 ]. Smaller effects of social media on engagement were reported by 1 RCT [ 45 ] that used a 14-day Twitter campaign ( Figure 3 [ 45 , 53 , 63 , 75 , 78 , 83 - 85 ]).

Between-Group Effects of Different Platforms, Formats, and Strategies on Engagement

Pooled findings indicated a large between-group effect on engagement in favor of Twitter (vs Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; SMD 1.15, 95% CI 0.21-2.10; P =.02; I 2 =79%; GRADE low; Multimedia Appendix 3 ) [ 47 , 67 , 68 ].

Pooled findings showed large between-group effects on engagement in favor of posts with images compared to no images. Effects were significant for interactions (SMD 1.24, 95% CI 0.53-1.96; P <.001; I 2 =98%; GRADE low) but not for likes (SMD 0.87, 95% CI –0.40 to 2.14; P =.18; I 2 =88%; GRADE low; Multimedia Appendix 3 ) [ 41 , 45 , 49 , 52 , 56 , 72 ].

Pooled findings indicated a small effect on post interactions of social media strategies with participation by influential others (including patients, authors, and non–peer-reviewed news sources; SMD 0.26, 95% CI 0.13-0.39; P <.001; I 2 =82%; GRADE low) [ 54 , 71 , 73 ]. Evidence from individual studies also showed large effects of social media influencers with >1000 followers [ 52 ], morning and weekday posting [ 72 ], and hashtags [ 72 ] and a small effect of @mentions [ 52 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

Direct Dissemination

In total, 23 studies (including 8 RCTs [ 39 - 45 , 48 ]) evaluated direct dissemination (10 in link clicks [ 41 , 45 , 49 , 51 , 53 , 56 , 73 , 79 , 80 , 83 ], 13 studies reported article views [ 39 , 40 , 42 - 44 , 48 , 63 , 69 , 70 , 74 , 81 , 84 , 87 ], 8 measured PDF downloads [ 40 , 44 , 48 , 50 , 63 , 69 , 79 , 81 ], and 9 assessed the altmetric score [ 44 , 45 , 51 , 69 , 74 , 77 , 79 , 83 , 87 ]).

Effects of Social Media Compared to No Social Media on Direct Dissemination

Pooled data showed large between-group effects of social media on direct dissemination. Effects were significant for link clicks or article views (SMD 0.88, 95% CI 0.15-1.62; P =.02; I 2 =95%; GRADE moderate) [ 39 , 40 , 42 , 43 , 45 , 48 ] and article downloads (SMD 1.25, 95% CI 0.86-1.65; P <.001; I 2 =0%; GRADE high) [ 40 , 48 , 50 ] but not for the altmetric attention score [ 45 , 74 ] (SMD 1.48, 95% CI –1.00 to 3.96; P =.24; I 2 =97%; GRADE low; Figure 4 [ 39 , 40 , 42 , 43 , 45 , 48 , 50 , 74 ]). Studies that reported the largest effects of social media on direct dissemination used campaigns including professional social media marketing and scheduling tools (Social Bro, Hootsuite, Sprinkler, and Spredfast); multiple posts per day; multiple platforms (Twitter, Weibo, Facebook, and LinkedIn); or multiple accounts on 1 platform, link, and blog [ 39 , 40 , 45 , 48 , 50 ]. The studies that showed the smallest effects of social media on direct dissemination used social media campaigns that posted less than once a day (approximately 0.36 [ 42 ] and 0.30 [ 43 ] posts per day or once a month publicizing a Twitter journal club [ 74 ]).

Within-Group Effects of Social Media on Direct Dissemination

Pooled findings indicated a large, significant within-group effect on direct dissemination after social media interventions compared to before in link clicks or views (SMD 1.93, 95% CI 1.23-2.62; P <.001; I 2 =92%; GRADE high) [ 40 , 44 , 45 , 53 , 63 , 70 , 79 - 81 , 83 , 84 ], article downloads (SMD 0.82, 95% CI 0.26-1.37; P =.004; I 2 =49%; GRADE moderate) [ 40 , 44 , 63 , 79 , 81 ], and altmetric attention score (SMD 1.92, 95% CI 0.75-3.09; P =.001; I 2 =92%; GRADE moderate) [ 44 , 45 , 51 , 74 , 77 , 79 , 83 ]. Studies that reported the largest effects used campaigns that included coordinated or paid social media software [ 63 , 83 , 84 ], posting at least once a day [ 45 , 63 , 83 , 84 ], visually attractive elements and links [ 44 , 45 , 63 , 83 , 84 ], hashtags, @mentions [ 45 , 83 , 84 ], multiple platforms (including Twitter and Facebook) [ 40 , 44 , 63 , 80 , 81 ], multiple accounts [ 40 , 44 , 45 ], associated blogs [ 40 , 44 , 45 , 79 , 81 ], podcasts [ 81 ], and tweet chats [ 51 , 80 ] ( Figure 5 [ 40 , 44 , 45 , 51 , 53 , 63 , 70 , 74 , 77 , 79 - 81 , 83 , 84 ]).

Between-Group Effects of Different Platforms, Formats, and Strategies on Direct Dissemination

Pooled findings showed no significant effect of the platform on direct dissemination (SMD 0.92, 95% CI –1.21 to 3.04; P =.40; I 2 =99%; GRADE low); both Twitter and Facebook appeared effective [ 48 , 70 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

Pooled findings indicated large effects in favor of posts with images, particularly infographics, compared to no images. Effects were significant for link clicks or article views (SMD 1.18, 95% CI 0.27-2.10; P =.01; I 2 =88%; GRADE low) [ 41 , 44 , 45 , 56 , 69 ] and for altmetric attention score (SMD 1.19, 95% CI 0.04-2.35; P =.04; I 2 =83%; GRADE low) [ 44 , 45 , 69 ] but not for article downloads (SMD 0.26, 95% CI –0.32 to 0.83; P =.38; I 2 =0%; GRADE low) [ 44 , 69 ]. Evidence from individual studies also highlighted large, significant effects of podcasts compared to infographics and standard posts on direct dissemination [ 69 ] and a positive effect on link clicks of posts with links compared to posts with infographics [ 49 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

There were insufficient studies comparing the effect of social media strategies on direct dissemination for pooled data analyses. Evidence from individual studies showed a large, significant effect on link clicks in favor of posting on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays compared to the other days of the week [ 53 ] and no effects of time of year [ 42 , 43 ] or non–peer-reviewed news source involvement [ 73 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

A total of 13 studies (including 3 RCTs [ 46 - 48 ]) evaluated impact (7 assessed article citations [ 46 , 48 , 54 , 55 , 58 , 59 , 65 ], 3 investigated impact factors [ 54 , 61 , 64 ], and 4 examined changes in thinking or behavior [ 47 , 57 , 60 , 82 ]).

Effects of Social Media Compared to No Social Media on Impact

Pooled findings indicated a moderate between-group effect of social media compared to no social media on citations (SMD 0.76, 95% CI 0.49-1.03; P <.001; I 2 =79%; GRADE moderate) [ 46 , 48 , 55 , 58 , 59 , 61 , 64 , 65 ] and thinking and practice (SMD 0.65, 95% CI 0.37-0.93; P <.001; I 2 =55%; GRADE low) [ 57 , 60 ]. The largest effects on impact were shown in studies that used social media interventions, including links and relevant @mentions [ 46 , 55 , 57 - 61 ] in campaigns that often had relatively short durations (14 days [ 46 ] to ≤12 months [ 57 - 61 ]). Larger effects on citations were shown in studies sharing articles on broad topics (such as urology or surgery) [ 46 , 55 , 58 , 59 , 61 ], whereas effects on knowledge and practice were evident in social media campaigns that were focused on a specialist topic (eg, persistent genital arousal disorder [ 57 ] and complementary and alternative medicine in multiple sclerosis [ 60 ]). Studies that showed smaller between-group effects of social media on impact either described social media intervention with infrequent posts on social media (7 times per month, approximately 0.3 posts per day) [ 48 ] or without indicating post frequency [ 64 , 65 ] ( Figure 6 [ 46 , 48 , 55 , 57 - 61 , 64 , 65 ]).

Within-Group Effects of Social Media on Impact

There were insufficient studies comparing the impact on citations after social media interventions compared to before; however, pooled findings showed a small within-group effect on thinking and practice after social media interventions (SMD 0.45, 95% CI 0.07-0.83; P =.02; I 2 =91%; GRADE low) [ 47 , 60 , 82 ]. One RCT [ 47 ] and 1 nonrandomized study [ 82 ], both concerning tendinopathy practice points with links to research articles or evidence-based podcasts shared for 2 weeks on Twitter and Facebook, reported differing effect sizes on thinking and practice (small and nonsignificant in the RCT [ 47 ] but moderate and significant in the nonrandomized study [ 82 ]). Another nonrandomized study [ 60 ] also reported a moderate effect of a paid targeted social media advertising campaign on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube that included article links, images, videos, podcasts, and a live tweet chat with a prominent organization that impacted knowledge, attitudes, and behavior regarding complementary and alternative medicine in multiple sclerosis ( Figure 7 [ 47 , 60 , 82 ]).

Between-Group Effects of Different Platforms, Formats, and Strategies on Impact

There were insufficient studies comparing the effect of social media platforms on impact for pooled data analyses. Evidence from individual studies showed a large, significant effect on the journal impact factor of posting on ≥3 social media platforms [ 64 ]; a positive association between the journal impact factor and the number of social media platforms used [ 59 ]; and a small, nonsignificant effect of platform in favor of Twitter (vs Facebook) on knowledge and practice changes [ 47 ] ( Multimedia Appendix 3 ).

No included studies compared the effect of different formats on impact.

Pooled findings indicated a large, nonsignificant effect on citations of author tweets in addition to standard journal social media strategies (SMD 1.00, 95% CI –0.84 to 2.84; P =.29; I 2 =98%; GRADE very low; Multimedia Appendix 3 ) [ 54 , 55 ].

Considering all the evidence, there was high certainty that social media is effective for the dissemination of research to health care practitioners. The outcome with the highest certainty across all comparisons was direct dissemination. Evidence was insufficient to determine the size and certainty of between-group effects of social media compared to no social media on reach and engagement; however, there was moderate certainty of large and moderate effects of social media interventions on direct dissemination and impact, respectively. After social media exposure, there was moderate certainty of large, positive within-group effects on reach, engagement, and direct dissemination, whereas there was low certainty of a small effect on impact. Certainty was generally low regarding the size of the effects of platforms, formats, and strategies on each outcome. However, the direction of effects was consistently in favor of using multiple platforms (particularly Twitter and Facebook), using images (particularly infographics), and involving influential others in social media campaigns.

The level of certainty about the size of the effects in favor of social media was different depending on the outcome of interest and study characteristics. There was a tendency for smaller effect sizes in RCTs and studies with less-intensive social media interventions. The certainty ratings were lowered for all comparisons due to the variability of the included study designs, many of which were descriptive and not designed for rigorous quantitative evaluations, meaning most included studies had moderate risk of bias. Consistency and precision of effect size estimates were also threatened by the low number and heterogeneity of studies included in some comparisons. However, for some comparisons, certainty was uprated due to the large magnitude of estimated effects and potential dose-response gradients between the intensity of social media interventions and their effectiveness.

Principal Findings

There was evidence of the effectiveness of social media for the dissemination of research evidence to health care practitioners. All the included studies reported some findings in favor of social media, although there was considerable heterogeneity in effect sizes, and study quality was mixed. Effect sizes of social media effectiveness were influenced by the frequency, intensity, and composition of social media interventions. Effectiveness was enhanced by the use of multiple social media platforms (including Twitter and Facebook); multiple social media accounts; ≥1 social media post per day; appealing formats (including infographics or other visual media, blogs, and links to articles); professional social media marketing and scheduling tools and involving relevant and influential people, organizations, and events in social media campaigns.

Our findings that social media was beneficial for the dissemination of research evidence to practitioners concurred with existing literature about the largely positive impact of social media on dissemination [ 10 , 21 - 23 , 28 , 65 , 90 - 93 ]. Quantitative analyses in other studies have revealed positive correlations between social media use and the dissemination and impact of health research evidence [ 65 , 91 - 93 ]. Narrative and qualitative reviews have highlighted benefits of social media for clinicians including connectedness and network accessibility to all (particularly with increasing use of communication technology and mobile apps in practice and day-to-day life), the large audience of practitioners and policy makers that uses social media (particularly for information acquisition and educational purposes), and the effectiveness of social media to deliver clinical guidelines and research evidence–based information that could be implemented in practice [ 21 - 23 , 28 , 90 ]. Reviews also highlighted the challenges of synthesizing social media effectiveness for the dissemination of information due to the heterogeneity of how social media are studied and used [ 22 , 28 , 90 ].

Social media campaigns to disseminate research evidence to health care practitioners should consider target outcomes because specific features enhanced the 4 outcomes of interest differently ( Table 1 ).

Our quantitative findings in favor of using multiple social media platforms, including Twitter (for engagement in particular) and Facebook, concurred with existing literature that recommends using a range of social media platforms [ 23 , 28 , 90 , 94 ] and highlights the prominence of Twitter for research dissemination [ 28 ] and Twitter and Facebook for e-professionalism [ 22 ]. New knowledge from our systematic review includes the potentially beneficial effect of using multiple social media accounts on the same platform. This may also link with the apparent dose-response relationship between effectiveness and the average number of social media posts per day.

There was consistent evidence to support the use of visual media, particularly infographics for better reach, engagement, and direct dissemination; our findings suggest that social media effectiveness may also be enhanced by other post formats including podcasts, blogs, questions, and practice points to disseminate research evidence on social media. This adds to previous literature, which recommended posting a range of appealing multimedia that is accessible, useful, relevant, authentic, and credible [ 10 , 23 , 28 , 90 ]. Our review also highlighted the importance of including links to original research; comprehensive infographics or practice points posted on social media might reduce the likelihood of viewing the original article by link click [ 49 ]. Nevertheless, including links offers the viewer the opportunity to check the authenticity and credibility of the information in a post. Including links may also facilitate the delivery of simple, clear, and practice-relevant messages without scientific language [ 88 ] because the main message from the research can be easily understood and accessible to all practitioners, while further details can be sought by accessing the link.

Our findings corroborate existing recommendations to identify and involve key influencers, organizations, events, communities, #hashtags, and @mentions and to use professional tools to plan sustained, scheduled, and regular posts to overcome the transient nature of social media [ 10 , 23 , 28 , 90 ]. Our systematic review extends existing recommendations by identifying that posting at least once a day on average (often achieved using multiple accounts, platforms or both) was more effective than less-intensive social media strategies, suggesting a dose-response relationship between post frequency and social media effectiveness. This dose-response relationship may explain the negligible effect of one journal’s social media campaign tested in 2 RCTs included in this systematic review [ 42 , 43 ].

The optimal timing of social media posts and campaigns for the dissemination of research evidence to practitioners is contentious in existing literature [ 53 , 95 , 96 ]. Optimal timing may be outcome dependent; in this review, different times of the day and different days of the week were more effective depending on the outcome measured ( Table 1 ). Similarly, while reach and engagement may be enhanced by established social media initiatives extending over months or years, impact may be best achieved in shorter, targeted social media campaigns over days or weeks.

Our findings suggested a tendency for greater impact on thinking and practice from social media featuring targeted topics or specialist areas of health care. This concurred with previous reviews that found that the dissemination of clinical guidelines or clear, evidence-based behavior change messages, such as practice points , may increase impact with health care practitioners [ 90 , 94 ]. This also resonates with recommendations in the existing literature to consider the target audience when selecting platforms, formats, and strategies that optimize content for the dissemination of research evidence [ 23 , 88 , 90 , 94 ]. For instance, the choice of platform and content about pediatric colorectal cancer should be guided by the understanding that, in this field, Twitter is typically used to share research evidence, Facebook is used for support offered by nonprofit organizations, and Instagram is used for sharing personal stories [ 67 ].

Our findings suggested a tendency that social media was more effective on impact (in citations) when used to share research articles about broad topics. Thus, there may be interactions between the content of research evidence posts and the effectiveness of dissemination on social media, regardless of platform, format, or strategy. Indeed, there are indications in the wider literature that research evidence source, topic, and post content may influence how effectively it can be disseminated on social media. For example, geographically, compared to the United States, authors from Europe, and UK clinical guidelines, achieve better altmetric attention scores and citation rates [ 58 , 97 ]. Published articles may achieve greater reach, research conference posts may receive greater engagement [ 73 ], and clinical guidelines may better influence thinking and practice [ 90 ]. Research evidence that aligns with “hot topics” on social media may also achieve better reach and engagement [ 68 , 98 ]. Engagement, direct dissemination, and citation rates may be better for open-access articles (especially reviews) that are recently published with shorter titles (which are provocative, interrogative, or declarative and free from methodological description), with a greater number of authors, and by higher impact factor journals (often with a larger social media presence in terms of followers and number of tweets per month) [ 54 , 58 , 59 , 65 , 99 - 101 ]. Depending on the health topic, posts with humor, shock value, inaccuracies, rumors, or emotional content might achieve better reach [ 66 , 102 , 103 ]; posts with practical guidance may be more likely to be shared [ 66 , 102 , 104 , 105 ]; and short videos with positive titles might receive more likes and comments [ 104 ].

Strengths and Limitations

The key strengths of this systematic review are the quantitative meta-analytical methods used that allow robust conclusions based on cumulative evidence about the effective use of social media for the dissemination of research evidence to practitioners. Methodological limitations have been discussed in the published protocol [ 29 ]. The search strategy was comprehensive, using multiple reviewers to ensure reliability and comprising a range of study designs including RCTs. However, no studies were identified investigating the effectiveness of social media for the dissemination of research evidence to social care practitioners. There were also relatively few RCTs, and the mixed quality of the included studies reduced the certainty of evidence about effect sizes for some outcomes. A wide range of social media interventions and research evidence content were represented by the included studies; this reduced the risk of confounding by topic, source, or content. However, time may have reduced the consistency of findings between included studies because the research and social media landscapes are rapidly evolving and have changed significantly from 2010 to 2023 [ 11 , 14 ]. Furthermore, the time frame of outcome measurement can influence potentially transient social media effectiveness [ 55 ]. Effectiveness was evaluated thoroughly in 4 outcome domains, comprising 9 outcomes of interest and multiple measures; this helped to accommodate the variability of reporting and design in the included studies. Although the diversity of the included studies threatened the consistency of effect sizes, the direction of effect in favor of social media was consistent. The heterogeneity of findings was ameliorated using a random effects model for more conservative estimates of effect size than a fixed effects model. Using 4 outcome domains added nuance to the existing understanding and facilitated the development of clear suggestions about how to optimize social media effectiveness for the dissemination of research evidence to health care practitioners. However, a cautious interpretation of a causal relationship between dissemination effectiveness and specific social media tactics is required. Effects may have been inflated by other confounders; for example, larger organizations with greater resources for public relations not only can post more frequently on social media but also may have greater reputational influence and share higher-quality research.

Conclusions

In conclusion, social media were effective for disseminating research evidence to health care practitioners. Large effects of and after social media interventions on measures of direct dissemination were particularly evident. There may be a dose-response relationship between the intensity of the social media campaign and its effectiveness. Selected social media intervention characteristics including platforms, formats, and strategies may enhance reach, engagement, direct dissemination, and impact of research evidence for practitioners. Future research directions include repetition of this review to keep up with the rapidly evolving use of social media for research dissemination; quantitative testing of the potential dose-response relationship between dissemination effectiveness and social media frequency and intensity; and further evaluation and exploration of how different practitioner groups, particularly social care practitioners, use social media to access research evidence.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) and St George’s University of London. This study presents independent research funded by NIHR evidence (2022/01). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Health Service, the NIHR, or the Department of Health.

Data Availability

The data sets generated and analyzed during this study will be available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Findings from this systematic review will be disseminated at academic conferences and promoted using a range of social media strategies.

Conflicts of Interest

None declared.

PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) checklist.

Search strategy.

Description of the included articles and full details of meta-analyses.

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Abbreviations

Edited by T de Azevedo Cardoso; submitted 31.07.23; peer-reviewed by A Araujo, M Katz; comments to author 22.11.23; revised version received 15.12.23; accepted 18.03.24; published 05.06.24.

©Sarah Roberts-Lewis, Helen Baxter, Gill Mein, Sophia Quirke-McFarlane, Fiona J Leggat, Hannah Garner, Martha Powell, Sarah White, Lindsay Bearne. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 05.06.2024.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

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Brandwatch Consumer Research

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Published May 23 rd 2024

2024: Consumer Trends for the Automotive Industry

Discover the biggest consumer trends in the automotive industry, from electric cars to AI to vehicle subscriptions.

The industry has seen a lot of changes in recent years, from supply chain issues to a surge in used cars and the rise of electric cars. What's big in this year and beyond?    

For our latest report on consumer trends in the automotive industry, we analyzed online conversations with Brandwatch Consumer Research to see how consumer behavior has changed.    

Read on to discover which trends are emerging and which are fading.  

Trend 1: Customer experience becomes less positive  

A superior customer experience is critical to brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Brands that don't deliver a seamless customer experience risk being overtaken by their competitors. Consumers are quick to go online and talk about their experiences, and when it comes to the automotive industry, their experiences seem to be less positive.    

Over the past two years, the number of unique authors discussing positive customer experiences has decreased, and it’s now lower than the number of authors discussing negative experiences. 

What are consumers’ pain points? Consumers complain online that their customer service experience hasn't met their expectations. These unmet expectations include problems with customer service, dealerships, auto insurance, or repair shops. 

Trend 2: Aesthetics play a big role in car conversations  

The look and design of a car play a crucial role in purchasing decisions. In fact, a car's aesthetics is the number one feature discussed in online car conversations, ahead of spaciousness, handling, and speed. 

It's also the feature that triggers the most positive emotions. No other feature is mentioned as happily as the look of a car. Joyful online posts about aesthetics that share an image most likely include the following: 

• The color blue 
• Lights 
• Sport cars 
• Wheels 
• Images in black-and-white 
• Vintage cars 

In online discussions about cars, consumers discuss car models and brands, frequently sharing pictures of their favorite cars. Online data also suggests that Gen Z are more likely to talk about cars’ design than other generations. 

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Consumer trends in the automotive industry.

We analyzed millions of online conversations around the automotive industry to identify the latest global consumer trends.

Trend 3: The range anxiety conversation is growing  

Battery, charging, and range are among the most discussed topics in online discussions about electric cars. How far an electric vehicle can go before the battery needs to be recharged is one of the most talked about concerns.   

There is a term to describe the feeling electric car drivers get when they get stressed about range: range anxiety. And more people are talking about it online. The number of unique authors mentioning range anxiety increased by 38% from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024 compared to the previous 12 months. 

Consumers worry that they won't make it to their destination before the battery runs out, or that they've miscalculated the range of their car. Others, like this user, say that range anxiety also starts before driving, due to not being able to go on longer trips without planning: 

Trend 4: The hype around sustainability and used cars has slowed down  

In 2020, the used car market exploded due to a shortage of new cars. Since then, online conversations around used cars have steadily declined, and the same is true for sustainability. Online mentions of cars and sustainability are down 16% from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024 compared to the previous 12 months.  

In recent years, inflation and the higher cost of living have made it harder for consumers to prioritize sustainability in their purchasing decisions. According to a YouGov survey, 45% of respondents said that buying greener cars is a lower priority for them when they have a tighter budget . So, it's no surprise that sustainability is one of the most negatively discussed topics in online car conversations, with sadness being the most expressed emotion. 

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Trend 5: Gen Z show more interest in vehicle subscriptions and leasing  

Subscription models are now a thing in many industries, allowing consumers more flexibility to use products without having to own them. In the automotive industry, consumers have more subscription models to choose from than ever before, and this is reflected in online conversations. 

The number of unique authors on Reddit discussing vehicle subscriptions and leasing has increased by 28% from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024 compared to the previous 12 months. Consumers turn to Reddit to share their positive experiences or seek advice on whether the subscription or lease plan they are considering makes financial sense. 

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Gen Z show more interest in subscription models and leasing than other generations. Online data indicates they are more likely to talk about it online than other generations, and according to a Deloitte study, younger consumers are more open to vehicle subscriptions than older generations . 

Discover more consumer trends in our new automotive report    

We are not done yet. Read more about the latest consumer trends in our new global automotive report and learn about:  

• The changing shape of the online automotive conversation.
• The most common consumer pain points around electric cars.
• How consumers feel about automotive AI technologies.
• Insights into automotive brands' social media performance. 
• And much more.   

Read the report.  

Michaela Vogl

Marketing Content Specialist

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