Let’s face it, social media has become the Holy Grail of marketing today. We live in a world where decisions are made by a swift swipe, a quick scroll or an impulsive click. The internet to many is a comfy hub to communicate with others, learn new things, look at memes… and vent about politics. With close to half the world’s population being on some type of social media (Statusbrew), we can’t deny the fact that the number of social media users will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
Your typical day on social media may consist of promoting your brand, bearing these points in mind:
- Organic social is just as important as paid social media (ads), so the consistent distribution of social media posts is crucial
- You have approximately 8 seconds to grab most social media users’ attention (SocialMediaToday)
- Become an interactive online persona who speaks on behalf of the brand
- Illustrating products or services in the most creative way as possible
With so much to juggle in the galaxy of social media, it’s only fair to consider using social media tools to help track and analyse what works well and what doesn’t. Efficiently analyse and optimise the performance of your social media activity with the help of our recommended 9 FREE Tools to Audit your Social Media.
1. Socialbakers
There will always be competition out there. That’s what makes the social media bubble a little more exciting. However, what can be intimidating is not knowing what your competitors are doing. With Socialbakers, you can find out where you stand within the competitive social media landscape. Socialbakers also provides you with thorough performance quadrant reports to learn how effective your ads strategy is.
There are many other benefits of using this tool such as, conducting an influencer search by region, which will help you find top performers on Instagram in specific locations.
And that’s not all. From tracking your communication on customer care activity to insights on some of the best-performing companies on social media, Socialbakers is the tool to make your social pages fly.
Check out Socialbakers’ free social audit tools here.
Social networks that integrate with Socialbakers include: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.
2. Klear
Klear is a social media analytics and intelligence platform that covers social media monitoring, influencer marketing and competitive intelligence.
The three essential analytics tools you can choose from are:
- Facebook Page Analytics
- YouTube Analytics
- Bloggers Analytics
You can either search your own Facebook handle to find out how well your influence, engagement, total fans and top content is doing. Alternatively, you can search for your competitors to see which content has worked best for them.
Although YouTube and Bloggers Analytics requires a demo to unlock the search bar, you can check out a few popular YouTubers and Bloggers as an example to find inspiration on their top content.
If you’re in the process of creating an influencer marketing campaign, Klear is the perfect platform as you can use influencer tools to identify and analyse influencers, which you can then measure against your programme to determine your potentially most valuable influencer for your campaign.
You can also identify and target influencers or bloggers across the globe, which means you aren’t limited to only one specific area.
Just to be ‘Klear’, a majority of auditing tools are free, however, a demo or paid account will give you access to the full capabilities.
Have a play around with Klear.
Social networks that integrate with Klear include: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
3. Union Metrics
Union Metrics did everyone a huge favour by borrowing a few clever algorithms from their paid product to provide a set of free tools to improve your social marketing.
They ask for nothing in return. You can access these powerful tools all in one place:
- Twitter Assistant – See how you’re doing on Twitter and get recommendations on how to improve
- Instagram Checkup – Find out which posts, hashtags and fans are boosting your engagement on Instagram
- Twitter Snapshots – Quickly report about recent activity for any Twitter hashtag, keyword or topic
With all these algorithms combined, you’ll have the right content posted, at the right time of day, with the best choice of hashtags in no time.
Sign up for Union Metrics for free.
Social networks that are integrated with Union Metrics include: Twitter and Instagram.
4. SumAll
This cross-platform marketing analytics company combines social media, web traffic, sales metrics and other data to allow customers to track business and social media metrics.
With SumAll, you can schedule content for Twitter and Facebook which is great if you’re super busy and need to work on social media as quickly and efficiently as possible. You can also track your organic and paid data to see how well the posts have done.
SumAll is totally free and allows unlimited automation, data and platforms.
Want to take SumAll for a test drive? Simply sign up.
5. Followerwonk (Exclusive to Twitter)
Take your analysis to another level with Followerwonk. With this tool, you’ll have the ability to learn about a Twitter user’s followers that you are particularly interested in. The tool segments users into several psychographic segments, including gender, location, Twitter activity, and much more.
So why exactly is it beneficial to do research on other influencer or brand’s followers? It may be that you think a certain account has the right audience for your product or service, and you’d like to find out certain patterns and habits of those followers. Learning about your audience is the first thing you need to do to understand their online presence, actions and interests.
Crack the code to targeting your audience and visit the Followerwonk website.
6. Likealyzer (Exclusive to Facebook)
Also known as your “personal Facebook advisor”, this software is a great way of helping your brand succeed on Facebook. Likealyzer instantly converts raw Facebook analytics into a simple report. All you need to do is a search for your own Facebook business page and hit enter… no sign in required! The report then gives you a general overview with a couple of bullet points, outlining what you’re doing right and wrong on the page.
This is then followed by an in-depth yet easily digestible report for you to understand what actions must be done to help increase your ‘LikeRank’.
Curious to see whether your Facebook page is doing well? Find out on Likealyzer.
7. Tailwind
Although Tailwind is primarily used to save time scheduling to Pinterest and Instagram, this platform also provides actionable analytics. One of the free features you can access is the ‘Post Inspector’, which allows you to analyse the performance of individual Instagram or Pinterest posts over time, or filter and sort to uncover insights by hashtags, keywords, date range, and even image filters!
Another great feature is being able to track the latest trends for your Instagram or Pinterest profile in handy charts, which makes it easy to gauge your progress over time.
Does Tailwind sound like your type of auditing tool? Check it out.
8. SparkToro (Exclusive to Twitter)
SparkToro is a new company set up by Rand Fishkin, the man responsible for the Moz suite of tools used in SEO, which currently allows you to analyse your Twitter account to uncover an estimated percentage of inactive, spam, bot and other fake followers. All you have to do is connect your Twitter account to see your ‘Fake Followers Audit’.
How does it work? This tool audits a sample of 2,000 random followers for any given account and runs diagnostics found to strongly correlate with these types of fake followers.
Along with this excellent tool, SparkToro also provides two more free tools to help audit your account. You can see what web marketers are talking about and sharing on Twitter, which is refreshed every 15 minutes based on the tweets of thousands of accounts in the marketing field. There is also a ‘SparkScore’ which determines the true level of influence for any Twitter profile on a scale from 0-100, and also gives you a detailed insight into how the score is calculated and the elements that support it.
Explore SparkToro’s free tools here.
9. TweetReach
TweetReach provides a quick and easy way of obtaining free reports on your recent Twitter activity. You can either search a hashtag, username or keyword. Searching for a hashtag or keyword allows you to see who’s been talking about any topic, including the contributor with the biggest impact.
Running a username search will provide you with quick analytics data. What’s in a TweetReach snapshot report?
- Search Query – analyse any hashtags, accounts or keywords
- Reach – the number of potential unique Twitter accounts that received these tweets
- Exposure – the total number of potential impressions
- Tweet activity – overview of the tweet volume over time
- Tweet type – a breakdown of the types of tweets in the report
- Top contributors – the top three influencers in this snapshot
- Top tweets – the three tweets that received the most retweets
- Contributors list – overview of all participants in this report
- Tweets timeline – a full transcript of all tweets with timestamps
Free snapshots include up to 100 tweets from the past few days.
Sign up to TweetReach and grab your free Twitter analytics report.
So, there we have it, 9 free awesome auditing tools for your social media platforms. If you’re looking to really gear up your social media platforms, read 7 Free Social Media Tools You Should Be Using. (Yes, we have more.)
As an agency, we use several tools that have a monthly fee that aids our clients with their Social Media campaigns, (find out more about these here) but these free auditing tools are a great start to auditing your social channels, social content and competitors.
