The Best Analytic Apps For Your Businesses’ Social Media Strategy

While there is an abundance of additional social media sites that can be used very effectively for your business, many high-ranking blogs agree that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram tend to be the most popular in 2015. All three of the platforms are heavily-used on mobile devices, and for that reason, are especially important to analyze in terms of social metrics.

Likes, comments and shares are the most visible and intuitive way to perceive how well your posts are performing, but what about the data you can’t see? Things like:

• Post Reach
• Post Clicks
• Views Per Day
• Admirers
• Non-Followers
• Traffic Sources

All are just a few examples of how analytic applications can help you refine and grow the extent of your social media campaign’s reach. The following will be broken down into apps available for all, or individual platforms.

Hootsuite (Available for all 3)

Known by many entrepreneurs as the premiere dashboard available for social media analytics, Hootsuite has just recently roped Instagram into the mix, allowing the user (Or team of users) to access an entire company’s social media platforms under one roof.

The main dashboard can be accessed via desktop, or right on your mobile device or tablet. Perhaps what makes it so powerful is the ability to construct posts that will run across all three platforms, and then get to analyze which did better and why.

Notable highlights of Hootsuite’s Analytics:

• Gauge Social Sentiment – Knowing how your audience is feeling is much more important than posting content you personally enjoy. Gauging sentiment can be done by filtering a posts results by location, language and gender.
• Tap Into Inspiration – Beyond exploring your own social channels, Hootsuite gives you the ability to view real-time data from blogs, news sites and conversations happening all over the world to compare what you’re posting with the social influencers within your respective industry.
• Content Analytics – Measure all of the numerical data that can tell a story about when and what is getting attention.
• Cross-Platform Insights – If you’re using all three platforms this may be the best feature for knowing what kind of content may or may not work effectively across all three. Creating one post for three platforms seems efficient, but if it doesn’t align with an audience based on the functionality of Facebook vs. Instagram you may want to alter your content calendar.

Crowdfire (Twitter and Instagram)

One of the distinguishing differences between Facebook and Twitter/Instagram is the heavy emphasis on followers. On Facebook your business page can’t really be active in following other business pages, it’s up to you as an individual user to “Like” other pages.

In the TwitterGram world, you’ll begin to notice fluctuation in followers. This might be because when you’re tired of seeing someone’s posts you can’t hide the posts without unfollowing them, and often times people will unfollow if you don’t follow them back. But how do you know?

Crowdfire is built for that exact purpose, with rapid-fire tools to drop people who don’t follow you, and gain new followers by tapping into accounts with similar content.

Notable highlights in Crowdfire:

• Copyfollowers – Think of an Instagram count you follow that has a tremendous influence, which also posts like-minded content. Simply search for that account and follow up to 160 of their followers within an hour. This is a great feature for growing your reach.
• NonFollowers – Crowdfire keeps track of everyone who hasn’t followed you back. You can choose to “whitelist” accounts you’d like to follow regardless, “blacklist”accounts so you don’t follow them again, or simply unfollow 160 an hour.
• TakeOff – Along with scheduling your posts, TakeOff suggests the best hashtags to increase the reach of your posts.

Page Manager Insights (Facebook)

In conjunction with the desktop version of Facebook’s insights, your company should consider downloading Facebook’s mobile version which comes equipped with push-notifications that will hep you engage with your audience at a moment’s notice.

Notable highlight of Insights:

• Week-to-week Data – Many of us are on the go constantly and the ability to check how well your posts are doing away from the desktop is an excellent exercise for planning future content.
• Post-Ranking – After you publish, Insights will send a push-notification when your post has done better than 75-95% of other posts on your page. Again, another great reminder of what has been working.
• Likes – You’ll begin to notice there’s a strong correlation between your posts quality/frequency and the number of new page likes. Within the app you’ll see how many new likes you’ve gotten, and how that compares to the prior week.
• Page-Reviews – Much like Google reviews, people have begun using Facebook’s page reviews as a way to get insight into your company. Within the app you can see when someone leaves a new one, and respond quickly in case there’s something wrong.