Mere brand presence on social isn’t enough anymore. Brands face a seismic shift toward community-led growth, social commerce and social search. For social media professionals, deeply understanding content and campaign performance isn’t just an advantage; it’s a strategic imperative.

Native platform insights offer a foundational glimpse into what’s working well and what’s not, but they often lack holistic, actionable intelligence. You need a robust, third-party social media analytics tool to navigate behavioral shifts, prove ROI and identify emerging trends.

Advanced social media analytics platforms aggregate disparate data, providing a unified lens that translates numbers into strategic narratives. Beyond standard metrics like reach and engagement, the best tools offer capabilities like sentiment analysis and competitive benchmarking—crucial for optimizing spend and achieving measurable business outcomes.

This article explores 12 leading social media analytics tools empowering marketers to master the complex social landscape in 2025.

What are social media analytics tools?

Social media analytics tools are a type of software that collects and analyzes data from your social media channels. Data from social media analytics software lets you better understand your audience and how they interact with your content. With these tools, you can get insights into trends and patterns that’ll enable you to better connect with your audience, optimize engagement and improve conversion rates.

Some social analytics tools provide additional functionality, like monitoring and analyzing competitor behavior. Advanced tools will also help you customize reports to your brand’s needs, and drill into the metrics that help you prove social’s impact to your leadership team.

Using social media analysis tools for monitoring and insights is a way to optimize your social media strategy—and strengthen your market position with business intelligence. This is why many top brands rely on Sprout Social’s analytics platform to achieve these strategic advantages.

Benefits of using a social media analytics tool

It’s essential to invest in a tool that’ll give you deeper insights into how your social media strategy is performing. Here are three key reasons to use social media analysis tools.

Gain deep insights into your followers

Using a social media analytics tool helps make sure you’re consistently creating and publishing content that actually resonates with your target audience. Get insights like:

  • How many people are your posts reaching
  • How often do people like or interact with your content
  • How much your social media following is growing
  • How many sales and conversions your social media posts are generating

And so much more. Having these details helps you get a better idea of what content to publish, when and where so you’re moving strategically rather than reactively. These insights will inform messaging that hits on audience pain points, needs and interests—making sure your social marketing strategy is relevant and engaging.

Increase follower engagement and customer loyalty

When followers see that your social media content aligns with what they care about, they’ll be more interested in your brand. What happens when you make an emotional connection with them? You win their trust and loyalty.

As a result, your followers may engage with your content more often, signaling they want to build a two-way relationship with you. They don’t want to simply scroll by your content—they want to interact with you.

Optimize and prove social media ROI

Advanced social media analytics platforms enable you to track key performance indicators (KPIs) like impressions, engagements, share of voice and, with the help of integrations, even conversion rates and pipeline. Having insight into these social media metrics lets you attribute specific social media activities to revenue generation.

When you’re able to measure the ROI of your social media strategy, you can execute data-driven optimization. For example, if you identify a specific type of organic social post that tends to have high conversion rates, you can increase the number of those posts to maximize conversions. And when you have data that showcases social media value, you’ll extract insights that resonate with your executive team—building trust and supporting future investment in social.

Bonus resource: Get the framework Sprout uses to share our social media ROI with our executive team. Download the ROI toolkit. 

Tools strengthen your social media analysis

Standard social media reporting and analytics can often stay surface level. But with the right third-party tools, you get access to core capabilities that enhance your analyses. Key differentiators include sentiment analysis, offering a window into the emotional tone of conversations around your brand, and competitive benchmarking to measure your performance against industry leaders and peers.

Many tools also use AI-powered insights for predictive analytics, identifying important insights like emerging trends in your data and the best times to post on social media. This deeper intelligence enables you to move from reactive adjustments to proactive, data-driven strategies that optimize ROI and foster genuine community growth.

Best social media analytics tools for your brand

1. Sprout Social

The need for cross-channel social media analytics and influencer marketing reporting makes Sprout Social’s analytics tools an easy choice.

Whether you want to dive deep into your performance on a single network, quickly compare results across multiple networks at once or track the ROI of your influencer campaigns, Sprout has you covered.

Track Facebook Page impressions, tally up YouTube video views, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement, see which Threads posts perform best and what’s driving the most engagement on TikTok, all from the same location.

Tag posts to understand campaign performance and filter down to the information you need. Then quickly organize and share your data with easy-to-understand, presentation-ready reports. And, get a full view of your social customer care activities with dedicated reports for agents. Our Inbox Team Activity and Case Management reports are built to highlight essential metrics like your message and Case volume alongside reply times.

Try Sprout free for 30 days

Take it a step further with Sprout’s premium offerings:

  • Use Premium Analytics to create custom reports tailored to your organization’s KPIs. With Sprout’s My Reports custom reporting, you can combine various reports, add text annotations and include a variety of widgets to filter your reports in the ways that make sense to different audiences.
  • Access templated and customizable reporting options for multiple ways to gather essential social metrics, reduce the noise and easily present them to others in meaningful ways.
  • Sprout’s advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data surrounding audience demographics, industry influencers, campaign performance, share of voice and consumer sentiment.
  • Use AI-powered tools to analyze data in My Reports and create summaries.
  • With Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector, you can combine the power of social data with other business metrics for a 360 view of the customer journey.
The Cross-Network Post Performance Report in Sprout showcasing top performing posts across major social networks like X, Instagram and TikTok.

 

Discover the right influencers and measure the ROI of campaigns with Sprout Social Influencer Marketing:

  • Find ideal influencer partners based on topical alignment and key social metrics, like engagement, using Sprout’s Influencer Marketing Discovery and Reports capabilities.
  • Build influencer marketing strategies rooted in data by understanding industry dynamics–like most active social platforms, creative trends and audience interests, so you can invest in campaigns in the most efficient way.
  • Use Brand Safety reports to assess and mitigate partnership risks, ensuring your influencer partners are aligned to your brand values.
  • Measure the Earned Media Value of brand collaboration posts so you understand the impact and ROI of your influencer partnerships.
  • Track competitor activity to get visibility into their partnerships and share of voice, helping you understand your brand’s impact compared to the competitive landscape.
Example metrics included in Sprout Social Influencer Marketing Reports, like EMV and link clicks for each influencer.

No matter your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout is built to give you a fast, user-friendly way to display social insights.

2. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management tool for agencies, with comprehensive analysis and reporting features. It works with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and X. With it, you can better understand how your social posts perform in order to optimize your social media strategy. Sendible offers automated reports with customized branding and 200 analytics modules to choose from.

Sendible's traffic sources dashboard.

Sendible also offers social media management features, like content customization, image editing, direct scheduling and client collaboration. It also has audience engagement capability so you can respond to audience comments, DMs and mentions from one inbox.

A key differentiator for Sendible is that it can be white-labeled, so it works well for social media agencies that want to use the software under their brand for their clients.

3. Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time social media analysis tool for X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok. Its products monitor what followers say about your brand, track competitor behavior, find leading social media influencers, spot upcoming trends and more.

A mock-up of a Keyhole dashboard created for Starbucks Coffee.

Keyhole aggregates your analytics for each social media profile across your accounts so you can monitor everything through a single platform. Plus, it shows your social media performance over time to help you better understand how your strategy is working—so you can optimize it to reach your goals.

This platform works for agencies, B2C brands, nonprofits and several industries such as media and entertainment.

4. IZEA

The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.

Enter IZEA, an analytics platform which removes many of the what-ifs related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.

IZEA’s Flex software also enables brands to get a look into potential influencers’ audience demographics, influencer campaign performance, conversion rates and so much more.

IZEA Flex Dashboard, which tracks your influencer partnerships so you can evaluate performance and pivot strategies for success.

Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be an ROI mystery. Using a tool like IZEA to not only find but track influencer partnerships is a good way to monitor success.

5. BuzzSumo

Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is a resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.

If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter) or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.

Buzzsumo Search Backlinks dashboard, which helps you understand how each performs, with metrics for performance and engagement.

Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.

6. Google Analytics

While it’s not solely a social media analytics tool, Google Analytics is a way to track social media campaigns driving to your website and even help you measure social ROI.

You may already have an account set up on your website to monitor and analyze your traffic right now. But did you know you can access and create reports specifically for social media tracking, too?

Google Analytics Traffic Acquisition dashboard, which shows you how much traffic you send to your website with each social media channel.

For instance, you can see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network, or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns.

7. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an X-specific analytics tool that can help brands search relevant X bios to find users to engage with, compare users, analyze accounts, track followers and more. Users can get access to valuable insights and help with their X strategy using a completely free Followerwonk account.

Followerwonk's Track Followers dashboard, which provides insight into X profiles that your brand should engage with.

 

Followerwonk was acquired by Fedica, which is adding new AI-powered tools to help automate more social media management workflows.

8. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a social media analytics tool that can help businesses track their success across a number of channels—YouTube included. With features like competitor analysis, basic social analytics, social listening, reporting and social media audits, Rival IQ works for businesses with a widespread online presence. It can also be a huge help for agencies working with multiple clients.

A mock-up of a Rival IQ dashboard, which has many features like social media analytics, social listening, competitor analysis and reporting.

Build out custom dashboards for each client based on their specific goals with social media marketing. Then download reports to share in a number of formats, like PPT, PDF, PNG or CSV. Rival IQ also offers influencer tracking and hashtag analytics to help you monitor influencer campaigns and choose the best hashtags for your content.

9. Iconosquare

Iconosquare started as a basic Instagram analytics tool years before the platform started offering built-in insights. At the time, this tool was one of the only ways to effectively monitor your Instagram efforts. As platforms adapt and change, analytics tools must do the same.

Now, Iconosquare is a social media analytics tool that lets users monitor 100+ different metrics across various social media platforms. Supported social media platforms include Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn and TikTok.

Iconosquare lets you build custom social media analytics dashboards so you can focus on the metrics that matter to you.

Create custom dashboards that allow you to see your most important metrics at a glance, like follower growth, audience demographics, post engagement, reach and more. Iconosquare also offers publishing capabilities, collaborative content creation and approval, social listening and community management.

10. Tailwind

Tailwind is another social media analytics tool that has changed and evolved over the years. What started as a Pinterest scheduling tool called Pin League has quickly evolved into a social media management and analytics tool.

Tailwind supports a limited number of social networks. While users can connect their Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest accounts, Tailwind’s features are catered to the visual platforms of Pinterest and Instagram.

Tailwind's Pinterest insights dashboard, which allows users to create and schedule posts, find the best hashtags, access a seamless link-in-bio tool and more.

Get Pinterest and Instagram insights, create and schedule posts, find the best hashtags, access a seamless link-in-bio tool and more with Tailwind. Brands can easily track the performance of their visual social media profiles with this platform’s visually appealing and easy-to-use dashboard.

11. Audiense

Audiense is an audience-building tool that helps brands track their performance across multiple social media platforms. Audiense is also a very X-minded tool, so it works well for brands who put a major emphasis on their X audience and performance.

Audiense gives you metrics that help you grow your social media audience across multiple channels.

Source

With Audiense, brands can easily create customer personas based on their target audience demographics, gather sources of influence that their audience likes to get content from, find the best influencers to work with and more. Audiense’s X marketing tools enable brands to also get a deep dive into their X (Twitter) analytics.

12. SparkToro

SparkToro is similar to Audiense in that it’s also an audience intelligence platform. While this tool doesn’t necessarily provide you with data and analytics from your own social media performance, it gives brands insight into their audience, competitors and other profiles within their networks.

SparkToro's Social Intelligence dashboard.

Use SparkToro for social media intelligence on where your customers spend their time online (so you know where to advertise to them), uncover audience demographics (so you can improve your ad targeting), pinpoint what your audience is talking about right now (so you can create catered content) and even get insight into your own account’s influence and authority online.

Which tool is best for social media analytics?

To determine the “best” social media analytics tool, there is no one-size-fits-all answer; rather, it hinges entirely on your specific business objectives, team size, budget, and desired depth of insights. The ideal social analytics software should seamlessly integrate with your existing social media channels and workflows to provide the metrics most crucial to your strategic goals.
When evaluating options to choose the best social analytics platform, consider several key factors:

Features and capabilities:

Assess the specific functionalities offered. Do you require in-depth audience social platform, demographics, robust competitor analysis, precise sentiment tracking, or comprehensive, customizable reporting? Ensure the software provides support for all the social media platforms your brand actively utilizes.

Ease of use and user interface (UI):

An analytics platform with an intuitive and well-designed interface is crucial. This will significantly reduce the learning curve for your team, encourage broader adoption, and make data more accessible and understandable across your organization.

Reporting and visualization options:

Evaluate the social analytics platform’s ability to present data clearly and effectively. Can you create customizable dashboards that highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your goals? Are the reporting features robust enough to generate clear, compelling reports for stakeholders and leadership?

Scalability:

Consider your future needs. Will this software be able to accommodate your growth as your social media presence expands and your data volume increases? Choose a solution that can evolve with your brand’s trajectory.

Cost and support:

Another critical aspect is the tool’s pricing. Beyond the financial investment, investigate the quality and availability of customer support. Reliable support is invaluable for troubleshooting, guidance, and maximizing your return on investment.

Ultimately, the “best” tool is the one that most efficiently empowers your team to extract actionable insights efficiently, streamline your workflow, leading to demonstrable improvements in your social media strategy and overall business objectives.

Get actionable intelligence from social media analytics tools

The takeaway from all of these tools? Marketers need to own their data. Doing so is the difference between running data-driven campaigns that result in a positive ROI versus just following your gut.

Choose a tool based on what will work best for your business. As you consider your options, start with a free 30-day trial of Sprout to see exactly how well it’ll work for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are social media analytics?

Social media analytics refers to the collection of data and metrics that help you measure your overall social media performance. This helps marketers understand which types of social media content best resonate with their audience, so they can shape and adapt their strategy accordingly. Reviewing social media analytics empowers teams to make data-informed decisions about how to transform their marketing efforts and grow their businesses.

What can social media analytics tools help you measure?

Social media analytics tools enable businesses to track and measure important key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, reach, and impressions.

What are the benefits of social media analytics for business?

Social media analytics provide businesses with valuable insights into their performance across major social media networks, allowing them to track their progress, measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, and optimize their strategies.

In addition, these tools enable businesses to understand their audience better, gain competitive intelligence, and make data-driven decisions. Ultimately, social media analytics can help achieve better results and stay ahead of the competition.