Social media is important for marketers, to say the least. 95% of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are most likely to follow a brand through social networking, and 70% of the U.S. population is active on at least one social platform. But even after you’ve launched a social media marketing campaign, your work is far from over. Measuring the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics attached to the campaign will give you a wealth of valuable information including your ROI for different campaign components, places you may need to tweak your approach, how different ad features affect performance on different social media platforms, insights to guide your next round of social listening and more. Luckily, a number of resources are available to help you keep track of how your campaign is performing. Here are some of the best tools for social media marketing out there today.

Facebook Pixels

A pixel is a snippet of code that you can add to your business website to help track where your online traffic is coming from, usually in connection with an ad campaign. Facebook pixels tell you how many conversions you’re getting from ads on the platform, but they can also tell you similarities between the profiles of the people clicking on the ads, helping you build audience profiles and retarget people who have previously shown interest. This is one of the most basic, and best, tools for social media marketing that you will want to learn.

Google Analytics Pixel

Like the Facebook equivalent, this piece of code is added to a website and helps you keep track of clicks and conversions, along with on-page behavior like bounce rate, time on page and a lot more. This is probably the most popular KPI tracker of its kind, because of its impressive array of features, user-friendly interface and price (it’s free).

Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights is a social media marketing tool designed specifically for the Instagram platform, and it can tell you all sorts of things about how your posts are performing and what micro-trends are emerging in your account from one week to the next. You can find information with this program such as how many viewers your page has had over the past week, what time of day your followers tend to be most active, what content that you’ve put out is most viewed, your reach among followers and non-followers and engagement rate.

Traackr

This program will tell you information about your influencer-driven social media campaigns. Influencer ROI trackers are one of the top social media marketing tools because they help you pin down exactly how much it’s helping you recruit influencers to promote your brand. Here in the golden age of earned media, it’s tempting to think that more influencer outreach is always better, but as with most other facets of marketing, in fact, you’ll find you have to strike a balance between pursuing your business goals and overextending yourself with redundancies and extravagances.

Hootsuite Impact

This versatile option shows you insights about your content — paid, owned or earned — and it integrates with other analytics tools you run, giving you access to all your marketing metrics across channels at once. It also features a reporting feature that can summarize KPI changes in your social media marketing campaigns, so that you have an immediate sense of what to adjust and how.

Sprout Social

Similar to Hootsuite Impact, this tool features all-in-one access to your different social media platforms, a social media scheduling tool, and an internal messaging system to help organize your team’s efforts on social.

HubSpot

As a suite of products designed to work together as a comprehensive CRM platform, HubSpot does much more than measure social media marketing KPIs. It’s a Marketing Hub that features a social media component that tracks all the classic metrics you’re after, and it has a paid ad tracking section where you can monitor the results of paid campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo isn’t a social media marketing tool as much as a content marketing tool, but it still has a place on your social channels. By allowing you to search for top-performing content, along with key influencers near you, brand mentions and more, this resource can generate some creative directions to take your social campaigns.

Keyhole

A powerful social media monitoring platform, Keyhole lets you automate reports, track and compare posts by influencers, measure hashtags, and see a host of other metrics across your social media accounts in real time.

How Can You Ensure These Metrics Are Legitimate?

Social media platforms have opened up their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to third parties like software developers in order to allow apps to mesh with their structures and provide accurate real-time data to users. The tools we’ve mentioned above all draw from the data pipeline set up by the social platforms themselves, so you can be confident that what you’re seeing is a good reflection of audience behavior on the platforms.

How to Use Social Media Data Effectively for Your Business

When it comes to using social media data effectively, here are a few tips:

Know Your Goals

You won’t be able to decide which KPIs to track if you don’t have a clear sense of where you want to go. Once you have the goals set, you can backtrack to the individual metrics that will be important.

Use Social Listening

Listen to what your audiences are saying in their own social posts. What do they say about you, or your competitors? Are there product releases or promotions they’re excited about? This is a powerful way to get inside the minds of the people you’re going to address later in your social media marketing campaigns.

Track Platform-Specific Metrics

What works on Instagram may not work on Facebook. Don’t get complacent when tracking KPIs or designing campaigns — you might be tempted to copy and paste your specifications across platforms, but it’s better to dive deep into your individual channels and come up with a formula for each.

Want to Start Tracking Social Media KPIs? We Can Help.

If you’re looking for expert help managing your business’s social media marketing, we’re ready to talk. Reach out to us today.