As a business, you know how important it is to have a social media presence. But being a whiz at Instagram or Twitter isn’t just about knowing the right hashtags to use—it’s also about staying up-to-date and finding the latest and greatest ways to get your message out there and put your brand in front of the people who matter most.
So when you’re ready to take your social media game to the next level, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite tools so you can do it with ease.
Table of Contents
Competitor Analysis Social Media Tools
Let’s talk about a subject that’s honestly a bit uncomfortable to some marketers.
Competition.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in–marketing is a game of competing for the attention of your audience. With so many marketing channels available today, that competition is oftentimes fierce.
Think about it.
Competition for traffic, ad placement, followers and sales. The list goes on and on. And while the idea of conducting competitive analysis isn’t particularly “fun,” it’s absolutely necessary.
Why Competitor Analysis Tools Are a Must-Have
The good news, though? There are a ton of competitor analysis tools out there to help you quickly and efficiently assess how you stack up against your top competitors.
And with the right tools on deck, you can spend less effort trying to dig dirt on your competitors and more time actually marketing.
Rather than spending too much time trying to spy on your competitors, why not let some smart tools do the legwork for you?
We’ve broken down a comprehensive list of competitor analysis tools that’ll help you do exactly that:
Competitor analysis tools for social media
Competitor analysis tools for SEO
Competitor analysis tools for content
Competitor analysis tools for email, ads and industries
Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media
- Sprout Social
With social media ranked the No. 1 channel for connecting with customers, there’s no better starting point for competitive analysis.
Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.
You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.
Up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool that offers deeper insights into your social platforms, along with interactive charts and graphs that you can customize to align with your goals.
Facebook analytics are essential to using Sprout as a competitor analysis tool
Sprout offers the same competitive analytics on Instagram too.
You can conduct Instagram competitor analysis with Sprout
And you can dive even deeper using Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool.
By tapping into publicly available social conversations, you can quickly find out how consumers feel about your competitors’ products and services, as well as examine your own share of voice in your industry.
We use listening to understand what is being said about us across social media, and further into the web, such as in blog posts and on forums. We also track what is being said about our rivals, and the manufacturers that we stock. We then take all this information and use it in our quarterly social media strategies to determine how we can tailor content that we believe our audience may be interested in.
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Alex Hodgson
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With direct access to consumer sentiment, Sprout makes it easy to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand from competitors.
- Phlanx
This Instagram engagement calculator clues you in on how active any given account’s followers are. This is an awesome resource to analyze your competitor’s Instagram presence. Plus, it doubles as a way to figure out whether or not an influencer has a legitimate following.
Phlanx’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate that followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc).
For example, Trader Joes has an engagement rate of 2.56%. This is a fair score for a larger brand that posts on a consistent basis.
Phlanx engagement analysis for TraderJoes’ Instagram
But compare that to the likes of Denny’s, well known for their cult-like social following and rabid fans:
Phlanx engagement analysis for Denny’s Instagram
This score isn’t the be-all, end-all of a brand’s Instagram presence, but it does offer some much-needed perspective.
Take Adidas, one of the most followed accounts out there, for example. They do get an insane amount of engagement on their posts, but it’s low relative to their massive follower count.
Phlanx engagement analysis for Adidas’ Instagram
This speaks to a bigger point about competitive analysis on social media. Context matters. It’s easy to get caught up in follower counts, but engagement is arguably a much more important metric.
- Social Blade
A fun tool for checking out bigger brands is Social Blade. It assesses follower counts on the likes of Twitter, Instagram and YouTube among other services. Although often used to assess the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, there are some interesting insights here for marketers.
For example, their Twitter competitor analysis applies a “grade” based on their average number of retweets and likes.
SocialBlade assigns a grade to every social profile you search
Perhaps most notably, Social Blade provides a day-by-day follower update as well as a live follower count.
SocialBlade tracks Twitter follower growth
Another cool feature is the ability to stack brands’ social presences against each other.
SocialBlade compares the activity of multiple Twitter accounts at the same time
Competitor Analysis Tools for SEO
- SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the most widely-used SEO tools on the market, but its competitor analysis features set them apart from the pack. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.
Here’s a sample dashboard after running a domain analysis for FreeCodeCamp:
SEMRush examines your competitors’ backlink profile and traffic sources
And here’s the piece of the analysis which provides a by-the-numbers view of who’s competing for their keywords:
SEMRush can tell you who else is competing for your traffic
This is an invaluable tool for understanding who your competition is from a strictly SEO perspective. Likewise, highlighting what keywords are targeted by competitors directly influences your own content strategy.
- Ahrefs
Another staple competitor analysis tool for SEO is Ahrefs’ site explorer, which allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords. Additionally, you get a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.
Ahrefs examines your competitors’ organic traffic
It’s easy to check out a site’s highest-performing content based on backlinks (as opposed to shares) too. This information teaches you what sort of products or messaging is working best for a brand.
Ahrefs can identify the source of your competitors’ backlinks
And in addition to highest-performing content, you assess what keywords bring in the most traffic to a competing site.
Ahrefs provides a detailed list of your competitors’ keywords
The takeaway here? Your competition’s traffic doesn’t have to be a guessing game when you’re regularly running your own reports.
- MozBar
This browser extension from Moz provides a surface-level view of how authoritative a site is in the eyes of Google. Based on Moz’s own metric of domain authority (DA), MozBar assigns sites a DA score based on its likelihood to rank in search engines (based on factors such as backlinks). The higher the DA score, the better.
Settled atop your browser, the MozBar is a useful tool to quickly determine a site’s search potential performance at a glance.
MozBar is a competitive analysis tool that looks at a site’s Domain Authority
When enabled, you also see how competing sites compare in a Google query.
MozBar analyzes the domain authority of competing Google results
MozBar allows you to conduct a sort of passive competitive analysis as you examine competing sites to figure out how long they’ve been around and whether or not they’re winning backlinks.
Competitor Analysis Tools for Content
- Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool looks at a piece of content’s engagement on social sites as well as its total shares across the web.
Buzzsumo highlights the top-performing content in your industry
Not only does this clue you in on who’s killing it in terms of industry content, but also it helps you identify potentially hot topics to explore yourself.
Buzzsumo highlights your competitors’ most popular pieces of content
Whether you’re looking for movers and shakers in your industry or simply a new idea for a blog post, Buzzsumo provides you with definitive answers.
- Similarweb
Similarweb is an insanely comprehensive tool for both content and SEO. The tools helps you dig deep into your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from.
For example, you can determine a site’s referral traffic and likewise where a site ends up sending its visitors.
SimilarWeb provides a report of where your competitors’ referrals are coming from
And more importantly, for content marketers, you see what topics visitors search for and what other relevant sites they visit.
SimilarWeb tracks what users are interested in on any given site
- Feedly
If you’re looking for a way to keep an eye on a competitor’s content without checking up on their blog constantly, look no further than Feedly.
Feedly is a content aggregator that stores and organizes content as it’s published, including that of your competitors. This allows you to see hot topics covered by your competitors, all on one page.
Feedly allows you to compile a list of popular industry content
Competitor Analysis Tools for Emails, Ads and Industries
- Mailcharts
Email marketing is arguably one of the most tedious channels for competitive analysis.
Recognizing this, Mailcharts aggregates emails from competing campaigns to help influence your own. In addition to grabbing subject lines, Mailcharts pulls data such as send frequency and compares it to your business’ campaigns to see where your emails stand.
Additionally, the tool compares your campaigns to their own massive library of marketing emails to ensure you’re in tune with best practices (think: timing, frequency, subject line length, etc).
Mailcharts tracks the performance of competing email campaigns
Not only is Mailcharts a powerful competitor analysis tool, but its website offers a ton of email examples to draw inspiration. Pulling from some of the biggest campaigns out there, you get a better idea of what today’s top-performing emails look like.
- Owletter
This tool automatically aggregates emails from competitors and organizes them into a simple, user-friendly dashboard. Owletter’s analytics spots changes in your competitors’ email frequency, and likewise picks up on trends to help you optimize when you should send your own emails.
Owletter aggregates competing email campaigns for analysis
This represents an efficient, data-driven alternative to keeping up a dummy email account to spy on your competitors.
- iSpionage
If you’re interested in a competitor’s paid ads, iSpionage is definitely for you. This tool analyzes multiple aspects of PPC campaigns, including how many keywords a brand is targeting on AdWords:
iSpionage tracks the performance of paid ads
Additionally, you see what their target PPC keywords.
iSpionage provides a list of competitor keywords for PPC ads
You also see who else competes for PPC ads for a particular topic, in addition to how much they’re projected monthly budget is:
iSpionage can determine which competitors are paying for ads on a certain keyword
For brands considering PPC, such a tool is essential for keeping realistic expectations for ad spend.
- Owler
Last but not least, this industry analysis tool uses community data to curate data and content from startups relevant to your niche. Again another tool reserved for bigger brands, you input brands to create your own custom dashboard of industry names to watch.
Owler stacks competitors against each other
And that wraps up our list!
Quick Tips for Conducting Competitive Analysis
While each of these tools can effectively help you analyze your competitors, you also need to keep in mind what happens after you run the numbers. Below is a sort of “final word” on how to make the most of any competitive intelligence strategy.
Analyze Your Actual Competitors
There’s no use in trying to punch above your weight. A local coffee shop with 1,000 followers shouldn’t beat themselves up because they don’t have as many followers as Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts.
As noted earlier, context matters. Sure, take a look at what the big players in your industry are doing. But when assessing your competition, focus first on those who are the most similar in terms of size and target audience.
Focus on Metrics First
When looking at competitors, it’s tempting to obsess over messaging.
However, it’s more prudent to take a data-driven approach to analysis first. Try to pick out as many metrics before trying to break down the “why” of their marketing.
For example, how often do your competitors post new content? What’s the ratio of promotional versus non-promotional posts? What are their top-performing keywords and hashtags?
The answers to these questions are arguably as important as understanding someone’s messaging.
Turn Analysis into Action
Finally, make sure the data you uncover translates into some sort of action.
Maybe you uncover a new set of keywords to target in your content based on your research. Perhaps you haven’t been pushing your content nearly hard enough based on how active your competitors are.
Either way, the end game of competitive analysis is to improve your own marketing strategy. The more information you glean from competitors, the better.
Which Competitor Analysis Tools Are You Using?
Competitive analysis is a crucial component of fine-tuning your marketing strategy. By using the right set of tools, you can run your analysis quickly and actually spend more time focusing on your own efforts.
So, how often do you spy on your competition? Any tools that you consider essential to conducting competitive analysis? Let us know in the comments below.
social media analysis example
Wondering which of your social media tactics are working? Want to better focus your time, effort, and budget? You need a social media analytics tool.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the best free social media analytics tools available, along with some paid options (for the true nerds who want to dive deep on the data and see real returns).
Then you’ll be ready to learn which social media metrics are important to track.
Not ready to start looking for at analytics tools? Get a primer on what social media analytics even is.
10 of the best social media analytics tools
Social media analytics tool #1: Hootsuite Analytics
Social media analytics tool #2: Google Analytics
Social media analytics tool #3: UTM parameters
Social media analytics tool #4: Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Social media analytics tool #5: Brandwatch
Social media analytics tool #6: Talkwalker
Social media analytics tool #7: Hootsuite Impact
Social media analytics tool #8: Channelview Insights
Social media analytics tool #9: Mentionlytics
Social media analytics tool #10: Panoramiq Insights
Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.
Why you need social media analytics tools
Social media analytics tools help you create performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss — to figure out what’s working and what’s not. They should also provide the data you need to assess your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.
They can help you answer questions like:
Is it worth it for my business to keep posting on Pinterest?
What were our top posts on LinkedIn this year?
Should we post more on Instagram next month?
Which network drove the most brand awareness for our product launch?
What kind of posts do my followers like to comment on?
And many more.
10 of the best social media analytics tools
Social media analytics tool #1: Hootsuite Analytics
Key benefits: Performance data from every social network in one place with easy-to-understand reports
Paid or free? Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, social media managers at small-to-medium sized businesses, marketing teams
Most social media management platforms have built-in analytics tools. We hope you’ll forgive us for saying Hootsuite’s reporting capabilities are our favorite. But it’s the tool we know and love best.
viewing social media analytics on multiple networks in Hootsuite
Imagine Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics, Facebook analytics, Pinterest analytics, LinkedIn analytics all in one place. Hootsuite Analytics offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
It saves time by making it easy to compare results across networks.
Social posts metrics:
Clicks
Comments
Reach
Engagement rate
Impressions
Shares
Saves
Video views
Video reach
And more
Profile metrics:
Follower growth over time
Negative feedback rate
Profile visits
Reactions
Overall engagement rate
And more
Best time to post recommendations:
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a. Posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.
This is why our Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features of Hootsuite Analytics. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
Engagement
Impressions
Link clicks
Best time to publish feature in Hootsuite Analytics
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks, instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Hootsuite Analytics:
Customize report templates for only the metrics you care about
Get reports on your competitors
Track the productivity of your social team (response times, and resolution time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments)
Monitor mentions, comments, and tags related to your business to avoid PR disasters before they happen
Hootsuite Analytics is included in the Hootsuite professional plan, with you can try for free for 30 days.
Learn more in this video or sign up for a Hootsuite Analytics free trial.
Try it for Free
Social media analytics tool #2: Google Analytics
Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but especially those who work for a web-based business
You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics already. That’s because it’s one of the best free tools to use to learn about your website visitors. And if you’re a social marketer who likes to drive traffic to your website, then it’s an invaluable resource to have in your back pocket.
While it’s not a social media reporting tool per se, you can use it to set up reports that will help you:
See which social media platforms give you the most traffic
See what content drives the most leads and traffic on which social networks
Get to know your audience with demographic data
Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns
Google Analytics dashboard showing sources of traffic for a blog post
With these data points, you’ll be able to get the most out of your social media campaigns and effectively strategize for the future. No social media strategy is complete without Google analytics.
Learn more: How to use Google Analytics to track social media success
Social media analytics tool #3: UTM parameters
Key benefit: See how much web traffic and conversions your social media channels and campaigns generate (to be used with a web analytics platform like Google Analytics).
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: intermediate
Best for: all social media managers
Example of a UTM parameter for sharing a Hootsuite blog post
UTM parameters are not a standalone social media analytics tool, but they are essential in helping you set up Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) to best measure social performance.
Put simply, UTM parameters are short pieces of code appended to the links you share on social media. They very precisely tell you how many people interact with your content and end up on your website.
In the screenshot above, the UTM parameter is everything that comes after the question mark.
UTM parameters aren’t essential if you’re only concerned about reporting on social media performance in terms of engagement, followers, etc. But if you want to take it to the next level, UTM parameters + Google Analytics will give you more precise data on which social media content and channels drive traffic and conversions.
Pro tip: You don’t need to know how to write code to include them on your social media posts. If you use a social media management platform like Hootsuite, you can automatically generate UTM parameters in seconds.
Learn more: Using UTM Parameters for robust social media reporting
Social media analytics tool #4: Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Key benefits: Analyze brand sentiment and customer demographics in real time, alongside all your other social media performance data
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Intermediate to advanced
Best for: Social media professionals, PR and communications teams, small to large social media teams
Hootsuite Insights is a powerful enterprise-level social listening tool that doubles as an analytics tool.
It goes beyond Hootsuite Analytics, tracking your earned social mentions so you can measure social sentiment and improve customer experience.
Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report template that shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.
Get the free template now!
Brand sentiment dashboard in Hootsuite Insights showing spike in negative sentiment
It also analyzes data about your audience demographics like gender, location, and language. You can compare demographics across networks, or look at the aggregate picture of your audience for all networks combined.
This is a tool that really tells you a lot about your audience — and how they feel about you. It can tell you whether a spike in mentions is a victory or a disaster. And it can help you capitalize or avoid either one, respectively.
Request a Demo
Social media analytics tool #5: Brandwatch
Key benefits: Track and analyze data from more than 95 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social networks
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring
Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:
Summary: A high-level view of social conversations about your brand, competitors, or keywords.
Trends: A report on the conversations and accounts influencing a specific topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
Reputation: A checkup on sentiment trends you might need to monitor or address.
Influencers: A report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities relevant to your brand and analyze their activity.
Competitor comparison: Benchmarking social media data for conversation volume, sentiment, and share of voice.
Learn more: You can add Brandwatch to your Hootsuite dashboard
Social media analytics tool #6: Talkwalker
Key benefits: Monitor conversations from more than 150 million sources to analyze engagement, potential reach, comments, sentiment, and emotions
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media managers, PR and communications teams, brand monitors, product marketers, researchers
Talkwalker offers analytics related to social conversations beyond your owned social properties, including:
Mentions
Brand sentiment
Important influencers
Author lists
You can filter by region, demographics, device, type of content, and more.
Talkwalker is especially useful to spot activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.
Learn more: You can add Talkwalker to your Hootsuite dashboard
Social media analytics tool #7: Hootsuite Impact
Key benefits: Track how organic and paid social impact real business goals and get recommendations for how to improve
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: intermediate to advanced
Best for: social media teams at enterprise organizations with lots of moving parts, paid social advertising teams
Hootsuite Impact provides an in-depth look at the performance of your organic and paid social posts. It then compares that performance to specific business goals, like sales and leads generated. Next, it recommends actions to improve your results.
Hootsuite Impact integrates with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and your ad accounts on many differt social platforms. This gives you a full picture of your post and campaign results, all in one place. With organic and paid analytics side-by-side, you don’t have to gather data from separate tools to create a social media analytics report.
Instead, you see exactly how much revenue all your social efforts generate, so you can prove your social ROI. Keep in mind that ROI is not only about sales generated. Hootsuite Impact uses a custom ROI formula developed specifically for your business. Seeing which of your efforts have paid off has never been easier.
You’ll also get a clear breakdown that shows you exactly how to replicate your successes and improve in the areas where you’re falling short.
Then there’s the competitive benchmarks. To get the best insights from social analytics, you need to understand how other businesses in your industry compare. Hootsuite Impact shows how your results stack up against your competitors, so you can spot opportunities to improve.
Watch this short video to see how Hootsuite Impact works:
Request a Demo
Social media analytics tool #8: Channelview Insights
Key benefits: Analyze the YouTube performance of multiple channels
Free or paid: Paid tool (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels
The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.
With this integration, you can analyze your YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.
Easily see the following metrics in one place:
Views, engagement, subscription activity
Video traffic sources
Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more
Channelview Insights showing YouTube analytics traffic sources piechart
Social media analytics tool #9: Mentionlytics
Key benefit: Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages on social channels and elsewhere on the web.
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, brand monitoring teams, product marketers, researchers at small to medium-sized businesses.
Want to get a big picture view of what’s being said about your brand on the internet? Mentionlytics is a great entry into the world of social media monitoring — especially if you run a global business in more than one language.
Mentionlytics “Top Website Mentioners” chart
Other things you can do with Mentionlytics:
Sentiment analysis
Find top influencers that follow you
Filter results by keywords
Reply to mentions directly
Social media analytics tool #10: Panoramiq Insights
Key benefit: tracks Instagram analytics, including Instagram Story analytics
Free or paid: Paid (or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: All skill levels
Best for: Instagram marketers
Alert all the Instagram marketers. Panoramiq Insights is perfect for Hootsuite free users or pro users who want to get deeper insights on their Stories in particular. (Just download the app from our App Library).
Instagram Analytics in Panoramiq Insights
Among other things, Panoramiq Insights lets you:
Analyze follower demographics, including age, gender, country, city and language
Monitor Instagram account activity (for up to two accounts), including views and new followers
Find your best posts with view and engagement analytics
Measure Story views and interactions
Free social media analytics report template
We’ve created a free social media analytics template you can use to collect data about your performance on the various social networks. It’s a great place to start if you aren’t ready to invest in a tool that will automatically collect data for you. Simply download it, make a copy, and start customizing it with your own data.
Conclusion
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