What Are Social Media Analytics Tools?
Social media analytics tools are software applications used to intake, process, interact with, and visualize social media data. They are essentially the nuts-and-bolts of how a marketer turns social media data into actionable insights. For example, a brand might use a social media analytics tool to create easy-to-comprehend graphs that make the case for devoting more of its marketing budget to a particular social platform.
Social media analytics tools are often used in concert with a social media management platform. The latter is typically used to manage an organization’s own social media accounts and activity. The two separate-but-related tools are sometimes integrated so that they work with consistent, unified data. This also aids marketers in analyzing their social media ROI, since they can seamlessly apply their analytics tools to their own accounts.
Why Social Media Analytics Tools?
Social media analytics tools make it possible for humans to efficiently and sustainably sort through and make sense of the massive amounts of data generating on social apps. While a person might be able to derive some anecdotal insights from manually scanning social feeds, deriving high-value insights from large social media data sets would otherwise be virtually impossible on any kind of long-term basis. There is simply too much information for the human eye to effectively parse. Social media analytics tools can deliver high-level insights in a manageable, comprehensible manner.