NetBase: How To Use Free Social Media Analytics To Your Advantage
NetBase, a social media analytics provider, has suggestions for free social media analytics tools for startups and small businesses on a tight budget. Social media has become vital to engage potential customers and enterprise-level companies have nailed it. They use analytics to see if they are meeting their business objectives and adjust their approach if what they’re doing isn’t working.
Unfortunately, without social media analytic tools, it’s impossible to judge engagement and sentiment. Knowing how audiences feel about your products is essential if you want to produce what people want to buy. For example, finding out that consumers dislike one feature of your service allows you to remove the feature and add what they want. Doing this shows that you listen to your customers.
Free Analytics from Social Media Sites
NetBase suggests you take advantage of the free social media analytics from the channels you use. Facebook Insights is a built-in analytics dashboard that shows post engagements, reach, likes, followers and more. You also can look at how your competitor’s posts are engaging people. If your target audience is responding to their posts and not responding to yours, it’s time to find out what they are doing better.
Pinterest analytics, which tells you who sees your pins and if the person acts on them. The data is free if you have a Pinterest business account. Instagram also requires a business profile to view your stats. You’ll see the normal impressions and reach, but what sets Instagram apart is that you get demographic data about your followers and you can see when they use Instagram, so you can time your posts to catch your followers when they are active.
YouTube analytics are essential since video content is more difficult to create. You don’t want to waste resources on making videos that viewers don’t finish watching. You can also discover your viewer’s demographics and the device they used to watch your videos.
NetBase suggests that is can be time-consuming to check multiple social media analytics on different websites, but most analytics software that combines data from multiple channels typically cost money.
Free Social Media Analytics Tools For Multiple Channels
Hootsuite’s free plan will let you check your basic data on three social media platforms. HowSociable lets you see activity on 12 social media platforms, but that’s all the data you receive with the free plan. Zoho Social lets you monitor mentions and messages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Other Analytic Tools
Boardreader analytics looks at reviews and forum posts for mentions of your brand. While you can’t learn what your customers are saying, you can compare the number of times someone mentions your brand to your competitor’s mentions.
NetBase suggests investing in a paid social media analytics tool when your business grows. Gathering quality data from multiple sources saves you time, which you can put into creating engaging, shareable content. If you’re not able to pay for analytics, use the free tools available to you to gain insights. Many of the paid tools, like NetBase, offer free trials of their product so you can try before you buy.