Free Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Tools

Building a website and creating content can be very fulfilling. But the real fun starts when people visit, engage with, and share your content.

It’s hard to know for sure that you’re doing something right without looking at the analytics. One way to tell is by monitoring your social media engagement. If people are visiting your site from social media and sharing what they find on their own social accounts, then you're doing something right. I learned this the hard way: if you don't monitor your social media analytics, then you don't know if you're succeeding. Of course, if you do monitor them, then it will reinforce what you're doing - which is the best part!

If you’re using WordPress, then you might be going crazy trying to find the best social media listening and analytics tools. I’ve compiled the best tools for you below! These tools are all 100% free. Check them out and read on to find the tools that will help you monitor your blog’s performance on social media.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free, robust tool that lets you monitor your site’s traffic and conversion rates. As a PM, you should know these metrics by heart. To get started, follow these steps:

• Sign-up for a Google Adwords account. This is required for the Google Analytics Dashboard to work properly.
• On your website, enter the tracking code provided by Google Analytics. This will give you all the insights you need on which channels are driving the most traffic to your website, as well as what pages of your website do the best job of attracting social media users. You can also see how well your social media efforts are translating into conversions.

IFTTT

IFTTT is a very specific tool that’s not necessarily designed for social media listening. But don’t let that fool you — thanks to the abundance of third-party integrations, IFTTT can be used for this purpose as well. For example, you can set up a trigger on IFTTT to get an email anytime your branded hashtag gets mentioned on social media, so you have time to respond to engaged followers.

You can even get more personal with IFTTT, having the program send you the information through SMS or your smart speaker. Even if you don’t use IFTTT to monitor your social media performance, it’s worth it for the ability to cross-post across channels alone.

TweetReach

Union Metrics’ TweetReach tool is a social media listening platform, which offers competitive analysis and insights through your data. And while they offer many other plans and features, we’ll focus on their free TweetReach snapshot reports. These reports provide insights into how your hashtag campaign is performing over time, which tweets with the hashtag received the most engagement, and more.

One interesting thing to note is that you can also view the top contributors for your hashtag, so these people may be good candidates for your influencer marketing. These reports are applicable for hashtag monitoring as well as account or brand mentions. If you’re a social media marketer or employed in this role, then Union Metrics is worth every penny.

Sumo WordPress Plugin

The Sumo WordPress plugin was built to improve your site's conversions. Part of that is measuring social media performance, analyzing which pages drive more traffic and conversions, and providing Facebook and Twitter share options. Sumo has carefully placed the buttons in such a way that they can boost social traffic by 20% on average for a WordPress site.

This plugin also integrates with over 65 services like Facebook and Pinterest. For example, Sumo is great if you want to reach out to an audience that’s not on traditional platforms. It also offers detailed analytics — you can see total shares for your various pages in the Sumo dashboard. You can also get an overview of top performing pages from the last 7 days (7 days free, then $5/month).

GetSocial WordPress Plugin

The Sumo WordPress plugin was built to improve your site's conversions. Part of that is measuring social media performance, analyzing which pages drive more traffic and conversions, and providing Facebook and Twitter share options. Sumo has carefully placed the buttons in such a way that they can boost social traffic by 20% on average for a WordPress site. This plugin also integrates with over 65 services like Facebook and Pinterest.

For example, Sumo is great if you want to reach out to an audience that’s not on traditional platforms. It also offers detailed analytics — you can see total shares for your various pages in the Sumo dashboard. You can also get an overview of top performing pages from the last 7 days (7 days free, then $5/month).

Twitter Analytics & WordPress Plugin

The Twitter plugin for WordPress makes it easy to integrate Twitter with the WordPress website. You can embed Twitter content in posts, add Tweets and Follow buttons to your site, and customize the way your posts appear on Twitter. This plugin is essential if you do any form of advertising on Twitter. Add a tracking pixel without having to write a single line of code. Create campaigns and start advertising directly from your WordPress dashboard.

You can review analytics, conversion rates, and various campaign activities to see what content is performing best for you. The insights with this plugin are robust. When you use Twitter Ads, you’ll be able to see what users do after viewing or clicking on your ad. If you haven’t started with Twitter ads yet, you should take advantage of these Twitter promo codes. Who is the target segment — individuals who are thinking about using Twitter ads from advertisers new to Twitter.

Shareaholic WordPress Plugin

The WordPress Share Buttons, Related Posts, Google Analytics plugin, by Shareaholic, is all about increasing your audience engagement on social media. It includes the basics of a social media plugin with share counters, buttons, short URLs, and support for dozens of sites. In addition to this, it includes analytics for content with robust details including which pages are the most popular on social media, and which networks send you the most traffic. You can even break down the performance at an author and post tag level so you can determine which authors and topics are bringing the most traffic to your website.

There are even more social media listening tools we love, but they have limited free plans, so you won’t find them on our list.

Finally, whichever plugin you choose, whether for social media or anything else, make sure it works for your needs and for your business.