Facebook is still the king of social media, so if you are engaging on it as part of your business, you need to be measuring the results of your activities and finding ways to improve them.
That is why understanding how your Facebook content performs is crucial for optimizing your social media strategy. With the right analytics tools, you can dive deep into key metrics like engagement, reach, and audience demographics to uncover valuable insights.
Based on my experience working with my Fractional CMO clients, these are the best Facebook analytics tools for your business. With this software, you’re able to track performance, analyze data, and make informed decisions to grow your presence on the platform.
Why Facebook Analytics Are Important
As you start using social platforms on a daily basis, tracking performance becomes a real hassle. This is especially true if your marketing strategy involves several accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other websites. To make sense of all these numbers, you need a unified real-time reporting tool.
Social media management tools aggregate your performance across different channels. They show you the total number of views, likes, and shares on each platform, as well as the top-performing posts. These engagement rates are great for assessing your social strategy and whether your investment bears fruit.
Optimize Content
These complex analysis tools show you which content types are worth pursuing. By tracking metrics such as clicks, impressions, and conversions, you will determine if your strategy is suitable for the target audience. Eventually, you’ll use these insights to optimize content and boost campaign performance.
Audience Insights
Certain tools give you actionable insights about audience demographics. They show you where your audience comes from, how old they are, and what is their gender. This makes them vital for boosting follower count and customizing marketing tactics.
What Metrics You Should Track
Before I introduce your options for Facebook analytics tools, let’s look at the most important metrics you should track. These KPIs provide valuable information about follower growth and engagement, as well as your ability to turn visitors into buyers.
Engagement
The best way to assess content performance is by looking at social media metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Your ability to achieve high engagement directly correlates with the speed of account growth.
Reach and Impressions
By talking about trending topics, you’re able to gain more impressions and, usually, many more views. This is why business accounts should always focus on topics their followers want to read about, instead of promoting their company.
Conversions
Impressions are not enough for a healthy social media account; you also need to convert at a high rate. Use software to track conversions and assess how your audience interacts with the posts. By enticing people to click on your social links, you’ll be able to generate more sales.
Audience Demographics
The best way to boost content performance is by understanding your audience’s age, gender, and location. By using these comprehensive insights, you can tweak your social strategy so it converts at a higher level.
Let’s begin with Facebook’s native tools and see how they differ from third-party analytical tools.
Meta Business Suite provides deeper insights into your social account. It comes with key metrics such as organic and ad reach, content interactions, follower metrics, and link clicks. Most notably, the platform works for both Facebook and Instagram, making it ideal for comprehensive marketing campaigns.
I love the platform’s audience insights. Meta Business Suite shows you the countries and cities where your visitors come from, as well as their gender. There’s also a cool feature that shows potential audience, which is vital if you wish to grow.
Further Reading: 17 Facebook Publishing Tools to Help You Grow on Meta
There are a number of tools that provide basic insights into your social media usage. These programs support Facebook and other social media platforms where you have a business account.
Whether you’re a small marketing agency or a large corporation, you can benefit from Keyhole’s robust analytics features. My favorite thing about the tool is its competitor analysis features. Social media managers commonly use the software to assess other companies’ content engagement metrics, growth in impressions, and follower count.
Among other things, Keyhole allows content scheduling. Subscribe to this service to create a long-term plan for various social media channels and automatically publish posts. As for other cool features, Keyhole has amazing hashtag tracking and market research functions.
Besides Facebook, Quintly provides engagement insights for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The platform features a whopping 500+ performance metrics, which will tell you everything you need to know about audience engagement and conversions.
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Quintly excels at competitive benchmarking features, showing you how your social content performs against other businesses. Another thing I love is the platform’s fully customizable dashboards allowing you to focus on metrics that matter for your company.
Further Reading: 15 Killer Instagram Analytics Tools (and the Critical Metrics to Measure)
Rival IQ is excellent for assessing your ability to keep up with content publishing demands. The software comes with lots of activity metrics, such as posts published per day, post engagement, common publishing time, and percentage of posts with hashtags. By focusing on these engagement metrics, Rival IQ pushes you forward on a daily basis.
Similar to Quintly, this software works for a wide range of social media platforms. The tool also provides fantastic results for audits; compare your cross-channel audience with other businesses and analyze coverage of trending topics with a single click.
The first thing you’ll notice when you open Sotrender is a basic dashboard that counts your views across different social networks. The same key feature works for all competitors, showing you how you compare to them.
The analytics platform shows you the total number of followers for all your social media profiles, comments, various activities, and audience segmentation across the board. The software comes with powerful reporting features, which are vital when working with clients.
Further Reading: The Top 17 Facebook Tools for Marketing Your Business
Aside from generating social media reports for all your social profiles, this platform provides you with a breakdown of your paid advertising performance. My favorite thing about Social Status is that it shows you audience growth and view growth, as well as other growth KPIs.
With this social media management platform, users can check their link stats. See how many people clicked on your post links, and track your CTR over time. It’s also worth noting that the platform differentiates between regular post views and video views for more granular tracking.
Within a single dashboard, Socialinsider breaks down total posts, post impressions, engagement rates, and compares your performance with a previous period. Users gain advanced insights into the audience’s sentiment split, showing their attitude toward your post.
Perhaps the best thing about Socialinsider is that it shows you what type of content works best for your social media profile. The software compares the performance of your regular posts, video content, and stories to help you find the ideal format for your followers.
This category of software allows you to create custom dashboards and track essential metrics for your business. They feature advanced analytics, which you can’t find in simpler programs. Let’s look at some of the more popular tools from this category.
SproutSocial is one of the best social analytics software in the world. One of the program’s cool features is the unified inbox, which allows you to communicate with your Facebook followers and email contacts from a single dashboard.
SproutSocial tracks Facebook performance as well as your online presence on other social platforms. I love the fact that the platform puts emphasis on conversions and how much money you’ve made from post views. As for other notable features, I’d like to mention hashtag tracking, tag reports, competitive reports, and paid performance breakdowns.
Hootsuite is primarily a platform for social listening. The program excels at discovering trending topics and helping you plan future social content. Furthermore, you can use it to perform comprehensive sentiment analysis and discover what the average user thinks about your brand.
The program shows you the expected returns for each social media, assessing your ability to convert followers. AI features are another thing that will boost your marketing efforts, by streamlining your content creation.
Further Reading: 20 Best Social Media Analytics Tools to Empower Your Marketing in 2024
Like SproutSocial and other programs in this category, AgoraPulse offers a unified inbox that simplifies your communication with potential customers. Utilize its AI functions to quickly respond to users and reel in people interested in your products.
AgoraPulse has a wide range of metrics, from engagement rates to return on investment. It tracks unique clicks, events completed, and events value, to give you a better understanding of your sales and marketing efforts. Check how each Facebook page is doing and whether you’re able to turn casual visitors into followers.
SocialPilot is a perfect help for your Facebook management. It creates and schedules posts for your profile, streamlining the daily work. My favorite thing about the software is bulk scheduling, a feature that is vital for larger corporations.
The software tracks your engagement numbers during the current period and compares them to the prior period. It differentiates between textual posts, images, videos, and links and shows performance for each category. Another thing worth mentioning is customizable reports that place focus on vital metrics.
Iconosquare has a few tracking features that are excellent for measuring the audience’s growth over time. The program shows you how many followers you’ve gained and lost during the previous period and how it compares with your past performance.
The software tracks engagement rates for videos and other elements. It shows the growth over time, both in terms of audience, views, and likes. Iconosquare offers fantastic collaboration features that allow the entire team to work from the same dashboard without having to switch programs.
Social listening tools are vital for tracking audiences’ sentiments. Programs from this category are able to track every negative comment about a brand, making them essential for reputation management.
Brand24 gives social managers a lot of valuable engagement data. The program tracks mentions, social media reach, positive comments, negative comments, and total interactions on the web. As it works in real-time, you’ll be able to respond to negative comments immediately upon their posting.
The platform gives you lots of data regarding brand awareness. See if people are aware of your company and whether they’d be willing to purchase products from your websites.
Further Reading: 13 Best Social Listening Tools for Business
Understanding what metrics you want to track will help you filter out tools that might not be relevant to your marketing objectives. Here are additional tips to assist you in choosing the best Facebook software for your business.
Consider Business Goals
First, you have to determine what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re just looking to boost your views, you can use just about any program on the list (as most of them feature view count metrics).
However, if you’re looking to track web mentions, you might want to choose something like Brand24. If you wish to track performance on various social platforms, you might want to use SocialSprout or Buffer.
Budget Considerations
If you’re tight on budget, your best choice would be Meta Business Suite with its native analytics. Keep in mind that some of these competitive analysis programs can be quite expensive, especially if you go with one of the better plans. I suggest you check each tool’s plans and see whether they have custom pricing before making your choice.
Nowadays, social media managers use a plethora of tools in their daily operations. Learn more about a program’s integrations before purchasing it and see if it supports various social media channels besides Facebook.
Conclusion
The right Facebook analytics tool can provide invaluable insights that help you improve your content strategy and grow your audience. Whether you’re looking for a free, easy-to-use solution or a comprehensive platform with advanced features, these tools will equip you with the data needed to make informed decisions and enhance your social media performance.
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