Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, so companies need to evaluate and adjust. In this article, we’ll cover social media security best practices to help you develop a security-first approach for your organization’s accounts.

What is social media security?

Social media security refers to the strategies, tools and best practices businesses and individuals use to mitigate risk and protect assets across social media platforms. This includes safeguarding sensitive information like customer data, employee details and confidential business information.

Common social media security threats include:

• Password theft
• Account impersonation
• Phishing and social engineering
• Data breaches

With the right privacy and security measures in place, organizations can lower the risk of these attacks and maintain a positive reputation.

The importance of social media security

Social media security goes beyond preventing account hacks and phishing attempts. It’s essential for protecting your brand’s reputation, employee and customer information, as well as ensuring compliance with evolving data protection laws (like GDPR and CCPA) and avoiding financial losses.

Think of it this way: Every employee, vendor and leader who touches your social media accounts plays a role in your overall security posture. Why? Because social media is inherently public. Any security breach can instantly damage your brand’s reputation through inappropriate posts, misinformation or scams visible to a wide audience. On top of that, the real-time nature of social means a malicious post can spread like wildfire, leaving little time to react.

And the stakes for brands are high. Not only can failing to follow data protection regulations lead to hefty fines, it can also lead to lost revenue due to damaged brand trust. According to a Q1 2024 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, 78% of consumers agree that, compared to a year ago, a brand’s social media presence now has a bigger impact on whether they trust that brand.

Top social media security risks and threats 

Here are the most common social media cybersecurity risks, along with sample scenarios of how they might occur in an organization.

Password theft

Password theft involves stealing login credentials (username and password) to gain unauthorized access to a social media account. This can be done by stealing the login credentials of an employee or through a brute force attack.

Password theft can apply to the networks and any third party tools used to access and manage social media accounts.

Account impersonation

Account impersonation in social media security refers to the act of creating a fake account that mimics a legitimate individual, brand or organization.

Attackers use these fraudulent accounts to deceive others into believing they are interacting with the real entity. This can include impersonating executives, employees or entire businesses to scam customers, spread misinformation or damage a brand’s reputation.

Phishing

Phishing is a common cyberattack where cybercriminals impersonate trusted entities via email or social media to trick individuals into sharing sensitive information, like login credentials or financial details. These messages may look legitimate, but often contain links or attachments that lead to malicious websites or install malware—programs intentionally designed to harm a device, network or server.

Phishing is a serious security threat, as it can compromise accounts and systems, leading to privacy breaches and financial loss.

Malware

Malware is malicious software designed to harm a device, network or server. On social media, it can be spread through links, downloads or attachments shared on various platforms.

One wrong click can lead to malware being installed on a user’s device, potentially compromising sensitive data or allowing attackers to take control of the system.

Social engineering

Social engineering is a manipulation tactic used to trick people into giving up sensitive information, like login credentials or financial details. Instead of using technical hacking methods, social engineers rely on psychological tricks to exploit human nature.

For example, a scammer impersonating a customer or a partner might send a direct message (DM) that includes a link to a malicious website. Without proper training on social media security best practices, your team might click the link, assuming it’s legitimate.

Spam and bot accounts

Spam and bot accounts are automated accounts used to spread spam, malicious links and misinformation, polluting your feed and potentially harming your brand. They typically mimic real users and can be tricky to spot.

The real threat lies in their ability to distribute harmful content, launch phishing attacks and impersonate legitimate users or brands. This increases cybersecurity risks for both your social media team and your followers.

Privacy breaches

Privacy breaches occur when unauthorized individuals gain access to personal or sensitive information shared through social media platforms. This can include login credentials, private messages, financial details or proprietary business information.

Breaches often happen due to weak security practices, phishing attacks or vulnerabilities within social media networks and third-party platforms.

4 social media security best practices to know in 2025

Here are some social media security best practices you can follow to safeguard your brand, employees and customers:

1. Implement strong password practices

Strong passwords are foundational to your social media security. They’re your first line of defense against unauthorized access, protecting your social accounts and any third-party management tools. But while most people understand the dangers of weak or shared passwords,  it’s easy to fall short in practice.

That’s why it’s crucial to choose tools with built-in security features like multi-factor authentication and single sign-on. These features combat “password fatigue” by making it easier to create and manage strong, unique passwords for each account. They also make it much harder for unauthorized users to gain access, even if a password is compromised.

Equally important is avoiding manual password sharing (like keeping passwords in a shared note). This practice makes it impossible to track who has access to which profiles, creating a major security vulnerability. If you can’t control access, you can’t ensure security.

2. Educate employees about social media security

Social media moves fast. This rapid evolution allows cybercriminals to innovate quickly, and unfortunately, exploit vulnerabilities on a large scale. But here’s the thing: Many employees may not be aware of the unique security risks that come with using social media for business.

That’s why it’s crucial to educate your team about the specific challenges of social media security. Here are a few key reasons it requires extra vigilance:

• Public nature: Social media platforms are inherently public, making it easier for attackers to gather information about your employees and target them with personalized attacks.
• Decentralization: Security on social media is a shared responsibility between platforms, users and businesses. This makes it more challenging to enforce consistent security practices across the board.
• Third-party apps and integrations: Many marketers connect their social media accounts to third-party apps and services, which can increase the risk of data breaches if those apps have weak security practices.

Empower your team to make smarter security decisions with up-to-date training that includes specific examples of social media threats. By illustrating how these risks can play out in realistic scenarios, you can help employees recognize and respond to potential attacks effectively.

3. Regularly review and update access permission settings for third-party applications

People change roles, leave organizations and projects evolve. To maintain strong social media security, it’s crucial to regularly review and update access permissions for all your social accounts and any third-party tools.

Start by setting clear user permissions. Your social media management platform should enable you to grant specific access levels based on each team member’s responsibilities. For example, in Sprout Social, you can set user permissions at the company and feature level. This ensures that team members have access to the tools they need—and nothing they don’t.

Equally important is establishing a clear workflow for removing system access when someone leaves the team or changes roles. This helps prevent former employees or those with new responsibilities from accessing sensitive information or performing actions they no longer have authorization for.

4. Create a social media crisis management plan

Crises don’t follow business hours. When a social media crisis hits, you need a plan to guide your response and minimize damage to your brand. This plan should outline the steps your team will take to address different scenarios, such as a hacked account or a data leak.

Imagine a hacker gains access to your social accounts and starts posting content that goes against your brand values. Or worse, what if they leak sensitive customer data? Without a plan, your response will likely be reactive, inconsistent and potentially damaging.

A strong social media crisis management plan will help you:

• Respond quickly and effectively to minimize damage.
• Communicate clearly and consistently with your audience.
• Protect your brand’s reputation and maintain customer trust.
• Coordinate efforts across different teams (social media, IT, communications, legal).
• Back up important data regularly and establish a recovery plan to handle security breaches.
• Learn from the experience and improve your future response.

Bonus Resource: Download our three-step template to document a social media crisis management plan. This template will help your team effectively respond and recover if a crisis strikes.

Get the template

Social media security best practices for executives and brand advocates

Executives and fellow employees can be powerful brand advocates. Their personal social media posts can humanize your brand, build trust and reach new audiences. However, it’s crucial to ensure they can participate safely and effectively without compromising security.

Here’s how to empower these groups while maintaining a high level of social media security:

Executives

When it comes to executives, managing their social media presence within a secure platform is key. This eliminates the need for shared passwords and provides a centralized hub for managing content and approvals.

With Sprout Social, executive communications teams can efficiently oversee leadership profiles on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). Easily schedule and approve posts, photos and videos directly within Sprout. If your executive prefers to approve content outside the platform, assign them an “External Approver Seat” to send content directly to their email for approval.

Employees

Employee advocacy is a powerful way to amplify your brand’s reach. Using a centralized platform enables employees to easily share pre-approved brand content while ensuring compliance with your company’s social media policy.

If your team has concerns about connecting their personal profiles to a company’s tool, reassure them that platforms like Sprout Social prioritize data privacy. Explain that Sprout only collects the essential information needed for employees to connect their profiles and share content from within the platform. This enables them to share company posts directly through our Employee Advocacy tool without needing to access their personal accounts.

How secure social media management tools keep you safe

Secure social media management tools act as a central hub for all your social media activity, making it easier to control access, enforce security policies and monitor for suspicious behavior. They provide a layer of protection between your valuable brand accounts and potential threats, helping you mitigate risks and safeguard your reputation.

At Sprout Social, we understand the importance of keeping data secure. That’s why we’ve incorporated world-class, enterprise-grade security standards into our platform. We’re trusted by over 35,000 organizations to help them manage millions of daily conversations across social media.

Here’s how we prioritize security:

• Purpose-limited data processing: We clearly identify our purposes for processing personal data from social media networks and limit our processing solely to those purposes.
• Data minimization: We ensure that the personal data we process is adequate, relevant and limited to only what is necessary.
• Stringent data retention policies: We have established standard data retention periods for customer data and are stringent in ensuring that deletion requests are respected.
• Enhanced login security: We offer capabilities like single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add extra layers of protection to user accounts and prevent unauthorized access.
• Responsible AI usage: We weave AI into our product responsibly to enhance our platform’s capabilities while prioritizing data security. Whether it’s Sprout’s proprietary AI models or integrations with third-party providers like OpenAI or Claude, Sprout never sells customer data and ensures these models cannot use or store data for model training.

For more on Sprout’s security and privacy standards, check out trust.sproutsocial.com.

Guarding the gateways to social accounts and data

Safeguarding your brand requires staying vigilant in the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape. Continually educate yourself and your team to stay ahead of emerging threats. Remain proactive, and you can keep your accounts secure today and into the future.

Managing all your accounts and permissions on one central platform is a significant step toward greater social media security. Request a personalized demo to discover how Sprout Social empowers over 35,000 brands to achieve smarter, faster business impact with comprehensive social media management solutions. Our platform includes tools for publishing, engagement, customer care, influencer marketing, advocacy and AI-powered business intelligence.

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In this post, we take a deep dive into the art of social media listening for Instagram. We explain why it’s important, how it works and how to build an Instagram social listening strategy. Let’s get started.

What is Instagram social listening?

Instagram social listening is the process of tracking relevant conversations on the platform. It involves listening in on conversations about specific keywords, topics, hashtags and competitors. This helps you extract valuable insights to inform other aspects of your Instagram marketing strategy.

Not sure what to post? See what your followers are buzzing about to get inspiration for new content ideas. What memes are they sharing? What topics are they discussing?

Similarly, these conversations help you:

• Identify potential customers and influencers
• Assess your overall brand health and sentiment
• See what your competitors are doing
• Guide customers on their path to purchase
• Stay on top of the latest industry trends

Instagram social listening gives you firsthand, actual answers based on facts. So you’re no longer wasting your efforts and resources on guesswork.

Why Instagram social listening matters

Brands shouldn’t live in a bubble when it comes to their Instagram activity. Listening puts your mentions, interactions and comments into context. This helps you engage people and grow your account.

Below are some specific ways that Instagram empowers you to connect with customers.

Learning what your audience wants on a personal level

Social listening on Instagram lets you hone in on the needs and pain points of your target audience. It shows you what conversations people are having, even outside of your brand’s account. This gives you a better idea of what they want based on the posts they’re creating and the comments they’re leaving on a friend’s or influencer’s post.

These insights will then inform your social media content strategy and promotion strategy. Knowing what your audience wants can even guide your product development efforts.

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Providing more impactful Instagram customer service

“Good” service goes hand-in-hand with having a pulse on customer questions, comments and concerns.

This becomes challenging when people use Instagram to vent their frustrations instead of talking to you. Instagram social listening ensures that you never miss a @mention. It also helps you track posts containing branded keywords. So you can stay on top of customer service conversations beyond your direct call-outs.

That way, you can respond swiftly and step up your social media customer service efforts.

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This could be a game-changer, with 76% of consumers in our 2023 Sprout Social Index™ report valuing how quickly a brand responds to their needs. Our report found that consumers also equally appreciate it when a brand prioritizes customer support. 70% also expect to get a personalized response for their customer service needs.

Discovering meaningful customer content to promote your brand

Your customers are your best marketers. Listening can clue you in on valuable content and social proof you can promote yourself. This might include:

• Positive reviews, testimonials and customer success stories
• User-generated content (think: customer photos and videos)
• Shout-outs from potential co-marketing partners (think: brands, influencers and creators)

Rather than dig for these opportunities, listening ensures that they all come to you.

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Instagram social listening vs. social media monitoring

Quick side note! Let’s take a moment to break down what Instagram listening isn’t.

Listening is about more than @mentions, comments and #hashtags

Terms like “monitoring” and “listening” often get used interchangeably among marketers. They aren’t the same, though.

• Social media monitoring is the act of tracking @mentions, comments and hashtags. Monitoring is a crucial aspect of listening, but it’s only part of the process.
• Instagram social listening involves translating conversations and customer talking points into action.

Interactions matter, but so does context. Think about it. Someone tagging a fashion brand in their OOTD post versus calling out that brand’s products are apples and oranges.

A tag simply means, “This is what I’m wearing/using.” A call-out goes deeper into what they love about the product or why they chose it specifically. Also, not every mention of your business on Instagram involves a direct call-out or tag. This is likely to happen when people are complaining about your brand or expressing their frustration.

Social listening for Instagram is about deciphering the context behind those relevant conversations. This then empowers you to take appropriate action and make informed decisions.

The takeaway? If you’re only looking for mentions of your brand name or campaign key terms, you’re missing out on key conversations.

You’re also missing opportunities to intervene and take action to engage customers. That’s why it pays to be proactive via listening.

How does Instagram social listening work, though?

Good question! Instagram is a strange beast as far as listening to customer interactions goes.

For starters, you’re juggling a lot of different queries. Tags, mentions and branded keywords are just the beginning.

And although IG search has improved, you need to do some digging to find and pull together relevant conversations.

Instagram social listening involves the following three-step process:

• Creating queries based on your business, hashtags and terms relevant to your industry
• Monitoring mentions, tags, comments and interactions
• Assessing all of the above to take action

This action could be something as simple as responding to a post. Or it may involve a bit more complex process of solving a customer’s problem.

Starface uses brand tags and hashtags to find relevant customer content. The following Reel shows how a customer created a DIY bag charm using the brand’s star balm. Starface responds with a comment about how smart this is. Even a simple acknowledgment like this is enough to build a strong brand community.

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Features such as Instagram’s keyword search and tags can help you dig out content relevant to your brand. Coupled with your comments and brand tags, you have a decent idea of what people are saying about your business.

This is obviously a lot to sift through by hand. Again, Instagram doesn’t make listening particularly easy by default.

The good news is that there are tools out there to help. Sprout’s social media listening tool helps you hone in on relevant Instagram conversations. Brands can create their own listening queries for Instagram via Boolean syntax and rules logic.

Choose from existing templates to simplify your Instagram social listening efforts. Monitor brand health, discover industry insights and analyze your competition. Or check out how your campaign is performing and how people are responding to an event.

Sprout’s Query Builder is where you enter the words, phrases or hashtags you want to track. For Instagram, it’s crucial to include hashtags as a part of your Query since Sprout uses hashtags to collect data from the platform.

Not sure what words or phrases to track? Queries by AI Assist is a useful feature that automatically suggests additional words or phrases. Enter one keyword relevant to your industry and the capability comes up with other related keywords to add to your Query.

Optionally, exclude specific words and phrases and select industry themes to reduce noise in your social listening data. You can also configure your alerts and apply additional filters to streamline your search.

How to build an effective Instagram social listening strategy

Of course, understanding Instagram listening and how it works is only half the battle.

How do you turn all of these metrics and observations into action?

Your social listening strategy ultimately boils down to your goals. Below is how brands can use Instagram social listening to level up their marketing efforts.

Conduct competitive analysis to find ways to stand out

One of the best uses of social listening is competitive analysis.

Consider ultra-competitive markets such as the beauty industry, for example. New products are constantly popping up every day, with new brands adding to the competition. Tracking tags and trending discussions will show you which brands are dominating the space and why. So you can better position yourself in the face of stiff competition.

Meanwhile, direct mentions and branded hashtags highlight conversations specific to your brand. This helps you uncover what makes your brand different.

Uncover opportunities to improve your products

If you want to know how to improve your own products and services, who better to ask than your own customers? Prompted or not, followers can clue you in on new ideas.

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Of course, not all feedback from your followers is going to be direct. People might create posts or Stories complaining about your products without tagging you. Using an Instagram social listening tool will help you zero in on those relevant discussions.

Likes, comments and shares also help you measure how customers are responding to certain products. Look at an influx of interactions to see which products are a customer favorite. Alternatively, posts with a lower engagement can show you which items are falling flat.

Make valuable customer touchpoints on the path to purchase

The latest Instagram stats show that 70% of shoppers look to the platform for their next purchase. And over 60% research brands and products on the app. So if you take the opportunity to engage these potential customers, you could effectively grow your sales.

Instagram comments are a goldmine for finding folks interested in your products. This rings true for people who don’t know about you yet or might be looking for a new spot in your space.

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Listening makes it easier to maintain relationships with satisfied customers, too. This includes check-ins and opportunities to earn more UGC.

Discover industry and content trends relevant to your followers

Social listening is invaluable for tracking industry trends. For starters, you should know the tags your audience follows. But are how they responding to such trends? What’s the context behind those trends? How can you apply them to your own campaigns?

On a related note, Instagram listening can keep you from accidentally copying your competition.

For example, brands need to differentiate their tone, content calendar and captions if they want to stand out on Instagram. Effective listening can help you uncover tags and trends that your competitors might be missing out on and how you can fill the void.

Monitor your customer sentiment and keep people happy

Let’s say you’ve launched a new product or campaign.

You obviously want to know how your audience feels about it, right? Are you building the kind of buzz you expect? Or is the campaign falling flat with your audience?

Again, you may not always get those answers from direct mentions. Chances are there are users out there who can provide a concrete answer, though. You need to keep track of the posts people are creating about the product or campaign to get an idea of its impact.

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This is where sentiment analysis comes in, helping you gauge how folks are reacting to your brand on Instagram. Track the sentiment around specific campaign tags and products. Whether it’s “yay,” “nay” or “meh,” sentiment analysis can inform you to better serve customers and score more love from your Instagram followers.

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What Instagram social listening tools are available to brands?

Native Instagram search tools allow basic brand listening. But the process is manual and taxing, especially if you’re going all in with Instagram social listening.

After all, brands need to track multiple tags and competitors. That’s not even considering your own mentions and branded keywords. Given the sheer amount of content posted to Instagram daily, sifting through it all is no small feat.

Investing in a proper Instagram social listening tool saves you the trouble of digging through thousands of posts each day.

Sprout’s robust suite of social listening features is a game-changer for brands looking to step up their Instagram presence. Businesses can track dozens of queries beyond simple hashtags with the help of our Query Builder. This gives you a holistic understanding of your brand and industry to inform your larger marketing efforts.

Reporting and analytics provide a quantitative look at your listening so you can make data-driven decisions. Second-guessing a campaign or your next move on Instagram? Look no further than your numbers for peace of mind.

Listen, learn and grow with Instagram social listening

Social listening on Instagram helps you tap into the pulse of industry trends and conversations. These insights inform various aspects of your business—from your content to your product development.

Stay on top of those critical conversations with Sprout’s robust social media listening solution. Try it for free for 30 days to see how it can power your Instagram social listening efforts.

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The answer, as with many marketing questions, is a bit more complex than a simple yes or no. While EMV is a great tool for understanding your brand’s social presence, it’s just that—a tool.

This blog post will explain in detail, explaining its benefits and its limits. It will also help you understand why a complete approach to measurement is important for showing social media ROI.

What is earned media value?

Earned media is any content that mentions your brand that your business didn’t paid for. In simple terms: Earned media means earned engagement by your “digital word of mouth,” not engagement from your own media channel or bought through paid promotions or advertising of content.

Earned media value, or EMV, is a way to value the different actions people take when they interact with different social media content. These engagement actions include comments, likes, shares and mentions. These actions are then projected to be worth a numerical dollar value to your business.

So, for example, if a creator receives 1,000 likes on an Instagram post, using a customized EMV benchmark of $0.10 per like, that post would provide an estimated value of $100.

Is it worth measuring EMV for your brand?

The answer to that question depends on your specific social media marketing goals and objectives.

While earned media value can provide valuable insights into the impact of your social media efforts, it isn’t the only metric that should be considered. It’s important to also track other key performance indicators, such as reach, engagement rate and conversion rate. This will help you to get a more comprehensive understanding of your social media success.

Ultimately, using EMV as a tool together with other metrics can still help guide you in guaging the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

Earned media value can be a useful metric for:

• Benchmarking: Track your brand’s performance over time and compare it to competitors.
• Identifying trends: Spot spikes in EMV that might indicate successful campaigns or viral content.
• Reporting to stakeholders: Provide a high-level overview of your social media impact.

However, keep in mind that EMV has its limitations. It doesn’t directly correlate to business outcomes like sales or leads, and it can be influenced by factors outside your control (like changes in platform algorithms).

What to look out for when earned media value is calculated

When reporting to stakeholders about your social media impact, it’s valuable to include a high-level overview of your earned media value.

While earned media value can be a useful measure for evaluating the success of your social media efforts, it’s important to keep in mind common challenges around earned media value formulas.

Here are a few key things to watch out for around how earned media value is calculated:

• Common calculation inconsistencies: The challenge with EMV calculations is that there is no standard way to assign a monetary value to social media engagements. Some methods rely on advertising equivalents, like cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-engagement (CPE), while others use arbitrary multipliers based on perceived value. Not to mention, the calculation of earned media value can vary significantly between different social media platforms and partners. This can lead to inconsistencies and make it difficult to compare results across platforms.
• Lack of transparency: Be wary of partners who are vague about their approach to calculating EMV. Some may claim their calculations are based on a “proprietary algorithm” or a “trade secret.” This lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine the accuracy and reliability of their results.
• Misaligned KPIs: Ensure the EMV calculation aligns with your specific goals. Misalignment can lead to skewed earned media value figures and make it challenging to accurately measure the success of a campaign. It’s crucial for companies to carefully choose and align their KPIs with their EMV calculations to get a more accurate understanding of their campaign’s effectiveness.
• Over-reliance on EMV: Don’t fall into the trap of relying solely on earned media value. In today’s sophisticated marketing landscape, we have access to far more granular data and attribution models that can paint a bigger picture on ROI than this one calculation.

Looking for the best way to capture your social media data across various social platforms accurately for calculating your social ROI and overall EMV?

Enter: Sprout Social, the all-in-one social media management platform.

Under Sprout Social’s Premium Analytics, Sprout seamlessly integrates reporting across various social media platforms for you. This integration ensures that you have a comprehensive view of your social media engagements for your various accounts across multiple social media networks. It enables you to analyze accurate data for seamless EMV calculations. Additionally, with Sprout Social’s reporting, you will find a repertoire of invaluable data tracking and visualization to present your social media ROI to stakeholders.

Curious to explore Sprout Social? Get started with a 30-day free trial today.

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How to calculate earned media value

As previously mentioned, calculating earned media value does not look the same for everyone. A common approach we can easily recommend, however, is as follows:

1. Determining your average cost-per-engagement (CPE) for paid social media. This provides a baseline for valuing organic engagement.
2. Assigning weights to different types of engagement. For example, a share might be weighted more heavily than a like.
3. Multiplying the number of engagements by their respective weights and your CPE.

Let’s give you an example. We’ve decided that our average CPE is $0.50.

You receive 100 likes, 50 comments and 20 shares on a post.

You assign weights of 1 to likes, 2 to comments and 3 to shares.

• Likes: 100 likes x 1 x $0.50 = $50
• Comments: 50 comments x 2 x $0.50 = $50
• Shares: 20 shares x 3 x $0.50 = $30

Total EMV for the post: $50 + $50 + $30 = $130

Important Note: This is a simplified example. More complex calculations might factor in reach, content type and other variables.

Leverage powerful social media analytics to prove ROI

To sum up, earned media value is a useful metric for benchmarking, identifying trends and reporting to stakeholders. However, it isn’t the be-all and end-all of social media measurement. To truly maximize your social media strategy, it’s essential to integrate EMV with other metrics that provide a more complete picture of your efforts. By understanding the nuances of EMV calculations and leveraging tools like Sprout Social’s reporting tool, you can ensure that your social media strategy is data-driven and aligned with your business goals.

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SOV illustrates your place in the market. It puts all of your other social media metrics into context so you can understand where your brand stands.

Is your brand present in relevant product conversations? Do people consider your company a leader in the industry? If not, you might have a problem with your brand’s share of voice.

But here’s a crucial point: It’s not about dominating every conversation. True SOV comes from strategically placing yourself in the discussions that resonate with your target audience and contribute meaningfully to an industry narrative. Think quality over quantity.

In this post, we explore this metric in depth and show you ways you can build up your share of voice on social media and other channels—the right way.

Bonus resource: Keep executives informed of the impact of your social strategy and position your brand’s share of voice with the right competitive context using Sprout’s social media scorecard template.

Get the template

What is share of voice?

Share of voice (SOV) is a measure of the market conversation your brand owns compared to your competitors. It measures your brand’s visibility and influence within industry conversations. The more market share you have, the greater popularity and authority you likely have among users and prospective customers. SOV isn’t a static metric; it’s constantly evolving alongside consumer interests and competitive dynamics.

While SOV sometimes refers to a brand’s share of paid advertising in a competitive marketplace, it also has a broader definition that can include various elements of digital marketing and advertising, including mentions on social media and traffic for certain keywords.

Understanding your SOV provides insight into your brand’s position within the current market, illuminating opportunities for growth.

Why you need to measure share of voice

 Measuring your brand’s share of voice helps you see the bigger picture and where your brand fits into it. It adds context to your performance data, allowing you to pinpoint opportunities for growth and improvement.

Calculating your share of voice benefits your business in several key ways:

Audience insights

Share of voice can act as a barometer for how effectively your brand messaging is landing with your target audience. A strong share of voice often indicates that your messaging is aligned with your audience’s and values. Conversely, a low SOV might suggest a need to re-evaluate your messaging or content strategy.

Share of voice data can reveal why customers choose your brand (or your competitors), and even highlight untapped market segments.

For example, imagine you manage social media for a pet supply store. You’re analyzing your share of voice and notice a trend: customers are constantly asking about a particular type of treat that none of your competitors seem to carry. This unmet need represents a potential goldmine—an untapped market just waiting for you to offer that sought-after treat.

Competitor research

Share of voice data is your secret weapon to uncover competitive intelligence. It provides insight into competitor strategies, strengths, weaknesses and everything in between. Regular SOV analysis clarifies your competitive landscape, providing data-driven insights for success.

With SOV data, you can:

• Identify industry leaders in relevant market conversations.
• Track your SOV to measure market share growth.
• Analyze the sentiment within conversations around your competitors to identify opportunities to gain market share.

By analyzing this data, you can identify opportunities to improve and differentiate your brand. For a truly comprehensive view of your competitive landscape, combine SOV data with other forms of analysis, such as SWOT analysis and market research. This holistic approach will enable you to make more informed decisions and develop winning strategies.

Brand management

Share of voice data reveals the volume and sentiment of conversations surrounding your brand, allowing you to monitor and benchmark your brand reputation against competitors.

Additionally, this data serves as an essential safeguard. By gaining visibility into the entire landscape of brand conversations, you can proactively address emerging issues and minimize potential risks that might otherwise go unnoticed.

With Sprout Social’s Listening capabilities, you’re equipped to keep a pulse on brand conversations and boost your share of voice with relevance and positivity. Use it to monitor fluctuations in brand sentiment, helping you decode the factors driving these changes and respond effectively.

How to calculate share of voice

Now that we’ve explored the benefits of measuring share of voice, let’s dive into how to measure it. Use the following formula to calculate share of voice:

Share of voice = Your brand metrics / Total market metrics

This formula applies across all marketing channels, with slight variations in specific metrics. For example, you might track brand mentions across Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter) and more, for social SOV, while the volume of brand mentions across media channels determines media SOV. In this formula, “brand metrics” refers to the data points you’re tracking for your own brand, while “total market metrics” includes the same data points for all relevant competitors in your industry.

While this formula provides a basic understanding of SOV, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t capture everything. Qualitative factors, such as the impact and relevance of mentions, also play a crucial role.

Generally, there are four major areas to focus on when calculating share of voice:

Social media share of voice

Let’s zoom in on a crucial aspect of share of voice: social media. Your social media share of voice reflects consumer conversations across platforms, making it a valuable metric for understanding audience sentiment and brand perception.

Social listening tools simplify the process of tracking social media SOV by identifying all your brand or product mentions across platforms. Compare your brand’s performance to competitors to understand your position.

Sprout’s Listening tools help you visualize and analyze this data, providing a breakdown based on engagements, impressions, unique authors‌ and sentiment. You can also filter results by network, keywords‌ and other criteria.

Media share of voice

Media share of voice reveals which publications mention your brand, the context of those mentions, and your overall popularity among reputable sources.

By comparing your media SOV to your competitors, you can identify key publications for outreach and PR. This data can also inform your content strategy and help you tailor your messaging to resonate with specific media outlets.

While social listening tools like Sprout’s are excellent for tracking social media conversations, you’ll need specialized public relations and earned media software to effectively measure media share of voice. At Sprout, our social media team combines social media share of voice and media share of voice for a more accurate measure of our brand performance.

PPC share of voice

Your PPC share of voice measures your ad’s visibility compared to its potential reach.

Google Ads calculates this using Impression Share, factoring in your campaign and keyword settings. To find this data in your Google Ads account:

1. Go to the Campaigns tab.
2. Click the columns icon.
3. Select Modify columns.
4. Click on Competitive metrics.
5. Choose the Impression Share columns you want to track.

By analyzing your Impression Share, you can gain valuable insights into your PPC performance and identify opportunities to improve your visibility. For example, a low Impression Share might indicate that your bids are too low or your targeting is too narrow.

SEO share of voice

Beyond paid advertising, understanding your share of voice in organic search is crucial. Measuring SEO share of voice requires specialized tools that analyze your search visibility compared to competitors.

To measure this, you’ll need specialized search optimization (SEO) tools that analyze your rankings for relevant keywords. These tools provide insights into how much of the organic search traffic for those keywords is going to your site versus your competitors.

By analyzing this data, you can identify opportunities to improve your SEO strategy, target valuable keywords that you might be missing‌ and ultimately drive more organic traffic to your website.

What you can measure with share of voice

Share of voice measures your brand’s presence in broader market conversations. Marketers can use SOV data to track general brand awareness, identify industry trends and benchmark their performance against the competition. A strong overall SOV often indicates a healthy level of brand awareness and engagement.

To gain even deeper insights from SOV data, consider segmenting it by key brand priorities. This allows you to tailor your analysis to specific business goals and uncover nuanced audience insights. For instance, an automotive company measuring its presence among electric car enthusiasts should focus on the specific conversations within that segment to extract meaningful takeaways.

At Sprout, we use custom Listening Topic Themes to understand how our message resonates across key brand priorities. If you’re unfamiliar with Themes, here’s a quick explanation:

Drilling down into this segmented data allows us to tell a more nuanced story about our brand’s market share to senior leadership. This granular level of analysis also supports more data-driven decisions, so we can optimize our content for maximum impact.

How to increase your share of voice on social media

Social media is a great channel to actively increase your brand’s share of voice for quicker results that you can measure and refine.

It can take time to analyze the impact of your SEO and PPC campaigns, which delays your SOV measurement. And you have a little less control over your media SOV since it involves working with third-party publications.

Meanwhile, social media SOV is easier to control and adjust. Plus, you can measure performance in real-time and make changes to optimize your efforts.

Try out these five tips to boost your social media SOV, specifically.

Develop your content calendar around key brand priorities

Trying to keep up with the saturated state of social media by constantly churning out new content is exhausting and unsustainable. Content’s life span is shorter than ever, and this approach can quickly lead to burnout. Instead of chasing fleeting trends, align with your leadership team to understand your company’s key focus areas.

Once you’ve identified those priorities, use share of voice data to establish a data feedback loop. Analyze which topics are generating the most buzz and how sentiment varies across those topics, and optimize from there.

This data-driven approach may not be as splashy as achieving virality, but you can’t control virality. What you can control is creating specific, value-driven content tailored to the platforms where your audience spends their time. 

Tap into trends strategically

While you don’t have to jump onto every single trend, you should harness the right ones to increase your share of voice. Trends are informal, but they can be impactful. According to the 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report, social users primarily want entertaining content from brands.

However, jumping on a trend without considering your brand identity and target audience can dilute your brand, alienate your audience‌ and erode trust with your customers. To avoid this pitfall, use your SOV data to understand if and why certain trends resonate with your audience.

Strategic trend analysis is key. By analyzing which trends are gaining traction and aligning with your brand values, you can participate authentically and connect with your audience in a meaningful way. Use what you learn to spot relevant trends faster and more accurately in the future, allowing you to proactively engage in conversations and beat your competitors to the punch. 

Create share-worthy social media content

One of the best ways to get people talking about your brand is to create share-worthy content.

When your audience finds your content valuable, they’re more likely to share it with their own networks, expanding your reach and amplifying your message.

Great social content entertains and educates, motivating action and sparking conversations. Think about the types of content that resonate most with your audience. This could include practical tips and how-to guides, the latest industry news or even relevant memes and jokes.

For example, instead of simply posting game highlights, the Chicago White Sox create share-worthy content during baseball’s off-season by tapping into other local events, like the start of the basketball season, and connecting them to their brand in a creative way.

This approach not only keeps their audience engaged but also increases their brand’s visibility during a typically quiet period.

Partner with relevant influencers

Brand and influencer collaborations are increasingly generating earned media attention. As consumer-influencer relationships evolve, influencer activations are becoming more newsworthy, often rivaling traditional celebrity campaigns.

This shift is fueled by the trust consumers place in influencers and how that trust influences their online behavior. The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report confirms that trust in influencers remains strong and is even growing in some demographics.

When done well, influencer campaigns can prompt algorithms to favor your brand, organically increasing the visibility of your content. This increased visibility can lead to greater engagement, brand advocacy and ultimately, a stronger share of voice.

Invest in an employee advocacy program

Employee advocacy programs can significantly boost a brand’s share of voice. By encouraging employees to share company content, you can tap into their networks to expand your reach and increase brand visibility. This introduces your brand to new audiences and creates a more authentic presence online.

Employee advocacy fosters consistent brand conversations and helps maintain visibility. Content shared by employees often drives higher engagement, as people are more likely to trust and interact with posts from individuals they know.

Ultimately, employee advocacy turns your workforce into brand ambassadors, amplifying your message and building trust.

Benefits of measuring share of voice

Some of the benefits of measuring share of voice include:

• Perform competitive analysis on a market-wide scale. Get the big picture of how competitive the market is and whether you’re an up-and-comer or the dominant player in the industry.
• Use SOV as a way to segment your target audience. Calculating SOV is a powerful way to analyze your audience, but you can take further steps to organize this data into segments for more insight into your strengths and weaknesses. Look at your SOV within crucial regional markets, demographics and more.
• Evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns. If you launched a campaign recently, determine whether you made gains in your SOV that indicate your marketing message and tactics were effective.
• Improve future campaigns based on findings in SOV reports. Use the insight from your analytical reports to expand your reach, get involved in social conversations and ensure your voice is amplified across marketing channels. 

Tap into your share of voice data

Your social data holds a wealth of knowledge about your brand’s share of voice and how to increase it.  Capitalize on this valuable intelligence to expand your reach, strengthen your brand and uncover rich customer insights.

But don’t keep these insights to yourself! Effectively communicate your social media performance to your leadership team with this social media scorecard template. This presentation-ready resource provides a clear framework for showcasing your progress, highlighting your successes‌ and demonstrating the value of your social strategy

The post Share of voice: What it is and how to measure it appeared first on Sprout Social.

Influencer marketing helps brands tap into niche audiences, more so than traditional media and advertising. Plus, they can reach highly segmented markets based on influencer demographics and interests. It’s also ideal for brands who can’t afford celebrities to endorse their products but can partner with micro-influencers with a close-knit audience that trusts them.

Successful influencer campaigns need intensive planning and strategy. Influencer analytics tools help you do this by giving you insightful data, and the means, to execute your influencer marketing efforts to get the best results. These tools help you refine your strategy for better results by discovering the right influencers and monitoring and managing campaign performance.

Let’s dive into 12 top influencer analytics tools that can help supercharge your campaigns and grow your business in 2025 and beyond.

What is an influencer analytics tool?

Influencer analytics tools are a type of influencer marketing tool designed to measure the performance and impact of influencer marketing campaigns. These tools help brands find influencers with the right target audience, and then track and evaluate how each sponsored post contributes to the overall campaign.

Consolidating audience demographics, content performance metrics and profile stats for each influencer helps marketers measure and optimize their influencer partnerships according to overall business objectives.

Top 12 influencer analytics tools to boost your influencer marketing

An influencer analytics tool makes your influencer marketing workflow more efficient so you can focus on strategy and building strong, creative partnerships. Here are 12 of our favorite influencer analytics tools.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform with powerful influencer analysis capabilities. Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger) helps you discover niche influencers, analyze content performance and create influencer campaigns that resonate with your audience (and inspire conversions).

With Sprout, streamline end-to-end campaign management and deliver fast, tangible business impact. You can:

• Grow your audience organically by collaborating with vetted influencers whose audiences align with your brand.
• Connect with millions of brand and influencer profiles with billions of social data points. Use 50+ filters in thousands of combinations to identify influencers with the perfect alignment to your brand and campaign goals.
• Build data-driven influencer marketing campaigns and improve your social strategy with tailored insights into your target audience’s behavior across social media networks.
• Maximize influencer marketing ROI by monitoring real-time campaign performance and identifying optimization opportunities. Integrate with your favorite tools, from Google Analytics to Facebook Ads Manager, to further measure campaign performance.
• Manage influencer payments in one place with our payment dashboard. See payments made directly to influencers or through integrations like PayPal.

Key features:

• Vetted influencer database across multiple platforms including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), with audience demographics and smart filters.
• Brand affinity engine that uses machine learning and audience psychographics to suggest influencers based on interests, audience demographics and more.
• Centralized platform to manage content approvals, schedule posts and track campaign progress.
• Customized views for collaborators to review content, contribute feedback and access campaign performance summaries.
• Real-time content and campaign performance metrics including conversion rate and ROI.
• Historical data tracking to analyze an influencer’s past content history, quality and brand alignment. Also, see Follower verification and engagement rate analysis.
• Social listening ability to monitor brand mentions and sentiment related to influencer content.
• Competitor analysis insights to benchmark influencer campaigns against competitors for better market insights.
• Industry trend analysis to compare performance benchmarks to similar influencers.

Most importantly, our influencer analytics tool is part of our larger suite of social media solutions. We integrate influencer marketing with social media management, aligning all the components of your larger social media strategy.

Start a free 30-day trial

2. Upfluence

Upfluence is an influencer analytics tool that helps you find creators and measure campaign performance. It’s influencer database uses machine learning to choose the best influencers for your brand. You can find influencers, measure engagement rates and content performance and integrate influencer marketing into your broader marketing strategy.

Key features:

• Search and filter influencers based on industry, demographics, engagement metrics and other criteria.
• Access a large database of influencers across multiple platforms.
• Analyze follower authenticity, engagement rates and reach to make informed decisions.
• Manage communications, contracts and collaborations in a unified dashboard.
• Connect with influencers directly via your e-commerce platform.
• Find relevant insights in a custom campaign results dashboard.

3. HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor helps with influencer discovery, audience analysis and campaign tracking. It uses AI to track audience demographics, engagement rates and follower authenticity. The tool’s influencer database is 81 million strong and uses more than 35 metrics for vetting and fraud detection.

Key features:

• Get detailed reports on influencer performance, audience demographics and follower authenticity.
• Find influencers across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X.
• Assess audience quality score to check the legitimacy of an influencer’s audience to avoid fake followers.
• Benchmark influencer performance against competitors through competitive analysis.
• Identify suspicious activity or fraudulent engagement in influencer profiles.

4. Emplifi

Emplifi helps users boost reach, engagement and conversions. AI-powered content grades take the guesswork out of understanding individual influencer performance, engagement and brand health. Use this tool to discover top influencers and measure campaign performance.

Key features:

• Combine social media management with influencer marketing.
• Find and evaluate influencers across various platforms through in-built discovery and vetting.
• Monitor campaigns in real-time and get reports on influencer performance.
• Get insights into audience demographics and behaviors.
• Track social conversations and trends through social listening.

5. Grin

Grin has a free Influencer analytics tool designed to help you identify potential influencers for your next campaign. Paste an influencer’s URL in the search bar or use the Chrome extension to check critical performance metrics, including engagement rates, likes, comments, shares and views.

Key features: 

• Streamline end-to-end campaign management, including discovery, execution and reporting.
• Connect with e-commerce platforms like Shopify to track sales and conversions directly tied to influencer campaigns.
• Use the built-in influencer relationship management (IRM) tool to manage influencer communications and collaborations.
• Get centralized content creation and approval processes.
• Access detailed insights into campaign ROI and performance, including an engagement rate calculator.

6. Creator.co

Creator.co is dedicated to challenger brands and micro-influencers. Find influencers that align with your target audience using this influencer analytics tool’s detailed demographic data and database of 200M+ profiles. Analyze performance with comprehensive reporting for campaign reach, engagement and ROI.

Key features: 

• Access numerous creators, categorized by niche and audience.
• Automate influencer outreach, negotiations and content approvals.
• Manage campaigns with micro-influencers for more authentic engagement.
• Manage gifting or product sampling campaigns.
• Monitor and track influencer campaign success with real-time analytics.

7. Promoty

Promoty is an influencer analytics tool that helps you discover influencers with strong brand affinity and analyze campaign performance. Use it to get a detailed profile report for influencers worldwide with data on their follower count, engagement rate, credibility scores, audience demographics, most-used hashtags, brand affinity and interests.

Key features: 

• Search influencers by content, location, interests and audience demographics.
• Manage influencer relationships through the in-built tool.
• Organize influencer collaborations, including content approvals and communication.
• Get insights into influencer audience demographics and engagement quality, including credibility scores.
• Get a custom-branded marketplace for influencers to connect with your brand.

8. Keyhole

Keyhole is an influencer analysis tool that helps users measure and improve influencer campaigns with trustworthy analytics data. Use this influencer analytics tool to track influencer activities and campaign performance, and aggregate this data into a comprehensive report.

Key features: 

• Monitor influencer engagement and region, including audience demographics.
• Track campaigns, branded hashtags and keywords in real time.
• Get detailed influencer reports on engagement, reach, audience insights and other metrics.
• Measure your brand’s performance against competitors in real time.
• Track the overall sentiment of conversations around your brand and influencers.

9. Traackr

Traackr helps brands find, manage and measure influencer relationships. It offers advanced analytics and insights to optimize campaign performance and build long-term partnerships. You can also collaborate with partner agencies with transparent workflows.

Key features:

• Use advanced search and filtering options to find the right influencers.
• Manage and nurture long-term relationships with influencers through their relationship management tool.
• Manage campaigns seamlessly for streamlined workflows.
• Get insights from performance metrics and ROI tracking.
• Use influencer audience insights to ensure relevance.

10. Aspire

Aspire is an influencer analytics tool that helps you find influencers, manage campaigns and track performance. Brands can collaborate with influencers and measure the impact of their campaigns to optimize them accordingly.

Key features:

• Apply AI-powered search to identify relevant influencers.
• Use the campaign management tool for brief creation and communication.
• Get performance analytics reports to monitor campaign success.
• Use the centralized content library for all campaign content.
• Facilitate teamwork between brands and influencers with collaboration tools.

11. Meltwater

Meltwater provides data-driven influencer insights through advanced analytics. It helps brands spot the right influencers, keep tabs on their campaign performance and make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Key features:

• Find influencers based on various criteria.
• Get insights into influencer audience demographics.
• Track campaigns to monitor performance and engagement.
• Obtain competitor analysis insights into competitors’ influencer strategies.
• Use customizable reports to analyze campaign effectiveness.

12. Influencity

Influencity is an influencer analytics tool that provides detailed influencer analytics and insights. It helps brands discover and analyze influencers, manage campaigns and track the effectiveness of their influencer marketing efforts.

Key features:

• Use the Influencer database with influencers across different social platforms to find the right partner.
• Get insights into influencer audiences.
• Plan, operate and track influencer campaigns.
• Assess performance metrics to measure campaign success.
• Monitor competitor’s influencer marketing activities with deep insights.

What to look for in influencer analytics tools

Influencer data analytics isn’t just about a creator’s engagement rate. To find the right influencers and optimize future campaigns, you’ll need access to audience demographics, brand affinity, competitor analysis, industry trends and so much more. Here are the most important features to look for in an influencer analytics platform to get just that.

Influencer discovery

The influencer you choose can make or break your campaign. Big audiences and high engagement rates don’t guarantee success—it’s all about finding an engaging audience that fits your ideal customer profile (ICP). That’s why influencer discovery features are so important.

Your influencer analytics tool should have a database of vetted influencers you can filter and search through. It should also have analytics profiles with historic content performance and audience demographics for each influencer.

With Sprout, find the best influencers for your campaign with our social intelligence engine, Signals. It monitors trends, influencer data and competitor strategies so you can spot your industry’s key creators and trends and take strategic action before the competition.

Campaign tracking and monitoring

Reviewing influencer campaign performance can be a headache, especially when you have to request performance data directly from each influencer and hope you get accurate results. Influencer analytics tools should get rid of that burden and streamline the campaign performance reporting process.

Look for a tool that consolidates accurate, relevant analytics for all your influencer marketing campaigns into a single dashboard, so you can dissect campaign performance on a per-influencer and per-post basis. You’ll need access to advanced metrics like reach, impressions, engagement, clicks, conversions and audience insights. Plus, TikTok-specific metrics like average watch time and views for each influencer’s sponsored and organic content.

Another essential: enhanced link tracking. This is how you’ll measure the concrete impact of your influencer campaigns. Like how Sprout links campaign performance with Google Analytics so you can analyze link clicks, total new users and other conversion metrics at the post level.

Influencer marketing trend analysis

Social media users expect brands to read the room. Industry conversations, social media trends, current events and even brand sentiment can impact the success of your campaign.

Your influencer analytics tool should help you stay in-the-know so you can make informed decisions about your campaign messaging and brand positioning.

For example, Sprout’s Social Listening tools provide insight into critical use cases, including industry trends, product share of voice and event discovery.

Competitor analysis

Studying your competitor’s influencer marketing strategy is a bit like observing your older sibling. You learn to do what they did, but better. You also learn what to avoid at all costs. The best influencer analytics tools recognize the value of social media competitive analysis.

Look for a tool with competitor metrics so you can study your competitors’ influencer marketing strategy and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

Maximizing influencer ROI

Influencer marketing wouldn’t be a $7.14 billion industry without high ROI, but reaching that point takes strategy.

Influencer analytics tools help you strategically maximize influencer ROI. They use precise audience targeting, influencer insights and performance metrics to help you pick influencers that align with your brand and campaign objective.

They also provide creative content insights that show what type of content will perform best for your target audience. When you know what creative direction will work best, you set your influencers up for success.

Create winning campaigns with the right influencer analytics tools

Using data through influencer analytics tools is key to maximizing the impact of your campaigns. These tools offer valuable insights that help you identify the right influencers for your brand, and use data to make informed decisions and achieve sustainable growth.

As influencer marketing evolves, having advanced tools like Sprout helps you stay ahead of trends, connect with your target audience and get measurable outcomes. You can source niche influencers, create engaging content and seamlessly integrate influencer marketing into your overall social strategy. Plus, you’re able to prove your social ROI and the impact on your brand to leadership teams for greater executive buy-in.

Ready to take your influencer strategy to the next level? Schedule a demo to see how Sprout Social Influencer Marketing can help you.

The post 12 top influencer analytics tools to boost your campaign ROI appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media listening tools let you monitor and track social media conversations related to a specific brand or topic. This gives you insights that will inform your marketing decisions.

Let’s break down 15 of the top social listening platforms to consider for your brand.

Best all-in-one social listening tool

Some tools provide deep listening for one specific platform. Meanwhile, some may specialize in certain functions. While one tool gives you an in-depth sentiment analysis, another may be much better at predicting trends.

To get the most out of your social listening efforts, however, you need a tool that does it all.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social listening tools give you a comprehensive look into conversations that are relevant to your brand. Track conversations related to your brand across all major social networks and other online sources. Sprout’s tools automatically sift through millions of data points to uncover insights relevant to your brand.

You can learn about audience preferences and how they feel about specific products, campaigns or topics. This helps you stay on top of the latest industry trends and identify untapped business opportunities. Discover key influencers and thought leaders who are leading the conversation so you know whom to engage.

Brand-specific conversations give you more visibility into customer experiences and brand sentiment. Set up custom alerts to anticipate an upcoming brand crisis, giving you ample time to fix it before it gets out of hand. Plus, with powerful social media management tools built in, you can easily manage these issues all in one place.

Sprout’s AI features further streamline your social listening efforts. Summarizing with AI Assist saves you the trouble of having to read through lengthy messages. It creates a summary of Listening messages with over 800 characters, allowing you to quickly zero in on essential insights.

Meanwhile, Analyze by AI Assist takes the guesswork out of social listening. It automatically analyzes your Listening messages to find the insights that matter. This includes metrics related to words, phrases, emojis and hashtags. So you can easily forecast trends if certain topics see increased engagement.

It even helps you gauge the sentiment behind specific conversations. This simplifies how you anticipate possible brand crises or monitor how people feel about your latest campaigns.

Sprout offers a 30-day free trial so you can test out its publishing and analytics capabilities. The social listening tools are part of a custom-built plan for enterprise users.

General social listening tools

If your brand maintains a presence across a variety of social networks, you need a tool that’s appropriate for all major platforms. Let’s look at the top social listening tools that are suitable for general use.

2. Brandwatch

Brandwatch extracts valuable conversational insights from millions of sources. It analyzes both historical and real-time conversations to identify current trends and how they change over time. This gives you a better understanding of your market and audience, so you know what’s trending and popular. You’ll be able to see the top topics they’re talking about and identify relevant brand mentions.

3. Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful tool for measuring brand awareness and reach. It lets you track conversations from 25 million online sources to gather valuable consumer insights. This gives you a better understanding of what people like or dislike, especially when it comes to your brand. You can even measure brand sentiment and quickly identify reputational risks.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive listening tool that specializes in content discovery and research. The platform lets you track trending topics and popular content to inspire you. You can use the monitoring features to track mentions and trends across leading social networks. It lets you set up alerts for brands, topics and keywords to help you stay on top of the latest conversations.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole offers enterprise-grade social listening to gain a deeper understanding of your audience. It provides insights to identify who they are and get a better sense of what they like. You can use the platform to track specific hashtags and keywords as well as identify relevant influencers. The volume predictions feature lets you anticipate when your posts are going viral, allowing you to come up with a game plan.

6. Meltwater

Meltwater helps you cut through the noise and uncover the conversational insights that matter to your brand. It provides you with a full picture by capturing historical data to help you research changes in trends over time. The platform gives you a better understanding of your audience and allows you to analyze their sentiment. This helps you monitor brand mentions in real time and stay on top of upcoming crises to quell them on time.

7. YouScan

YouScan is one of the top social listening tools that comes with image recognition capabilities. It gives you access to AI-powered visual insights to gain a better understanding of your buyer persona. The platform identifies upcoming trends so you can align your marketing strategy accordingly. It tracks brand sentiment and consumer perceptions to show you how people feel about your brand. It even detects possible threats to your brand reputation in real time.

8. HubSpot Social Media Management Software

HubSpot’s social media management software lets you create custom keyword monitoring streams. This makes it easy to surface interactions that could turn critical and manage them on time. You can also set up email alerts, allowing your sales team to follow up when prospects mention specific keywords. It even provides AI-generated recommended actions to speed up your analysis.

Social listening tools for Twitter (X)

X is a place where all the trending conversations take place. It’s where people go when they want to complain about a brand or discuss a trending topic. As such, Twitter listening can uncover valuable insights into your target market.

So let’s take a look at the social media listening tools that specifically focus on X.

9. X advanced search

X’s built-in advanced search tool is highly robust for listening in on relevant conversations. You can track conversations containing specific words, phrases and hashtags. It even lets you narrow your search by excluding certain words.

To get even more specific, look for posts from one specific account to another. The tool gives you plenty of additional filters to help you narrow your search by engagement, date range and so on.

10. X Pro (formerly TweetDeck)

X Pro is a paid tool that offers the same features as the formerly free TweetDeck. Pull up hundreds of conversations across the platform and display them in several columns. This makes it easier to look out for posts around specific topics and news stories as they come in. X Pro even lets you pull up X posts from the dedicated lists you’ve created. This makes it easier to narrow down conversations from accounts that are most interesting to you.

11. Awario

Awario provides real-time insights on specific brand and keyword mentions in any language. This makes it a great social media listening software for brands that want to grow an international customer base. It even helps you identify top influencers and brand advocates leading the conversation.

Awario supports your social selling efforts with a feature that identifies hot leads. It tracks X posts and zeroes in on ones that are looking for a product similar to yours.

Social listening tools for TikTok

TikTok’s reach and influence are rapidly expanding. Now it’s the hub for all the latest social media trends and conversations. So being able to tap into the conversations happening on the platform gives you leverage to stand apart.

Let’s take a look at a couple of TikTok tools to conduct social listening on the platform.

12. Exolyt

Exolyt gives you comprehensive insights into TikTok conversations and trends. You can use the tool to monitor what people are saying about your brand and how they feel about it. It lets you track specific TikTok accounts, hashtags and videos to gather granular insights. Also, discover trending sounds, hashtags, effects and accounts to inform your content strategy.

13. All Ears

All Ears is an AI-powered social listening platform that focuses on voice and video conversations. It analyzes millions of TikTok videos to identify relevant brand or topic mentions. The platform automatically transcribes these mentions, saving you hours of time having to comb through the noise. All Ears also provides relevant metrics like reach, PR value and net sentiment to streamline your listening analytics.

Free social listening tools

If you’re not ready to invest in a paid tool just yet, there are a few free social listening tools that come with basic listening capabilities.

14. Answer the Public

Answer the Public pulls up search volumes and trends for a given topic, brand or product. It gives you a breakdown of the associated search terms. So it shows you what questions people are asking about it and what comparisons they’re making. This gives you a better understanding of their needs and pain points as well as their interests.

15. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another free option that lets you set up alerts for conversations taking place across the web. Use it to monitor specific keywords and topics or even brand names. The tool lets you filter your results based on sources, language and region. Customize the frequency of alerts and choose to show only the best results.

The benefits of social listening tools

Social media listening software helps you track and analyze millions of social media posts. This makes it easy to narrow down the conversations that matter without hours of manual research. As a result, social media listening tools offer a number of benefits for your brand:

Spot emerging trends

Social listening platforms detect patterns in conversations around specific keywords and hashtags. This helps you see when certain topics are starting to gain traction. So you can get in on trends way ahead of your competitors.

Understand customer interests and pain points

Listening in on social media conversations helps you understand what topics people like to engage with. It also reveals their concerns and complaints to help you zero in on their pain points.

Monitor and manage brand reputation

Social listening tools keep track of every relevant brand mention, even if you’re not tagged. This helps you identify conversations that could harm your brand reputation. Then come up with an appropriate and timely response to mitigate the issue.

Identify sales opportunities

Social listening platforms help you identify conversations that seek a solution you can provide. So you can jump in with a relevant suggestion and turn them into valuable leads.

Listen, learn and grow on social

Social listening tools empower you to learn what makes your audience tick. They give you actionable insights to inform what content you create and how you engage with your audience.

But the challenge lies in finding a social listening platform that meets your unique needs. If you’re looking for a well-rounded tool that does everything, Sprout’s the answer you need. Try it free for 30 days to see if it’s the right match for your brand.

The post 15 social listening tools for your brand in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

That’s a missed opportunity for competitive advantage.

Social media analysts turn raw data into insights that drive everything from product tweaks to customer service overhauls. They spot social media trends and link them to business metrics, translating digital buzz into tangible strategies.

So, what makes a great social media analyst? And how do analysts turn raw data into growth strategies that work?

In this article, you’ll learn six ways analysts contribute to business growth and six ways to supercharge your career as one.

What is a social media analyst?

A social media analyst assesses a brand’s owned data, content performance and social listening data, and translates them into actionable business recommendations. From refining audience targeting to optimizing content strategies, they help businesses pinpoint the steps to strengthen their brand’s market position.

The fundamentals of the role include:

• Comfort with social media analytics tools to report on critical KPIs
• Problem-solving to support overall social performance and achieve goals
• Understanding social platforms and how each of them uniquely impacts audience behavior and content performance
• Recognizing how social data can grow every aspect of their business and helping others see social differently

Businesses often lump social media data analysis into other social media and community manager roles. But that’s not the most efficient way to build a social media team.  Social media analysts help other social roles do what they do best. They handle most data-related tasks so other social team members can focus on engaging audiences, creating new content, and providing customer care.

Their analysis shows exactly what works—for example, how posting video tutorials at 2 PM leads to 3x more views than other content and how customer service response times under 30 minutes lead to 70% more positive reviews. This is imperative because precise data-driven insights help brands tailor their strategies for maximum results and reach goals and larger business objectives faster.

What does a social media analyst do to grow a brand?

Social media analysts highlight social media value and help drive growth in these six ways.

Analyze audience engagement patterns

Social media marketing has no ‘one size fits all’ approach because every brand has unique goals and audiences.

Analysts track reach, click-through rates and follower growth to gauge how content, engagement and publishing strategies are performing. They also keep a pulse in real-time to provide actionable insights for content creators, marketers and managers to make data-driven decisions.

When a content creator wants to know which types of content to start, stop or continue with, analysts provide owned data that validates or challenges assumptions. They test variables, analyze trends over time and adjust strategies based on what they discover to ensure continuous improvement. They also monitor the data and adjust recommendations to support proactive marketing efforts.

Collaborate and communicate

Analysts play an active role in bringing stakeholders together, sharing insights and guiding collaborative discussions.

They invite strategists, creatives, community managers, paid media specialists to the table and use storytelling to:

• Connect data points
• Create compelling visualizations
• Adapt their presentations to accommodate different learning styles

They contextualize data so it’s relatable and resonates with the audience.

An analyst might say, “In February, our top engagement types on LinkedIn were likes, up by 9.5% month-over-month and link clicks, up by 15% month-over-month. Comments however were down to 137 for the month.”

While that might not mean much to a visual learner or a person who isn’t as familiar with specific benchmarks, social media analytics tools like Sprout Social simplify this process. Analysts use these tools to automate visualizations that show engagement trends clearly and make data accessible to everyone.

Identify the ‘why’ behind trends

Metrics without context can lead to missed insights and misguided strategies. That’s why social analysts also investigate the why—which is essential for brand monitoring.

Let’s say content hits a plateau and social engagement is down month-over-month.

Using a social media analytics tool like Sprout, analysts can review past quarterly or yearly performance to identify patterns and consider specific variables such as posting times and audience demographics that might impact engagement.

They might analyze changes in audience sentiment by reviewing shifts in positive, neutral and negative feedback, helping them understand how brand perception could impact engagement. If it’s dwindled or dropped drastically, analysts can review negative messages and find more detailed information that might explain why content is underperforming.

Predict social media outcomes

So much of social media marketing is about planning content calendars and looking forward. But with social media trends shifting so rapidly, how can you confidently plan for the next three to six months? The answer is social data.

With social data, analysts can turn hunches into real and actionable ideas. They identify recurring patterns in customer behavior, analyze relevant listening data, evaluate the content types that consistently engage your audience and track the way content performance varies across channels over time.

Using social media search for market research is invaluable for businesses looking to understand customer behavior. With this information, your team can create more targeted content for your audience, apply collective insights to larger marketing campaigns and even surface specific product improvements based on audience feedback.

Focus beyond their own brand

Competitive analysis is a critical skill for analysts. This analysis helps identify successful strategies, unique content opportunities and areas where your brand can differentiate itself better.

Analysts can manually review competitors or use competitor reports and listening tools like those in Sprout to streamline the process.

Analysts also review industry trend reports to spot emerging themes and examine data from social channels to gauge platform-specific dynamics.

On top of that, they layer social listening data to understand cultural nuances and shifts in public sentiment—a benefit that social media uniquely provides.

Once analysts have the data, they share their findings far and wide, so teams across their org can use that competitive analysis to create new or improved products, campaigns or creative assets.

Help manage crises

Social media analysis isn’t just useful for retrospective reporting and can drive proactive decision-making—which is essential during a crisis.

When negative sentiment spikes or potential issues emerge, analysts provide real-time monitoring and data-driven recommendations that help brands respond rapidly and decisively.

For example, if customers start reporting product issues across social channels, analysts can track conversation volume, reach and sentiment shifts to measure the scale of the problem. They monitor key influencers, identify main themes in public reactions and give leadership data-backed recommendations for immediate action.

This rapid response capability, powered by Social Listening and analytics, helps brands contain issues before they escalate into full-blown crises. By tracking changes in sentiment, conversation patterns and reactions, analysts help organizations decide the best timing and approach to handle potential crises.

6 essential skills for a social media analyst

Like all things social, social media analysts’ jobs too, are always evolving—and quickly. As AI tools and consumer behavior trends reshape how we analyze data to strategize business decisions, it’s important to keep up. Here are six skills that can help if you’re looking to become an analyst or for existing analysts to further their craft.

Use advanced AI-driven data analysis

AI is reshaping how we interpret social data and analysts go past simple metrics to find more meaningful insights.

AI helps you:

• Spot patterns in customer behavior
• Forecast content performance
• Analyze sentiment in large volumes of comments
• Gather insights through social listening

All these insights can help you identify high-performing content and engagement strategies to reach your social media goals. But it’s not just about the tech. Blend AI social listening with human intuition to maximize the ROI of social media listening. Use tools like conversational analytics to spot patterns across massive datasets, then use your expertise to put those findings into context and strengthen marketing strategies.

Excel with social media reporting tools

Making data-driven decisions in social media requires using enterprise-grade reporting tools that offer both high-level overviews and granular insights.

Tools like Sprout Social provide a unified view of metrics across multiple channels, enabling you to not only track essential metrics but also create custom dashboards and reports tailored to strategic business goals.

Google Analytics is also crucial, linking social media activity with website behavior, which gives a full-circle view of how social efforts drive traffic and impact digital strategy.

By linking social engagement metrics to indicators like session duration, bounce rate and conversion paths, you can illustrate the direct impact of social strategies on business results. Such as increasing lead generation, improving customer retention and optimizing the customer journey.

With AI and automation taking over repetitive tasks, you and your team can dedicate more time to discovering emerging trends, refining audience targeting and optimizing content strategies for long-term business growth.

Be a compelling data storyteller

Raw data, stripped of context, rarely inspires action. Your data should inspire your brand story and social content as well as provide critical insights that resonate with your leadership teams for executive buy-in.

Weave data into narratives that resonate with decision-makers by:

• Using tools like Tableau to create intuitive dashboards and visualizations and turn complex data into compelling stories.
• Correlating social metrics with concrete business outcomes integrating CRM insights from platforms like Salesforce.
• Creating interactive reports with visual storytelling techniques that help leaders and teams explore data on their own to find insights they can act on.
• Framing the brand’s position in a way that clarifies competitive strengths and gaps.

Through business intelligence reporting, distill vast amounts of information into clear, strategic insights that inform key decisions—from market entry to customer engagement strategies. Highlight key trends, flag potential risks and spotlight opportunities for growth.

Stay current on platform changes

Social media platforms evolve at a dizzying pace. Facebook tweaks its algorithm, X (formerly Twitter) adjusts its metrics and new contenders like Meta Threads reshape the landscape—each shift can drastically impact content visibility and engagement.

Monitor official platform announcements, industry news and forums to anticipate how they may impact social strategies.

For example, when Reddit introduced new features like its Conversation placement for ads, you’d typically adjust your Reddit social listening techniques to gauge grassroots sentiments and user behavior. Or as short-form content rises on YouTube, focus on video engagement metrics across platforms to gauge audience preferences and adapt content strategies.

Custom reporting becomes crucial here. You can design flexible dashboards with Sprout and add new metrics and data sources to keep reports up-to-date as platforms change.

Be ahead of social media trends

It’s crucial not to just react to trends but anticipate them. Do this by:

• Monitoring influencer marketing trends to understand how these partnerships influence audience trust and drive engagement, then use these insights to refine brand collaborations.
• Tracking customer service trends to enable brands to deliver faster, more personalized support that builds loyalty and encourages positive word-of-mouth.
• Keeping a pulse on platform-specific trends, such as Instagram trends’ focus on Reels or YouTube trends’ emphasis on Shorts, to tailor content strategies.
• Exploring social commerce trends to uncover new in-platform shopping experiences that drive conversions and create a seamless path to purchase for users.

Staying ahead of these trends gives your brand an edge. Not only does this help your brand maintain relevance and agility, but it also builds deeper connections with your audience—ensuring your brand adapts to shifts before they happen.

Always learn

Embrace a growth mindset and constantly refine your skills and approaches:

• Optimize strategies through rigorous A/B testing and use data to refine content types, ideal posting times and engagement tactics that resonate most with your audience.
• Adopt AI customer service solutions and assess how automation improves response times and user satisfaction by enabling faster, more accurate support.
• Experiment with AI analytics tools and use machine learning to forecast emerging trends before they become mainstream.
• Regularly upgrade your data analytics skills through courses and certifications to expand your toolkit.
• Seek feedback on your reports and presentations to refine how you communicate insights to ensure clarity, relevance and impact.
• Develop and refine customer engagement models, like personalized marketing and customer support strategies, based on social data insights.

Through ongoing learning, you can equip yourself to turn social data into insights that drive action.

Supercharge your career as a social media analyst

You have the power to break social data out of the marketing silo and impact every area of your business. Your deep data analysis skills are invaluable, whether you’re part of a larger team or working solo.

If you’re on a team, use your unique perspective to drive cross-departmental insights and strategies. And if you’re still working as a social team of one, embrace the skills and habits of an analyst to become a more well-rounded, influential marketer.

Ramp up your skills and learn how to use social media competitive analysis for new strategies to gain an edge.

The post 6 skills social media analysts need in 2025 and beyond appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 91% of business leaders agree that their company’s success will depend on how effectively it can use social data and insights to inform business strategy.

Putting your social interactions into context can uncover new opportunities to grow and expand. Social media monitoring tools can help you do just that.

Below, we’ve broken down some of the best social media monitoring tools out there. We’ve also included tips to help you craft a successful social media monitoring strategy.

Table of contents:

• What is social media monitoring?
• Benefits of social media monitoring
• Social media monitoring tools to use
• Tips for social media monitoring

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and reacting to social engagements. These engagements include @mentions, comments, #hashtags and keywords related to your brand.

Despite the name, “monitoring” is not a passive activity. Brands should track everything from shout-outs and reviews to questions and complaints. More importantly, brands must react to all of the above. This is the distinction between social monitoring and listening.

Social media monitoring involves much more than just direct mentions and branded keywords, too. For example, a competitor call-out presents an opportunity for your brand to intervene. The same rings true for people asking for product recommendations.

The problem? These types of conversations don’t typically pop up in your notifications. This is especially true if you’re active on multiple networks. That’s why brands use social media monitoring tools to supplement their native data.

4 benefits of social media monitoring

Using data to fuel your campaigns is always a smart move. But what kind of data does social monitoring help you get? How can you use it to grow your business?

Here are some specific benefits of social media monitoring for your brand:

Maximize the ROI of your social media campaigns

Social media monitoring helps you gather valuable data to inform your future campaigns.

For example, by understanding what resonates with your audience, you can craft more engaging posts that boost brand visibility and sales—directly impacting your social media ROI.

Also, you can use this data to run more targeted ads and choose the right influencers to work with. This ensures your content reaches people who are genuinely interested in your products or services— giving you more bang for your buck.

Get insight into your industry and competitors

Social media monitoring is more than just tracking brand mentions—it’s about keeping an eye on emerging trends, industry news and what the other players are doing.

This helps you make proactive decisions like creating viral content, adopting new strategies or tools and even developing product features that give you a competitive edge.

Competitive intelligence also helps you set realistic benchmarks for your brand’s performance. What’s the engagement like for the top players in your industry? How efficient is their customer service? How frequently do they post and which channels do they use the most?

Reputation management

Social media is a great place to manage your reputation.

In fact, according to State of Social Media Report, 9 out of 10 business leaders agree that social media insights help them proactively manage crises and create effective PR strategies.

For example, you can catch negative comments or reviews about your business early on and prevent issues from escalating.

Plus, with regular customer sentiment analysis, you’re always up-to-date on how customers feel about your brand. If there are any unexpected drops, you can go back to the drawing board and take swift action to get your brand’s social media reputation back on track.

Social media monitoring also helps you deliver exceptional customer service. Research shows 69% of customers expect brands to respond within 24 hours on social. By promptly addressing queries, comments and messages, you can improve public perception of your brand.

Monitor your brand mentions on social media

Want to gauge your brand’s actual popularity? Start listening. What are customers saying about your products? Which influencers are using your hashtags? Do you have any haters spreading negative vibes about your brand?

Monitoring your brand mentions can answer all of these questions. Better yet, it can reveal valuable insights about customer sentiment, product strengths and weaknesses, competitive opportunities and even user-generated content.

18 social media monitoring tools to use

Social media monitoring tools let you track your brand’s meaningful engagements wherever and whenever they happen.

There’s no shortage of monitoring tools out there. The following list can help you hone in on a tool that makes sense for your brand based on your needs.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives you everything not only to track important interactions but also to act on them.

For starters, our platform keeps track of mentions, comments and keywords across multiple networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

The ability to condense all of your interactions into one platform is a massive time-saver. Doing so ensures that you don’t miss any noteworthy mentions or let customer service concerns go unanswered.

For example, Sprout’s Smart Inbox provides a real-time, up-to-date list of all of your social interactions. This includes communications between leads, followers and customers.

With a collaborative inbox, you and your team can reply to mentions and call-outs without leaving the platform. These features speed up response times and allow your team to offer a consistent experience to your customers.

Beyond monitoring, Sprout’s s suite of social listening tools is equally powerful. You can track specific queries using boolean operators to zero in on conversations that matter most. We make it easier to detect call-outs and shout-outs as they happen.

And with Sprout’s social analytics, you can report on all of the above to track the progress of your social presence.

Keep track of metrics including average response times and engagement volume to ensure that you’re consistently growing and improving. Consider that the best social media monitoring tools work across multiple platforms and encourage growth wherever your team is active. That’s exactly what Sprout does.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse’s platform lives up to its namesake with features to help brands keep a better pulse on their social mentions.

The platform’s monitoring and listening features are designed to help brands focus on “what counts.” With countless notifications and mentions for busy brands to sift through, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

To combat comment overload, Agorapulse allows users to set parameters to filter specific phrases and platforms out of their monitoring feeds. The platform also makes it a cinch to label and organize notable customer conversations and competitor activity. This activity includes negative competitor mentions and opportunities for your brand to intervene.

These features highlight the fast-paced, high-stakes nature of social media monitoring and why tools matter so much.

3. RivalIQ

Perhaps not surprisingly, RivalIQ’s platform focuses on competitive analysis to help brands keep an eye on their business rivals.

Monitoring and benchmarking features allow brands to understand their share of voice and how they’re growing versus their competitors.

The most notable features of RivalIQ are the platform’s variety of real-time alerts. For example, the platform can identify when a competitor has changed their social media bio as soon as it happens. Recent features include the ability to also see when a competitor boosts an organic post as an ad.

These alerts can give you a head start on understanding your competitors’ positioning, promotions and campaigns.

4. Mention

Mention is yet another monitoring tool that lives up to its namesake as a powerful @mention tracker.

For brands and agencies alike, the platform claims to monitor over one billion sources for relevant mentions and comments. With so many conversations to sift through, the platform offers plenty of filtering options to help brands “eliminate noise.”

Likewise, the platform’s alerts can keep brands in the loop. Additional features of the platform include identifying spikes in mention volume. These instances can help brands identify a potential social media crisis or PR opportunity sooner rather than later.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole’s monitoring abilities are primarily focused on helping brands find influencers to work with.

Automated keyword and hashtag searches uncover influencers posting about topics relevant to brands. The platform also uses hashtag analytics to highlight influential accounts, posts and conversations around any given topic.

6. HubSpot

If you’re already using HubSpot as your CRM, consider how the platform can double as your social media monitoring tool of choice.

HubSpot’s features aren’t radically different from most tools on our list. The platform tracks interactions, engagements and content performance.

Coupled with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the correlation between top-performing content and social interactions with sales. For example, you can see if customers interacted with a certain piece of content or a team member via social. This goes hand in hand with understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.

7. Brand24

Brand24’s media monitoring features include sentiment analysis and instant notifications for all of your social mentions. The platform can also detect trending hashtags that relate to your brand.

A notable feature of the platform is its mention feed that detects spikes in activity. The platform’s “summary” feed also makes it easy to track your brand’s PR efforts from week to week.

8. Atribus

Atribus is a consumer intelligence tool with an emphasis on social media monitoring. Helping brands uncover “unmet needs,” the platform digs deep into customer conversations and data.

Specifically, the platform highlights common complaints within any given industry through sentiment analysis. This provides opportunities for competing brands to identify pain points and intervene. Atribus is capable of automatically classifying mentions into complaints versus inquiries, too.

9. Zoho Social

If you’re using Zoho as a CRM, the platform’s complimentary social media monitoring features are incredibly useful.

Beyond the standard monitoring features we’ve talked about, the platform lets you build a custom listening dashboard. From hashtags to specific platforms or media outlets, this gives you a comprehensive understanding of your PR and social presence at a glance.

10. Awario

Awario’s monitoring features are also similar to many of the platforms mentioned above.

That said, Awario Leads is a noteworthy addition to the platform’s regular monitoring and listening capabilities.

In short, Awario can identify specific instances of people asking for recommendations for a particular industry. This again shows how monitoring is an active process that can help you win more business.

11. Cyfe

Cyfe is an analytics platform that lets you create custom dashboards to monitor key social media metrics from one centralized location.

Track followers, engagement, reach, top posts and more on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Cyfe is particularly helpful for observing trends and patterns across your social media KPIs over time.

Using Cyfe’s dashboard also makes reporting a breeze. You can easily present all your social media metrics to team members, clients or managers.

Plus, most metrics are presented in the form of data visualizations like colorful charts. This helps you make sense of the data and understand the overall performance of your brand.

12. Sendible

Sendible is a powerful social media management tool that lets users track analytics, generate reports, and design, schedule and publish content across multiple social media networks without leaving the platform.

You can keep tabs on brand mentions and industry keywords, and even respond to comments on multiple platforms from within Sendible.

The tool is built with agencies in mind, so if you’re monitoring the social presence of multiple client accounts, you can create a separate dashboard for each one. They also offer white-label solutions for those looking for customized software aligned with their brand.

13. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media analytics platform known for its advanced social monitoring capabilities, including sentiment analysis and trend tracking.

The tool integrates with all popular apps and networks, and can gather data from millions of sources. It can also perform deep, granular analyses of social conversations and create custom dashboards to help you measure performance.

You can also use Brandwatch’s AI smart alerts to take swift action in response to unusual trends, such as spikes or drops in brand mentions.

14. Meltwater

Meltwater provides a holistic approach to brand monitoring—it combines social media, news and blog tracking. In fact, it even uses AI to find brand mentions in podcasts.

The platform lets you search for unlimited keywords and queries, dig into industry trends, scour historical analytics and even generate reports to uncover the meaning behind all that data. You can also leverage sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about your brand.

Another cool feature Meltwater offers is visual analytics searching to analyze image/video content shared on platforms like Reddit, blogs, forums and news sites.

15. YouScan

YouScan specializes in visual content analysis—it uses AI to scan social media for images and videos that include brand mentions, logos and relevant scenes. This lets you uncover brand-related content that might be missed by traditional text-only social monitoring tools.

The platform also analyzes sentiment in visual content and puts it into context to help brands better understand how they’re perceived on social media. It’s a valuable tool for brands focused on visual branding and those interested in tapping into user-generated content.

16. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows your brand to set up real-time alerts for any keyword, brand mention or competitor. This means you can instantly track conversations relevant to your brand, industry or specific campaigns. You can monitor mentions across various social media platforms, news sites, blogs and forums, ensuring comprehensive coverage of online discussions. This broad reach helps you stay informed about what people are saying about your brand, identify potential crises and discover new opportunities for engagement.

Beyond tracking mentions, BuzzSumo also provides analysis of social media data. You can analyze the sentiment around your brand, identify key influencers driving conversations and track the performance of your social media campaigns. This data empowers you to understand audience perception, refine your social media strategy and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

17. Emplifi

Emplifi’s social listening tools allow you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and industry keywords across various social media platforms. You can monitor conversations in real-time, identify trending topics and analyze audience sentiment to understand how people perceive your brand. This enables you to proactively address customer concerns, identify potential crises and discover opportunities for engagement.

Furthermore, Emplifi’s listening capabilities extend beyond just text. Its image recognition technology can analyze images and videos to identify brand logos and visuals, providing a more comprehensive view of online conversations. This is particularly useful for tracking brand mentions in visual content, such as user-generated photos and videos shared on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

18. Statusbrew

Statusbrew’s social listening features enable you to monitor keywords, brand mentions and competitor activity across multiple social networks. You can set up real-time alerts to stay informed about important conversations and quickly respond to comments, questions and reviews.

This proactive approach helps you build stronger relationships with your audience, manage your online reputation and identify potential crises before they escalate. Statusbrew also allows you to track hashtags, identify influencers and analyze audience sentiment, providing valuable insights to inform your social media strategy.

4 tips for social media monitoring

Tracking social metrics and mentions on social will only get you so far. The tools above offer plenty of other powerful features to help position your brand for success.

Follow the tips below to make the most of your social media monitoring efforts:

1. Monitor relevant keywords for your brand

Instead of just tracking brand mentions, keep tabs on specific keywords related to your brand and industry. This could include product names, features, popular hashtags, common industry phrases and even competitor names.

For example, a fitness app might monitor keywords like “workout”, “fitness tips” or “healthy living.” This could help them identify trends in the fitness sphere, such as a rising interest in at-home workouts. They could use that info to create more relevant content and features.

2. Monitor across different channels

Your audience is spread across various social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit and others. And every channel has its unique dynamics.

You need to monitor your online reputation, customer sentiment and key metrics on every platform your audience is active on to create targeted strategies for each one.

For example, you might find engagement is low on Instagram but great on LinkedIn. Digging deeper might reveal you’re just posting at the wrong time on Instagram.

Luckily, most social media monitoring tools let you track insights across multiple channels from one dashboard. Sprout Social, for example, lets you create consolidated reports and get a birds-eye view of your overall social media performance.

3. Monitor customer sentiment

Understanding how people feel about your brand is just as important as knowing what they’re saying. Sentiment analysis involves studying the tone and emotions behind all the comments, reviews and mentions—so you know exactly what customers are thinking.

Customer sentiment can be positive, negative or neutral. Some tools like Sprout Social give you a sentiment score to help you quantify that metric. Use it to adjust your strategy to improve customer satisfaction and overall perception of your brand.

4. Monitor your competitors

Don’t just monitor your own brand. Use these tools to keep an eye on your competitors and their strategies. What kind of content are they posting? Is their brand getting more mentions than yours? What’s the customer sentiment like?

Sprout gives you visual reports to help you monitor your competition and benchmark performance across various channels:

Tracking your competitors’ campaigns, publishing behavior, engagement rates, interactions, response timings and other strategies helps you learn from them, anticipate their moves and capitalize on any gaps in their strategy.

Competitive analysis also helps you differentiate yourself from the crowd. What unique value do you bring to the table? Is there anything that your product offers that theirs is missing? Focus your energy on highlighting those areas in your promotions and campaigns.

Use social media monitoring to build better campaigns

Stepping up your social monitoring should be a top priority regardless of your industry.

The closer you track what people are saying about your brand, the better you can serve your target audience.

Likewise, you can form more meaningful relationships with your followers and customers. That’s because you’re already clued into their wants, needs and pain points.

Doing so means having the right social media monitoring tools at your fingertips. Try a tool like Sprout Social to align your publishing and customer service strategy with your monitoring insights in one place.

The post 18 social media monitoring tools you need in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Twitter’s built-in analytics provide basic metrics such as follower counts and impressions. Third-party analytics tools give you deeper data—the kind that reveals what’s really working, where you can optimize and, most importantly, how your Twitter strategy impacts your overall business goals.

In this article, we’ll explore why you need a Twitter analytics tool and list seven third-party X/Twitter analytics tools designed to help you track and improve performance.

Why do you need an X/Twitter analytics tool?

An X/Twitter analytics tool optimizes your social media strategy by providing detailed insights into content performance, audience behavior and competitive positioning. It enables you to understand what’s working and what’s not, adapt your messaging and stay ahead of competitors.

Here’s exactly how it helps.

Identify top-performing content

Knowing which posts in your Twitter marketing strategy resonate most with your audience helps refine your strategy and allows you to continually build on what works. With an X/Twitter analytics tool, you can easily pinpoint posts with high engagement metrics like reshares and build on those insights to replicate success.

Understand audience demographics

Insight into your audience’s age, location and interests helps you tailor your messaging. This deeper understanding of who’s engaging with your content lets you create campaigns that directly address their interests and boost conversion rates. This could be through more targeted ads or curated content that speaks to their needs.

Track brand sentiment

Customer sentiment analysis helps you gauge how people feel about your brand in real time. Tracking brand sentiment allows you to amplify positive feedback or address complaints swiftly, preventing them from escalating and maintaining your brand’s reputation.

Measure campaign performance

Analytics tools help you analyze your own strategies—whether it’s engagement rates, content themes or audience interaction patterns. These tools also give you a clear picture of social media ROI and the insights needed to optimize future campaigns.

Monitor competitors

Stay ahead of your top competitors by analyzing their strategies with X/Twitter analytics tools. Competitive monitoring tracks competitor X/Twitter post performance in terms of engagement rates, follower growth and hashtag use. And you understand your competitors’ overall share of voice, compared to your organization’s, on the topics that matter to your brand.

7 best X/Twitter analytics tools

We’ve evaluated several tools based on features, usability and the depth of insights they provide. Here are some of the best X/Twitter analytics tools.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social delivers in-depth insights into account performance, audience engagement and content effectiveness across multiple X/Twitter profiles.

Analyze key metrics such as impressions, engagements and follower demographics to refine audience targeting and optimize your X/Twitter content strategy alongside other networks. Plus, identify your best-performing posts and conduct a competitive analysis to see how you stack up against industry leaders. These X/Twitter insights give you a detailed look at what your audience likes, how they engage and when they’re most active—so you can tweak your strategy for maximum punch.

Sprout’s Premium Analytics further enables you to select metrics that align with your X/Twitter goals. Create presentation-ready reports to showcase the impact of your strategies and share insights easily with key stakeholders through shareable links. You can also compare performance across multiple profiles with Sprout’s cross-channel capabilities to get a holistic view of your brand’s X/Twitter presence.

In addition to these X/Twitter-specific functions, you get access to a full suite of social media management tools—from publishing and analytics to engagement—to streamline your X/Twitter strategy.

Features:

• An easy-to-use dashboard that offers a unified overview of your platform, including demographics and profile insights
• Hashtag tracking to learn what hashtags your audience is already using to reach and grow your audience
• Summarize by AI that distills complex data into actionable insights, making it easier to understand your X/Twitter performance at a glance
• X/Twitter Listening capabilities to understand audience sentiment and identify advocates and influencers
• Device demographics to inform your content strategy based on how your audience accesses X/Twitter
• Customizable reports on audience growth during your selected reporting period
• Analyze by AI Assist to track metrics, hashtags, keywords, Smart Categories and emojis to uncover major insights
• Several report options to guide your X/Twitter strategy, including:
  • Post Performance Report to identify your best-performing content and analyze engagement metrics
  • X/Twitter Profiles Report for tracking changes in performance over time, including engagements, replies, likes, reposts and audience growth
  • Competitors Report to see how you compare to rivals
  • Paid Performance Report to track ROI from Twitter ads

2. Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is a built-in analytics tool only available to Twitter Premium users.

It’s a useful tool for getting started and providing a snapshot of what’s working on your account—helping you identify quick wins.

To access, head to analytics.twitter.com, or from your regular Twitter feed, click More in the left sidebar, then click Analytics. Here, you get basic insights into your best-performing X/Twitter posts, how your last 28 days compared to the previous period and how much engagement your individual posts get.

Features:

• Monthly highlights that show your top X/Twitter post, mention, followers and other key updates
• Detailed breakdowns of engagement metrics, showing likes, profile clicks, reposts, replies and detail expands
• Average monthly engagement rates, number of replies and reposts

3. SocialPilot

SocialPilot offers social media scheduling, content curation, its own browser extension, help with ads as well as analytics.

Features:

• Automated reporting that generates and delivers daily, weekly or monthly reports
• Custom filters to perform tailored analysis, track performance over time, make historical comparisons and assess goal achievement
• Top Mentions Posts that highlight the number of times your brand gets mentioned
• Most Engaged Followers metric shows you who interacts with your posts, so you can reciprocate or give free products as a thank-you

4. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social media monitoring and analytics tool that helps you track your online presence. In fact, it differs from some of the other tools we’ve already covered because their entire focus is on social listening.

Monitor hashtags, keywords and trends across various platforms in real time to get insights into engagement and sentiment analysis. It also offers cross-platform publishing so you can schedule all your upcoming posts for all your channels (including X/Twitter) from one dashboard.

Features:

• Automated, comprehensive reports that eliminate human error in spreadsheets
• Campaign-specific reporting so you can see how individual social media promotions are performing
• Hashtag reporting to track user-generated content and relevant hashtags your brand is promoting
• Analysis of post types and times that will generate the highest levels of engagement, such as likes, clicks and shares

5. Meltwater

Meltwater provides tools for social media monitoring, media analysis and audience segmentation that help you understand market trends and customer sentiments.

Meltwater is ideal for global brands who want to track multilingual conversations and stay culturally relevant while addressing market-specific trends.

Features:

• Multi-brand search functionality for various research purposes
• Data sources include social media platforms as well as traditional media like radio and TV
• Assisted search feature as an alternative to manual boolean searches
• Data storage covering a 15-month period

6. Fedica & Followerwonk

Fedica and Followerwonk provide powerful tools for detailed social media analysis, especially on X/Twitter.

Fedica brings together publishing, analytics and engagement tools that help you improve your social media strategies across platforms. With the Follower Segmentation tool, you can group followers by different traits to target specific audience segments.

Now part of Fedica, Followerwonk adds features like bio search, user comparison and follower tracking, which helps with competitor analysis and audience insights. Together, these tools help you check the quality of your followers and track engagement.

Features:

• X/Twitter account analysis to find the accounts influencers follow—a way to pinpoint potential customers to interact with
• X/Twitter user comparison to find gaps or overlaps in how your followers line up with your competitors
• Follower growth analysis over a specified period to monitor how your account is expanding
• Audience interest and sentiment analysis to reveal trending topics, concerns or praise among your followers
• X/Twitter engagement dashboard to keep an eye on how your followers are receiving your X posts

7. Brand24

Brand24 helps you monitor and analyze brand mentions across various online platforms, including social media, blogs, news sites and forums.

It uses sentiment analysis to label mentions as positive, negative or neutral to help you understand public perception in real time. The platform’s Brand Reports pinpoint emerging trends and correlations, highlight key mentions and identify key events.

Features:

• Automated sentiment analysis gives you a quick view of public opinion about your brand, helping you react faster to changes in sentiment
• Mentions feed for easy tracking and response to all X/Twitter brand mentions
• Marketing analytics to monitor positive and negative mentions over time
• GPT-powered recommendations to identify growth opportunities and fine-tune your strategy

Evaluate your current X/Twitter marketing strategy and build from there

Ramp up your X/Twitter marketing with the best Twitter analytics tools for auditing your performance. An audit uncovers gaps, optimizes underperforming posts and aligns your content with audience expectations—ensuring your efforts on the platform actually pay off. Select the right platform for your brand and perform an X/Twitter audit so your content connects with your audience and drives meaningful engagement.

The post 7 X/Twitter analytics tools to amplify your strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Successful marketers know that decisions aren’t made with owned analytics alone—routine competitive analyses are essential for getting the full picture.

Using Facebook data to bolster your competitive intelligence can provide you with the insights needed to zig where others zag. It’s no wonder Facebook is the most-used platform by marketers worldwide.

If you’re ready to engage in some good old-fashioned competitive sleuthing, you’re in the right place. Here’s everything you need to know to start monitoring your competition on Facebook.

What is a Facebook competitor analysis?

A Facebook competitive analysis is the process of evaluating your competitor’s Facebook activity for benchmarking data. These reports also provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor’s social media strategy overall.

Conducting a Facebook competitor analysis involves reporting on key brand growth and engagement metrics for your brand and its rivals. It also requires a closer look at your competitors’ posting habits, content formats and how their audience engages with their posts. Your team can use this social data to set a baseline for audience growth, publishing and engagement goals.

These findings can help you define what it means to offer superior content and service on social media, increasing the business impact of your presence on the network.

Why should you do a Facebook competitive analysis?

When conducting a social media competitive analysis, make Facebook your top priority. According to Sprout’s 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report, 83% of social users have a Facebook profile, and nearly half (44%) interact with brand content on the network at least once a day.

All of these little interactions compounded over time make Facebook a goldmine of strategic insights. If that’s not enough, here are some other reasons to consider.

Establish more relevant KPIs

Competitive benchmarking on Facebook can take the guesswork out of goal setting.

For example, say you’re trying to set a new engagement goal. Looking at your historical data can help you set an achievable target, but without competitive insights, you risk setting goals that aren’t in line with industry standards.

Your Facebook competitor analysis can motivate you to aim higher with your social content while keeping your strategy attainable and actionable.

Identify content gaps

Competitive analyses can illuminate cracks in your content strategy while supplying the information needed to fill them.

For instance, an oral health care brand conducting a Facebook competitive analysis might notice that Quip incorporates month-long observances into their content strategy. This provides an endless stream of social media content creation ideas that tap into trending topics.

Since these posts do well from an engagement standpoint, that brand may consider how they can put their own unique spin on similar events.

Create better content for your followers

Coming up with new content ideas is a top challenge for many social media marketers.

Industry data can provide valuable insights during brainstorming sessions, helping you generate smarter, more relevant content ideas for each social platform. That’s where your Facebook competitor analysis comes in.

The analysis will help you identify your rival’s content themes. As you notice them, ask yourself how your brand might approach something similar. What would you do differently? What opportunities are they not taking advantage of?

Eventually, you’ll come up with a unique piece of inspired content that stands independently from its source material.

Understand the strength of customer service efforts

Consumers are also more likely to turn to Facebook for customer care compared to any other channel—especially Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers.

A quantitative and qualitative review of your competitor’s Facebook pages can help you clearly define what they are and aren’t getting in terms of customer service. This will show you exactly what it takes to gain a competitive edge on social.

Facebook competitive analysis tools will help you keep a pulse on what your audience expects from brands on the network. Eventually, you’ll find ways to one-up their service offerings, cementing your spot as the brand people turn to for a better customer experience.

Learn from your competitors’ strategies

A Facebook competitive analysis gives you a clear snapshot of what’s working—and what’s not—for your top competitors.

By digging into their content, engagement metrics and audience interactions, you can pinpoint winning strategies, like the best posting frequency, content formats that get the most traction and the optimal times to post.

This data helps you refine your content strategy, adopt what works and avoid common pitfalls, so your brand stands out. Plus, it gives you a deeper understanding of how competitors are positioning themselves, helping you stay ahead with more strategic differentiation.

How to conduct a Facebook competitor analysis

Let’s go over our top tips for executing a Facebook competitive analysis effectively.

1. Identify your Facebook competitors

Before conducting your competitive analysis, narrow in on three to four key competitors on Facebook. Tracking every single competitor big and small can quickly become an unwieldy task. Instead, aim for an even representation of direct, indirect and aspirational competitors.

This is a good time to talk to your sales team and customers about which competitors helped them make their decisions. This will help you understand your position in the market and improve your approach.

2. Gather your data

Once you’ve confirmed your target competitors, it’s time to gather your data. While this process can be time-consuming, especially in competitive industries, thorough insights lead to more informed strategies.

Use a social media analytics tool to streamline your approach to tracking competitor metrics. If you’re using Sprout, you can even dig into data at the post level to figure out what content formats and themes are resonating most with the audiences of individual competitors.

Remember, this isn’t a one-time task. To stay ahead, it’s crucial to update your analysis quarterly or biannually, aligning with your overall social media reporting.

3. Analyze your competitors Facebook presence

Competitive intelligence involves both quantitative and qualitative insights. To gain the most comprehensive understanding of your competitors’ social channels, you need to explore how they present themselves across each platform.

Start your analysis by asking these three key questions:

• How active are your competitors? Examining their posting frequency can reveal insights into their content and customer care strategies, as well as potential gaps you can exploit.
• What types of content do they share? Review each competitor’s last 10 posts and determine the percentage that are promotional, such as calls to action for sign-ups or purchases.
• What is their brand persona? Identify the different brand voices your competitors use and evaluate how effectively they resonate with their audience.

4. Use a tool to conduct a Facebook competitor analysis

According to Sprout’s Social Media Productivity Report, 63% of social marketers agree manual tasks prevent them from doing high impact work. Social media analytics and listening tools are essential for conducting a Facebook competitor analysis while balancing the other duties of your role.

These tools offer valuable data-driven insights, such as engagement rates and follower growth, which help you objectively evaluate competitor performance and spot trends. Social listening tools also track audience sentiment toward competitors, providing richer qualitative insights that reveal how well they engage their audience and where they may be falling short.

5. Identify areas of improvement

The insights from your competitor analysis can reveal strategic opportunities to help your brand outpace the competition. Focus on doubling down on what’s working well and closing any gaps that may be allowing competitors to get ahead.

Use these findings to develop a clear action plan, and share it with your team to gain their support and collaboration. Engaging your colleagues in this process not only fosters teamwork but also ensures everyone is aligned in driving the brand forward.

6. Create a Facebook competitor analysis report

Numbers are nothing without the right context.

For example, what if one of your competitors ran an enticing social media contest during your reporting period? That would definitely have an impact on either their engagement or audience growth. If your report lacks that context, it can result in an unfair assessment of your team’s performance.

Use storytelling to give your data meaning. Include the “why” behind your most interesting numbers so that your teammates understand the full story behind the report as well. This social media market research worksheet will help you explain what’s really driving competitor performance in 90 minutes or less.

Get the worksheet

How to analyze competitors on Facebook with Sprout

You could do some of this research manually, but Sprout will make the process much more efficient. Sprout’s Facebook Competitors Report lets you track metrics for any Facebook page to compare them against your own.

Getting started with Sprout

If you don’t have a Sprout account, no problem.

Step 1: Start a free 30 day trial by setting up an account with your business email [you don’t even need a credit card].

Step 2:.Go to “Account and Settings” and select “Connect a Profile.”

Step 3: If you need to, choose a group for this Page from the “In Group” dropdown.

Step 4:.Navigate to “Connect for Facebook.” > “Connect Page” to link your Facebook Page.

Step 5: Select “Go to Facebook” and follow the simple instructions to authorize the connection.

How to use the Facebook Competitor Report

Here’s how you can discover what your competitors are doing differently on Facebook:

Step 1: Set filters

Use the Filter Menu to customize the data you want to see in your report.

You’ll find three different filters within the menu: Pages, Competitor Pages and Date Range.

• Use Pages to select which owned Facebook pages you’d like to include in the report.
• Use Competitor Pages to manage and select competitor Facebook pages
• Use the Date Range date picker to select a time period for your report.

Step 2: Check the summary

The top widget in the Facebook Competitor Report is a summary table. This features averages of key metrics including Fans, Public Engagements and Public Engagements per Post.

Use the trends highlighted in the summary as starting points for your competitive investigation. For example, if you notice that your fan average is lagging behind, that may be the first item to review and cover in your report.

Step 3: Dig into the numbers

You’ll find three different chart widgets in the Facebook Competitor Report:

• The Audience Growth chart shows how your audience grew compared to your competitors’ during the selected time period.
• The Publishing Behavior chart shows the different types of posts you and your competitors published during the selected time period.
• The Engagement chart evaluates how people are engaging with posts based on publish date.

Each of these charts goes deeper into the high-level metrics available in the Summary table. They also provide averages of each metric for both owned and competitor Facebook pages. Use this information to benchmark your performance against your competitors’ averages.

Step 4: Review post-level data

Use the Top Posts widget to review the most popular posts published during your selected time period.

The Top Posts widget will help you analyze published content across all competitors to understand what’s resonating within your shared audience. As you review the data, stay on the lookout for qualitative trends as well. What type of visuals and messaging drive the most engagement? Are there any topics people seem particularly excited about?

Understanding these trends will come in handy during your next brainstorm.

Step 5: Share findings

There are a few different ways you can distribute your report from Sprout.

If you’d like to limit the number of disparate files floating around people’s inbox, try the link sharing option. This will allow you to share reports with multiple stakeholders regardless of whether they have a Sprout account or not.

Top Facebook competitive analysis tools

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides social media marketers with a well-rounded perspective on competitors’ performance across various platforms and data points.

With Sprout’s range of competitive reports, you can evaluate and enhance your social strategy using valuable metrics from Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and more. Sprout’s suite of competitive intelligence tools enables teams to see what your competitors are posting and compare your growth to the profiles you are monitoring.

Through Sprout’s Premium Analytics, you gain in-depth insights into your social platforms, accompanied by customizable interactive charts and graphs tailored to your objectives. If you want to discover how to use Sprout for analyzing your Facebook competitors, sign up for a free 30-day trial today.

2. Socialinsider

Socialinsider is another social media management tool that offers several different features—including Facebook competitor analysis reporting.

Marketers use Socialinsider to monitor metrics like views, engagement, follower growth and more, while also giving them access to information like historical content trends and top-performing content. The platform also helps users get competitive insights at the campaign level, so you can study specific plays in competitor strategies.

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers data analytics for consumer intelligence and social media management, including competitive benchmarking for Facebook and X.

These tools allow users to monitor their competitors’ social media output, while tracking all mentions of specific competitors across the web. Reports can be exported and shared via Excel, PowerPoint, PDF file or through the Brandwatch API.

May the best brand win

A Facebook competitor analysis can be exactly what you need to level up on the network. Understanding where their strengths and weaknesses lie is the first step to understanding how to outperform them on social.

Compiling that data takes a lot of work, especially when analyzing multiple competitors. Sprout Social can eliminate all the data collection work so you can focus on planning your next steps. Sign up for a trial today to test out the Facebook Competitor Report free for 30 days.

The post How to conduct a Facebook competitor analysis report [plus template] appeared first on Sprout Social.