So you have your social media plan in action with profiles on all the top sites. You are building relationships, posting, replying to comments and reviews, and posting content on a regular basis. Your strategy is working…or is it? How do you know if all this work you are doing on social media is translating into more site visits and new customers? That is where social media analytics tools can help. In fact, it can be a challenge to measure your social media ROI without some tools to help you.

If you have checked, you may have found that there are a lot of analytics tools out there so, I have compiled a list of my 7 favorite for you to choose from or, you may even want to try a combination of them. Each of the tools listed offers both free versions as well as upgrades to paid versions that give you additional options, details and reports that you may or may not need.

Top 7 Social Media Analytics Tools

Tweetreach: The free version of Tweetreach gives you reports of basic analytics which is plenty for most businesses; however if you would like to measure the reach of their specific brands, campaigns, events and hashtags on Twitter that will require a Tweetreach Pro subscription. However, both the free reports and those through a subscription will help you understand and improve your social media strategies.

Sociota allows you to manage multiple social media profiles from Twitter and Facebook without leaving your dashboard. It’s a great way to save time and improve productivity. The dashboard is designed to let you listen, engage and manage all from one simple interface. Its monitoring system will also monitor hashtags, profiles and keywords as well as those of competitors which can help you keep a competitive edge.

Buffer is a social media management site where you can schedule posts on various social media accounts and then check out the analytics tools to see how each is performing. It gives you the convenience of having social media management and analytics all in one place.

Viralwoot caters to Pinterest users and allows you to schedule and promote pins, gain followers and create pin alerts. It will also manage multiple Pinterest sites all from one place. Their Analytics is not up and running yet, but promises to be an excellent addition to this Pinterest focused tool.

Collecto: Much the way Viralwoot caters to Pinterest, Collecto caters to Instagram. It was previously known as Followgram, but they revised and improved on Followgram and gave it a new name. The ease of posting and managing Instagram accounts from one tool is enhanced even more by the “stats” they provide you to track and follow the performance of the items you are posting.

SocialOomph is another social media management tool that includes a fairly extensive analytics tool. When compared to the analytics of Hootsuite, SocialOomph comes out a bit ahead due to the more details and information they provide in their analytics tool.

Google Analytics: A post about online analytics would not be complete without at least a mention of Google Analytics. As with all things Google, this is the granddaddy of the analytics tools. Google provides analytics for just about everything you can imagine from mobile apps to tags, to site performance. For some this might be more than they need but for others it covers all their needs conveniently.

Focus On Relationships and Let the Tools Handle the Analytics

I like to focus on using social media to massage my network, build new relationships and deepen existing ones. Social media also gives you the ability to shine a spotlight on the people in your network. However, before you shine that spotlight, be sure you also use a magnifying glass to do your due diligence on where that light will shine.

These analytics tools allow you to spend your time focusing on using social media for your relationships and using the tools to do the analytics to measure the ROI of your relationship building. This will allow you to adapt as needed to build even more relationships and ultimately grow your business through social media.

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Do you know the ROI of your social media engagement? What tools have you used for analytics? Please share your favorites with me!