Social Media Marketing

Twitter Audit: How to Conduct & Optimize Your Account

Regardless of whether you’re still figuring out how to use Twitter to boost your business, or you’re already doing well but are looking for ways to up your game, you’ll love this quick Twitter audit guide that will show you how to assess and improve your Twitter profile in less than 30 minutes. 

With the end of this quarter fast approaching, it’s time to start thinking about expanding your potential and making the next quarter more successful for your business. 

This means that it’s time for you to: 

  1. Start reflecting on what you did right and what could be done better in your business, and… 
  2. Develop new strategies to drive positive change and better results.

A quick Twitter audit will enable you to achieve just that – understand what works for your business and how you could improve your social activity to increase engagement, boost your follower count and improve your conversion rates.

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What is a Twitter Audit and Why Does it Matter?

Set Your Goals

Start With Your Profile

Audit Your Twitter Audience

Audit Your Tweets

What is a Twitter Audit and Why Does it Matter?

A Twitter audit is an assessment of your Twitter account and overall performance. 

A quick Twitter analysis like this will help you better understand your audience, fine-tune your content strategy, stay consistent and determine ways you can improve your online presence and return on investment.

Twitter audits should be done frequently – at least once every quarter – and they are fairly fast and easy to do.

Let’s jump right into the “How”.

Set Your Goals

Before you start with the actual audit, you need to define what success means for you and what you are hoping to get out of your Twitter activity.

Generally speaking, Twitter is best for raising brand awareness and providing timely customer service, but your goals will depend on your current business situation and your overall social media strategy. 

Read more on how you can develop a full blown social media strategy that works for you.

Start With Your Profile

Your profile determines your visitors’ first impression about your business.

Auditing your profile will help you ensure that you make a great first impression and that your visitors understand what your business is about and what you provide in terms of value.

Auditing your profile comes down to updating three elements: your Twitter bio, your Twitter profile pictures and your pinned tweet.

A good Twitter bio is short, clear and concise. Avoid using vague phrases and marketing buzzwords, and just explain what you do as you would to a friend.  

You only have a couple of seconds to capture your visitor’s attention before they click away so make sure that you use simple language and a clear statement that shows the value you can provide.

Your bio may be good already, but go over it one more time to make sure that all details are correct and up to date. 

Audit your Twitter profile pictures to make sure that your branding is consistent across all online channels. Update your profile photo to the latest logo of your company – your profile picture size should be at least 400 x 400 pixels. 

Also, update your header image (1,500 x 500 pixels) so that it matches your company’s messaging. 

You can use the header to reinforce your brand, promote a new product, or make an announcement.

Upon rebranding a couple of months ago, we decided to use our header image to increase brand awareness among our visitors and followers.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s header image is all about his personal brand as well.

As you can see, you can get creative with your header image – it’s social media and people are here for informal conversations after all!

Another thing that visitors see immediately upon landing on your profile is your pinned tweet – which is why we included this point in the “Profile Audit” section instead of the “Tweet Audit” section.

Pinned tweets are tweets that appear on the top of your profile for as long as you don’t unpin them or pin another tweet.

At Keyhole, we usually use the pinned tweet to promote new content or to make an important announcement, like we did with our big rebranding a couple of months ago. 

You can use your pinned tweet for different purposes:

To announce a new initiative…

To promote a new story…

To promote a new product…

… or to inform about a current campaign.

Smart Bird Social have published a great piece on the reasons why you should consider pinning tweets to the top of your profile.

SUGGESTED READ: Optimize Your Twitter Profile to Improve Visibility

Audit Your Twitter Audience

The next thing you want to look at is your audience. 

The audience audit is a crucial step since it helps you understand the kind of people that follow you and this serves two purposes.

  • It will help you create a better content creation strategy and publish content that this audience is interested in seeing.
  • It will help you see if you’re on the right path and if you’re doing everything right to attract the audience that will help you achieve your goals.

The Twitter audience audit is done in two steps.

STEP 1: Understand Who Your Audience Is

The first thing you need to do is understand what you audience is about and what their interests are. 

This will help you determine the kind of content that would resonate best with them, and in turn, increase your Twitter impressions, engagement rate, and will ultimately help you lose less followers and increase your following.

Thankfully this is easy to do and all you need to do is to get on Twitter analytics and check the audiences tab.

Here, you’ll be able to see your audience demographics, their top interests, gender distribution, as well as the change in your follower numbers for the past 30 days. 

This should give you a general idea of the kind of audience your content resonates with.

STEP 2. Check For Bots

Once you know your audience, you want to check how many of your followers are real people. 

Chances are your profile has at least some percentage of bot followers.

Think you’re an exception?

In 2018, Twiplomacy published a list featuring the world leaders and their fake followers as calculated by Twitter Audit.

This shows you that no one is immune to bots.

To do a quick audit of your own account, go to https://www.twitteraudit.com/ and enter your username.

Now, here’s the thing.

Fake followers can’t harm your account per se, and you can’t do much about your fake followers (unless you want to pay to have them removed).

What this audit will help you do is understand where you stand in terms of your actual following and will also help you determine your real engagement rate. 

STEP 3. Find Your Top Followers

If you want to step the Audience audit a step further, you can also perform a more advanced analysis and find out who your top followers are. 

You can easily do this using a social listening tool that allows you to track hashtags and monitor conversations and use these insights to connect with influential and engaging followers.

SUGGESTED READ: The Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools

Audit Your Tweets

The next step is to audit your tweets and evaluate your performance. 

Log in to your native Twitter analytics dashboard and select the Tweets tab. Here you can select a date range of your preference, and you’ll be shown a breakdown of your activity within your selected time frame. 

This report will show you your Tweet activity, including your top tweets, your tweets and replies, as well as the impressions and engagement rate next to each one of your tweets. 

On the right-hand side, you’ll be able to see the number of likes, replies and link clicks you’ve acquired during this period as well. 

Click the export data button to download a CSV of the report.

This report should give you a clear idea of what’s landing well with your audience and how you can optimize and improve your activity for maximum engagement. 

If you want to get down to the nitty gritty…

You can also use an analytics tool like Keyhole to track keywords, monitor social conversations and learn more about your audience and how they feel about your brand. 

This will help you understand what’s working for your target segment and identify patterns that will ultimately help you optimize your strategy and create more engaging tweets and stories that resonate with your audience.

SUGGESTED READ: The Ultimate Sentiment Analysis Guide

Another reason why you might want to consider using a third-party tool to audit your account is that the native Twitter analytics app will show you a performance report limited to a narrow time window. 

Keyhole allows you to export your data in any custom time range you choose and see trends, events and overall performance on particular days or create robust reports for a longer time period.

Performing a Twitter audit is a quick and easy activity that can ultimately determine your Twitter success and how well your message resonates with your audience.

The key in performing a successful Twitter audit is to make quarterly Twitter check-ins part of your routine.

This is the easiest way to evaluate your performance: quarterly Twitter audits will allow for a timely response to industry trends and your audience’s changing requirements – all this without being overwhelmed by the amounts of available data.

SUGGESTED READ: Twitter Analytics: A Guide to Drive Traffic and Boost Sales

If you haven’t done a Twitter audit until now, go ahead and schedule some time to see where you stand.

You’ll be able to make informed decisions about how you can make next quarter’s social strategy better and more lucrative for your business.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

How to Find Micro Influencers on Instagram to Boost Sales

Updated on November 7th, 2019.

Influencers have the power to win the hearts of consumers.

It is no surprise that some of the biggest brands in the world are using influencer marketing to promote their products and services.

Influencer marketing is effective, but not a all brands have enough budget to afford a top tier influencer.

Fortunately, there are micro influencers on whom these brands can rely.

Micro influencers are everyday consumers who possess a large social media following; generally between 1,000 and 10,000, though some have up to 100,000.

These influencers offer better audience access and higher engagement than macro influencers at a fraction of the cost.

One major social media website on which you can easily find micro influencers is Instagram.

In this post, we’ll demonstrate how you can use micro influencers on Instagram to boost sales and how you can find Instagram influencers.

Jump Links:

Micro Influencers Should be Relevant to Your Niche

Showcase Your Product Experience with Micro Influencers

Give Influencers the Freedom to be Creative

Finding Instagram Influencers
Turn to Your Audience
Use Hashtags

Micro Influencers Should be Relevant to Your Niche

Influencer marketing can be used for achieving different goals, such as driving engagement, increasing brand awareness or sales.

To be able to achieve these goals, you must promote your content to a relevant audience.

This means that you must work with micro influencers who are relevant to your niche and have a significant following.

Ideally, you should find an influencer who is considered an expert in a subject that is relevant to your niche.

If you fail to do this, you won’t be able to reach your target audience and there will be no point in using influencers to promote your brand.

Showcase Your Product Experience with Micro Influencers

When consumers see a compelling product content, they may become interested in trying that product.

In order to make a major impact on your audience through micro influencers on Instagram, you must showcase their experiences using it.

This can compel and inspire followers to buy the product or service to enjoy the same experience themselves.

For example, if you want to promote your product, you can have an influencer use it and share their reviews about it with the audience.

Micro influencers on Instagram can make a video of your product, share stories or simply post a picture with an inviting caption.

The goal here is to demonstrate how your product is enhancing an influencer’s experience.

Because the influencer’s following trusts them, this will compel the audience to try your product themselves.

In a similar fashion, you can promote your services too by having the micro influencer show to their audience how your services enhance their experience.

Give Influencers the Freedom to be Creative

This is perhaps the most important thing to remember when working with micro influencers on Instagram.

The reason why micro influencers have managed to grow their audience is that their audience trusts them and they know what content attracts the audience.

They know their followers, so they know the type of content that will appeal to and engage their audience.

Let them give honest reviews about your product and allow them to promote your brand in their own way.

If you tightly control the content that an influencer shares about your product or services, there is a risk of the audience losing their trust in the influencer due to inauthenticity.

If that happens, you won’t be able to successfully promote your brand.

Now that you know how to use micro-influencers, will you promote your brand through influencer marketing?

If so, there’s a missing piece of the puzzle.

I still haven’t told you how you can find Instagram micro influencers.

Finding Instagram Influencers

Turn to Your Audience

When searching for Instagram micro influencers, you should start with your current fan base since you know that a connection already exists.

Since they’re already interested in your content, you should examine their interests by looking at the pictures they post and the people they follow.

Then, you should analyze similarities among your fan base.

Do they all follow the same influencer or brand? Does your analysis indicate that many of the Instagram pages you’ve looked at have common content themes?

By finding these common interests, you’ll be able to create a target lookalike audience to draw connections with others like them.

If any of your followers themselves have a large following, it is an added bonus for you.

Reach out to them and recommend an exchange of service or product for a review or Instagram post.

It’ll be easier to convince them as they are already familiar with your brand.

Use Hashtags

The best method to find the right influencer is to simply search for the correct hashtag or keyword that’s relevant to the product you’re trying to promote.

For example, if you want to promote a fashion product, you can run a hashtag search for queries like #ootd or #instafashion.

You can then determine how popular an influencer is by looking at how much engagement their posts are getting or their follower count.

You can calculate engagement with the following formula:

Are they getting likes and comments on their posts, and if so, how consistently are they posting?

It is common to find influencers who have purchased their followers and likes, and barely get any authentic engagement on their posts.

Avoid partnering with these types of influencers!

Tools like Keyhole offer hashtag tracking and keyword tracking. This can help you find influencers who have already published posts with your search terms.

If the content they are posting is relevant to your niche, you can reach out to them to market your products or services.

An example of a keyword tracker on Keyhole.
An example of a keyword tracker on Keyhole.

In addition, you can also track all posts that contain your hashtags in real time.

This way you can analyze the engagement levels of the audience in your niche with influencers on Instagram.

You can determine the impact of influencers on their audience through engagement rate insights.

The hashtag you choose to search should be somewhat specific to reveal satisfactory results.

For example, if you wish to search for Persian cats, a hashtag search around #Persiancats would yield much better results than just #cat alone.

The hashtag #persiancats garners more specific results than a general hashtag like #cats.
#persiancats garners far more specific results than #cats.
The hashtag #cats doesn't provide specific enough results to select an appropriate micro influencer.
#cats provides many more results – almost 92.5 million more.

Alex of VM Interactive says that the more specific your hashtag is, the more actionable results you’ll get.

With the help of an Instagram hashtag analytics tool, you can simplify your research.

You can use specific keywords relevant to your niche to pinpoint conversations related to your business and target audience.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

5 Valuable Hashtag Marketing Strategies Proven to Engage Audiences

Hashtag Marketing Strategies to Engage Followers

Updated on October 17th, 2019.

Using hashtags effectively goes beyond casually plugging them into your tweets and posts.

On platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, calculated hashtag marketing can boost impressions, make your content more searchable and encourage users to talk about your brand.

Learning how to leverage tagged topics should be a priority for marketers.

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1. Brand Hashtags
2. Trending Hashtags
3. Chat Hashtags
4. Content Reflecting Hashtags
5. Call-to-Action Hashtags

Here are five hashtag marketing strategies that social media teams have successfully used to engage their target audiences:

1. Brand Hashtags

Think of a brand hashtag as your signature. Unique to your business, it should be a concise and relevant slogan you include when sharing original content.

Encourage followers to use it as well. This way, they’ll have a clear method of sharing posts with you and others interested in your company’s products or services.

The online community will also know how to find content about your brand.

Why Brand Hashtags Successfully Engage Audiences 

A brand hashtag is a way for users to let the social community know what they think about your company. Instead of just sending you a message, they’re speaking to their followers and other users who look for tagged posts.

Everyone stands to benefit, because:

  • You build a discussion around your brand, encouraging the online community to learn more about your products and services while promoting them. Ideally, consumers will also follow links you share.
  • Those using the hashtag will draw attention to their posts, possibly earning more followers.

As a bonus, you can run a promotional contest. For example, the person who creates the most-shared post using your hashtag will win a prize at the end of each month.

Everyone loves to win. Just watch engagement steadily rise.

Example: #WinnersFabFinds

Winners, a popular Canadian apparel store, uses #WinnersFabFinds across all social channels. Both catchy and unique, Winners promotes the brand hashtag both online and in-store. Another great example of effective hashtag marketing.

With more than 4,500 posts, here’s what #WinnersFabFinds looks like on Instagram:

Customers share content, while Winners gets original pictures of them enjoying products.

Measure any hashtag you want, including brand hashtags, using Keyhole.

When a high volume of users include a specific hashtag in their posts, it “trends.”

Social media platforms have different ways of displaying trending topics. For example, trending topics on Twitter displays on the top right side of the screen, and Facebook has a trending section on the top-right corner of your screen:

Constantly changing in real-time, a trending hashtag can last for days or mere minutes.

When you see a trend that relates to your business, don’t hesitate to engage in it with relevant content.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences

By sharing content through a trending hashtag, it’ll be seen by a group larger than your contacts and followers.

In a sense, your audience can be limitless — anyone who clicks on the trending topic can see your post. And if that post is witty, original or informative, the shares it generates will further boost impressions and comments.

Example: #CollegeIn5Words

When #CollegeIn5Words trended on Twitter, Denny’s Diner furthered its reputation as a company with a funny social media presence.

Being funny in this situation has its benefits, as Denny’s earned an enviable amount of likes and retweets. Not to mention all the replies it received, with people tagging their followers to share a laugh.

3. Chat Hashtags

Popular on Twitter, you can use chat hashtags to discuss a topic with users who are interested in the subject matter.

This is a form of hashtag marketing that calls for users to be directly engaging with a brand or an individual.

There are a plethora of industry and audience specific chat hashtags.

Chats are typically held at set times, sometimes involving one user asking questions and others giving their thoughts.

You can also start and promote your own, giving your brand more exposure. Make sure the hashtag is short – encouraging meaningful conversation is key, so it’s best not to deeply cut into Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences 

People want to talk about topics they’re passionate about, so Twitter chats can give you access to a receptive audience. With a popular chat hashtag, that audience is already established and waiting to be engaged.

What’s more, contributing to a Twitter chat can boost engagement by letting you:

  • Connect with like-minded individuals. Many people may be interested in your company, but not know about it. Using a chat hashtag is a way of informing them about your ideas, as well as your products or services.
  • Demonstrate your expertise on relevant topics. If people are invested in a certain subject, they want to know more about it. Sharing your content can spark meaningful conversations.

Example: #TMLTalk

During every Toronto Maple Leafs game, #TMLTalk is a trending topic. The team with the NHL’s largest fan base interacts with supporters using the hashtag, encouraging them to share opinions and content.

During every Toronto Maple Leafs game, #TMLTalk is a trending topic. The team with the NHL’s largest fan base interacts with supporters using the hashtag, encouraging them to share opinions and content.

Fans are passionate – giving them an online forum helps them interact with fellow enthusiasts.

Organizations such as news sites can also use the hashtag to share stories and earn clicks. Meanwhile, the Maple Leafs organization gains another way to build, and communicate with, a dedicated audience.

4. Content-Reflecting Hashtags

Content-reflecting hashtags don’t have to be trending or even popular, per se. They’re not specific to your brand, either.

They’re simply tagged words that relate to a posts’ content. For example, a tweet about social media ads may contain “#digitalmarketing.” A post about a tourist attraction may include the city’s name, and so on.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences

Think of content-reflecting hashtags as a way of optimizing content for search. Audience members may stumble upon your posts when looking for the words you tag.

This is useful for companies that:

  • Sell physical products
  • Operate in a set location
  • Participate in events
  • Share posts about niche topics that don’t trend or necessarily merit a brand hashtag

Content-reflecting hashtags become valuable when consumers perform general searches to find a certain item or learn more about a given subject. Being an early result can certainly earn you a click, reply or follow.

Example: #CleanEating

#CleanEating is a popular Instagram hashtag that carries over onto Twitter and other social platforms.

For example, here’s a typical post that would be associated with the hashtag:

Although it’s dominated by pictures of home cooking, a health foods store or restaurant could certainly leverage the hashtag to potentially earn comments or clicks to their website.

If used in conjunction with a location hashtag, an in-person visit also wouldn’t be out of the question.

5. Call-to-Action Hashtags

The goal of a call-to-action (CTA) hashtag? Encourage the online community to perform a specific action involving your brand.

It’s a traditional marketing concept that’s applied to social media.

A CTA hashtag usually starts with a verb, such as “share” or “talk.” Then, it should have a few short words that give additional instruction.

For example, a mental health organization may have a hashtag called “#TalkAboutMentalHealth.”

When a CTA hashtag gains traction, you’ll see posts across social platforms involving people taking appropriate action.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences 

Social media users follow CTA hashtags because they:

  • Feel like they’re contributing to an important cause.
    • Going back to the mental health example, people would follow such a hashtag because they feel as though they’re challenging the stigma of certain illnesses.
  • Think the action is genuinely fun. Who wouldn’t want to take a silly picture or share an interesting story?
  • Earn a sense of participation. If your friends are posting with a certain hashtag, it’s natural to want to contribute.

That being said, a CTA should be doable. You likely won’t engage your audience by encouraging an action that’s almost impossible.

Example: #ShareACoke

Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaigns harnessed the power of a fun CTA and became a wildly-successful hashtag marketing initiative.

Creating cans and bottles that read “Share a Coke With …” followed by a name, the company encouraged social media users to post pictures of themselves sharing the drink with friends and family.

Generating almost 700,000 Instagram posts, here’s a look at an example:

Generating almost 700,000 Instagram posts, here’s a look at an example:

Like a brand hashtag, this particular CTA campaign benefits the company and individual users. The users get to share content with a wide audience, while Coca-Cola gets original images of satisfied customers and potentially increases sales.

These five hashtag marketing techniques are shown to boost engagement by encouraging consumer conversations, making your content more searchable, expanding your reach, and more.

Implement them in your social media marketing strategy to see how effectively they work for you.


Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

What is a Brand Ambassador? & How to Launch a Successful Ambassador Program

What are brand ambassadors, how are they different than influencers, and how can you create a successful ambassador program? 

We’ll walk you through what a brand ambassador is, the difference between brand ambassadors and influencers, and creating a brand ambassador program best suited to your needs. 

Jump Links

The New Age of Marketing

Brand Ambassadors vs Influencers

Why Use Brand Ambassadors?

How to Create a Successful Brand Ambassador Program
1. Find the Right Ambassador For You
2. Selecting a Brand Ambassador Program That Meets Your Goals
3. Reach Out to Selected Brand Ambassadors
4. Set Up Your Campaign and Track Results

The New Age of Marketing

Social media has forever changed the way we create, place and consume content. 

However, one thing has remained the same throughout the years – consumers trust other consumers more than they trust brands.

Organizations have always been aware of how powerful social proof can be, and with the availability of information in the Digital Age, social proof has become one of the most important pillars of a successful brand.

Instead of remaining faceless, brands are choosing to partner with influential individuals that align with their brand image and values. 

These influential individuals are what we call brand ambassadors. 

In the early to mid-1900s, companies worked with “brand managers” who were also sometimes called “product managers”. 

In the early 2000s, the term brand manager was replaced with brand ambassador. 

Brand ambassadors were typically celebrities (mainly actors or musicians) who were paid to endorse a brand and show up on various commercials and promotional material.

Back in 2012, for example, Beyoncé signed a whopping $50 million deal with Pepsi to become the brand’s global ambassador.

Image result for celebrity branding

With the rise of social media, those who were once considered “ordinary people” now have the ability to build a following and have extraordinary influence over the masses by producing, publishing, and sharing content online.

Today, brand ambassador contracts expand far beyond celebrity branding.

This is also where the lines began to blur between what a brand ambassador was in comparison to similar terms, such as brand advocates or influencers. 

Brand Ambassadors vs. Influencers

When brands consider partnerships, their minds usually jump to influencer marketing, and collaborating with celebrities and influential social media users that may not have reached a celebrity status, but still maintain a loyal following. 

Suggested Reading:  Instagram Influencer Marketing: A Start-to-Finish Guide

However, partnering with an influencer for a campaign is different than having a brand ambassador.

Influencers are usually used for a single campaign, and once that campaign is over, they end the collaboration with the brand. They may agree to work on future campaigns together, but they are not exclusively promoting a single brand. 

Brand ambassadors are people who have agreed to collaborate with a brand on a long-term basis and as a result, become the “face” of the brand.

Paralympian Amy Purdy as Team Toyota’s brand ambassador.

Put simply, a brand ambassador is always an influencer, but an influencer does not always become a brand ambassador.

Another term that usually adds to the confusion is “brand advocate”. 

While brand ambassadors and influencers get compensated for their work and association with the brand, brand advocates support a brand not because they are paid, but because they are true fans. 

Brand advocates, unlike influencers and brand ambassadors, do not always have social influence.

Now that you understand the differences between a brand ambassador, influencer, and brand advocate, let’s see how you can benefit from brand ambassador marketing.

Why Use Brand Ambassadors?

According to a 2015 survey commissioned by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, 96% of consumers don’t think that marketers practice integrity. 

The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: In Brands We Trust shows that for 81% of consumers, trust is a deciding factor in their buying decision.

It’s no longer enough for a brand to be creative and come up with snappy taglines and eye-catching ads. 

The Edelman report shows that 74% of people, in fact, avoid ads.

So, how can a brand get ahead when ads are not seen by the majority of potential customers?

Easy – by using one of the oldest rules in the book: get someone who’s already trusted to talk about the brand.

Data shows that influencers could be your getaway to higher sales and increased consumer trust. 

Audiences do not perceive sponsored content as blatant advertising, especially since many influencers are selective about the companies they work with, and only tend to recommend products they truly like. 

By selecting an influencer to use as a brand ambassador, you will be able to tie their face to your brand.

Use this relationship to promote your products and build trust at the same time.

Brand ambassadors are key to putting an authentic touch on your marketing strategy.

How can you create a brand ambassador program that drives results?

How to Create a Successful Brand Ambassador Program

1. Find the Right Brand Ambassador for You

There are multiple ways you can identify potential brand ambassadors. 

One option is to go through your list of followers on your social media channels and find an influential user who has been engaging with your posts regularly. 

This technique will help you find a potential brand ambassador that’s already a fan.

The downside is, going about it this way is very time-consuming, especially if many people are already engaging with your content.

Another option is to search for hashtags that are related to your brand and what you do. 

Look at the posts that show up under the “Top” tab – chances are, a lot of these creators whose content is trending already have an established follower base and can be a good fit.

For example, we searched for #FitGoals on Instagram and this is the result we got:

A screenshot of a social media post Description automatically generated

You need to determine if there is high engagement for each photo, and then review the profile of the creator and judge how their other posts are performing.

This is the only way you can see if someone’s activity and public image are in alignment with your needs and requirements.

A third way to do this is to join an influencer marketing platforms such as Upfluence, Post for Rent or Tribe.

These influencer marketing platforms will give you an overview of the influencers that work in your industry and provide you with insight into their statistics.

Members on these platforms are typically already open to collaboration, so you won’t be wasting time reaching out to people who are not interested in partnerships.

Despite whatever strategy you select, it’s best to test the waters with a couple of influencers to see who is delivering the highest ROI or is the best fit for your brand.

But how do you know that the individuals you choose reflect your brand image and are worth your money?

Here are some guidelines that will help you source the right brand ambassador:

Stay in your Niche

You wouldn’t want to contact a food blogger who specializes in baked goods if you’re looking to promote fitness gear. 

We’ve seen it happen, and trust us, it doesn’t work. 

Every influencer has a tribe of followers interested in a specific type of content. 

If you get someone to promote your brand to their audience and their audience is not interested in the types of products you offer – you’re just wasting your time and money.

Look at the Numbers

Some believe that brand advocates and other fans with a very humble following can be great brand ambassadors who will promote the product to their narrow circle of friends and family.

We don’t agree.

A brand ambassador needs to be someone with an established audience. 

They can be someone who loved your brand even before you contacted them, or didn’t know about the brand, but are using the products after you agreed to work together.

Regardless, they need to have influence, so that their recommendation reaches as many people as possible.

But what does having an “established audience” mean exactly?

It will all depend on your goals, budget, and business.

In general, we’d suggest working with someone who has at least 4000 – 5000 real followers. 

You can check the authenticity of the followers using free tools like IG Audit or Twitter Audit.

It’s also important to check how many people are engaging with their content. 

Although although helpful in making a preliminary selection, the number of followers is a vanity metric, and doesn’t actually show the social influence this person has in their community.

For example, if you have a tight budget but want to gain exposure, you’d be looking for someone who has anywhere between 4000-10000 followers, with a high engagement rate (>4%).

Think Long Term

When looking for a brand ambassador, you’re looking for an individual with whom you can have a long and rewarding relationship. 

The person you choose to work with needs to carry themselves with professionalism both online and offline, always have your best interest in mind, and help you grow your brand, build trust, and attract new customers.

2.     Selecting a Brand Ambassador Program that Fits Your Goals

Think about what you’re trying to achieve with your brand ambassador program, and how much you’re willing to invest.

Different brands offer different terms to their ambassadors and have different requirements for their  programs.

There are a plethora of ways to set up your brand ambassador program:

  • Send your ambassadors complimentary products.
  • Offer your ambassadors a discount on your products.
  • Pay the ambassadors on a retainer basis. 
    • With this payment model the brand ambassador agrees to be on-call for a fixed monthly fee.
    • This fee needs to be paid regardless if you’ve tasked your ambassador with work or not.
  • Create an affiliate program.
    • Ambassadors get a commission on purchases linked from their promotional activities. Affiliate programs typically include a unique discount code that serves as an incentive for the audience to purchase.

You can also combine any of these options to build out your unique ambassador plan. 

3.     Reach Out to Selected Brand Ambassadors

After you’ve selected a program and compiled a list of influencers, it’s time to get in contact!

Keep in mind that some influencers are already getting many collaboration invitations, or may have ongoing contracts with other brands. 

Sending a generic, copy and pasted message won’t get you their attention or a reply.

Take a look at the following example.

Do you think this company got an enthusiastic answer (or any answer at all)?

Just dropping a comment asking for a collab, or sending a generic direct message to someone you’d like to work with won’t cut it.

So instead of just popping up in your target’s inbox out of nowhere, you first want to engage with their posts by liking and commenting on them. 

Ensure that you leave relevant and thoughtful comments – if you plan on just copy-pasting the same comment over and over again on every profile you stumble upon, it’s better not to do it at all.

When making direct contact with the influencer you’d like to be your brand’s ambassador, personalize your message by mentioning some relevant information they’ve shared with their followers.

Let’s say the influencer you’re contacting is on a 100 days squats challenge.

You might send them something like this:

It’s simple to establish meaningful contact to stand out. 

4. Set Up Your Campaign and Track Results

Once you and your brand ambassadors have come to an agreement, you’re ready to give them their first task.

To make the collaboration enjoyable and friction-free, consider the following:

Communicate your expectations.

Be clear about what you’re trying to achieve, whether that’s more traffic to your website, higher sales, or increased follower numbers.

Let the ambassador know what metrics you’ll use to measure their results: sales, reach, engagement, ROI, traffic… select your key performance indicators based on your goals.

Sign a contract.

Put everything into writing: the terms, the compensation, the expected activities, the contract cancellation, and other policies that are relevant to the collaboration.

Provide context.

Give your ambassadors information about your brand, your mission and objectives, and explain what kind of content would be in line with your brand image.

Measure results.

Track everything your ambassadors do: how often they post, what kind of content they create, how much engagement each post related to your brand has, and more.

By measuring everything, you’ll easily determine the ambassadors that bring the most value and get some ideas on how you can optimize your strategy.

Brands nowadays have a hard time gaining the trust of the busy and often overwhelmed consumers. Surveys show that consumers trust fellow consumers and influencers more than they trust corporations.

Brand ambassador programs provide brands and influencers with a win-win scenario.

Brands can use the persuasive power and social reach of influencers to get on the radar of new audiences and build trust, and influencers can get compensated for recommending a product or a service.

Brand ambassadors are easy to integrate into your marketing strategy.

When curating brand ambassador programs, they can be easily tailored to fit different objectives and even the smallest of budgets. 

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

16 Social Listening Strategies to Incorporate Into Your Business Strategy [+2 tools!]

With 3.03 billion active social media users around the world, you can use social listening to tune in and monitor what your customers are saying about your business across a variety of platforms. 

This allows you to listen to your customer base, learn more about them and interact with them. 

You can also identify possible new customers, and learn more about your industry or competitors. 

Social listening needs to be actionable. To use it to your advantage, you need to make the most out of conversations that happen about your brand and industry. 

Jump Links

16 Social Listening Strategies:
1. Develop Leads by Pinpointing Prospects
2. Develop Leads through Dissatisfied Competitor Customers
3. Learn Your Audience’s Language
4. Identify Influencers
5. Find Feedback
6. Start Conversations with Users Who Don’t Tag You
7. Keep Tabs on Industry News and Developing Trends
8. Track and Measure the Results of Social Campaigns
9. Discover New Audience Spaces
10. Answer Indirect Questions
11. Monitor Competitor Content
12. Create Customer and Prospect Personas
13. Research and Develop
14. Detect and Mitigate Issues Before they Escalate
15. Send Bottom-of-the-Funnel Customers to Gated Free Trials, Product Pages, or Waiting Lists
16. Refer Top-of-the-Funnel Customers to Ungated Content

2 Social Listening Tools to Grow Your Business

Here are 16 social listening strategies you can incorporate to grow your business and 2 tools to execute your strategy:

1. Develop Leads by Pinpointing Prospects

By tracking a range of terms, you can reveal users in your target market who may not know about your business.

To locate potential customers, track keywords and hashtags related to your niche that reflect:

  • Trade publications
  • Common practices
  • Issues in your sector
  • Leading figures and products

It can take between seconds and days to find posts containing your terms, depending on the social scale of your business and industry. Regardless, consider users who post with those terms as prospects.

The next step involves putting your social media sales hat on. Join the conversation by replying to them.

For example, give your opinion about a trend or send the prospect to a relevant page on your website.

This can earn you a fan and generate interest in your brand. The user may engage with you in the future or explore your website and eventually convert.

2. Develop Leads through Dissatisfied Competitor Customers

With similar tactics, you can find users eager to try new products and services.

Instagram Unhappy - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Social Listening and a List of 3 Tools

Track your competitors’ usernames, brand hashtags and product names to locate prospects who may be tired of their services.

Along with these terms, monitor negative keywords such as:

  • Not
  • Can’t
  • Won’t
  • Doesn’t

Depending on your social media monitoring tool, this can be done by typing the following into the search function:

“competitor name” AND “negative keyword”

As you identify unhappy customers, ask them what they’re looking for in an ideal product. If you can meet their needs, link them to a demo, discount or free trial.

But remember, they’re upset. Use gentle language and don’t force a reply from them.

3. Learn Your Audience’s Language

Effectively marketing a product through content such as ads and landing pages involves speaking the audience’s language.

This is largely because it shows you understand their common train of thought. As a result, you can better communicate with them.

As you study posts that use your tracked keywords, you may notice that members of your market:

  • Phrase concepts in a specific way
  • Use common secondary keywords
  • Write simple, complex or somewhere-in-between sentences

Without compromising clarity, implement the findings in your content.

Unconvinced it’ll make a difference? Run a landing page A/B test using your writing style versus an adjusted style that uses your audience’s diction.

Go forward based on the winning conversion rate.

READ: The Marketer’s Guide to Writing Click-Worthy Headlines

4. Identify Influencers

As brands turn to popular online personalities to post about their products, social listening is becoming a viable way to identify influencers.

Typical Influencers - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Social Listening + 3 Tools List

To find social media thought leaders in your niche, track the URLs and titles of:

  • Popular blog posts
  • Authoritative case studies
  • Content from industry-leading blogs and publications

You then need to determine who’s earning the highest engagement rate when sharing this material.

Use this simple formula to calculate engagement rate:

Add the number of likes and comments, and divide by the number of followers. Multiply by 100 to get the engagement rate percentage.

After you identify influencers, reach out to them by pitching your campaign idea. Explain how they’ll benefit and then ask for their participation.

5. Find Feedback

Tracking your brand and product names can uncover customer feedback across niche and popular social platforms.

Combined with positive and negative terms, such as “does” and “doesn’t,” you can locate reviews, complaints and endorsements.

As customers post positive comments, ask to use them as testimonials on your website, and make an effort to repost or retweet positive feedback.

This is a great strategy because it reminds your followers of the awesomeness of what you’re selling, and will likely interest new leads who happen to hear others raving about you.

Money saving app Piggybank does a great job at this. They repost the positive reviews they get from Twitter right on their Instagram page.

Image of Sam Hart tweeting about 'Saving Violently' using Piggybank

Since consumers resonate more easily with reviews from fellow consumers than from ads sent out by brands, Piggybank’s happy customers see fit to testify to the customer review Piggybank posted…

Image of Sam Hart tweeting about 'Saving Violently' using Piggybank

And there are also bottom-of-the-funnel customers asking how to get started; here’s one:

Image of Piggybank linking signup

On the flip side, you can also find negative feedback or comments through social listening.

But what you do after getting bad reviews is what matters the most.

It can be overwhelming to take note of every single piece of negative feedback, but the trick is to find the public embarrassments your company can do something about and handle the situation with finesse and style that impresses onlookers.

For example, JetBlue got a tweet from a customer who was complaining about being on a flight that had a bad headphone jack and a malfunctioning TV.

Image of cutomer tweeting to JetBlue

JetBlue responded with what clearly looks like more than just an apology; they offered to compensate the customer with a $15 credit for the inconvenience (once she can confirm she’s the actual customer who had the experience).

6. Start Conversations with Users Who Don’t Tag You

If you only pay attention to your direct mentions on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, you can miss chances to connect with prospects and nurture leads.

As well as not tagging you, it’s common for users to:

  • Misspell your name when trying to tag you
  • Talk about your products or services without mentioning your business
  • Misspell those products and services, too

The solution is to monitor the names of your business, products and services, along with their common incorrect spellings.

Barraco Barner - 15 Ways Social Listening can Grow Your Business + 3 Tools List
People can even incorrectly spell the U.S. president’s name.

For the latter, type the names into your phone. Note any autocorrects and create social listening trackers with your tool of choice. You can also think up misspellings on your own.

7. Keep Tabs on Industry News and Developing Trends

Monitoring the social web for news and trends can provide topics to post and blog about, keeping your content marketing strategy fresh.

To stay on top of what’s relevant, track keywords and usernames for big players and authoritative publications in your sector.

A tool like Keyhole can help you track other accounts, hashtags, or keywords.

News Stages - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business through Social Listening a List of 3 Media Monitoring Tools
These tweets use #Breaking, #Trending and #Developing.

Along with these keywords, monitor standard news terms such as:

  • Breaking
  • Developing
  • Trending

Depending on your social listening software, you can do this by typing a news term and publication name into the search function:

“breaking” AND “Wall Street Journal”

As you collect data about news and trends, your business can demonstrate expertise by creating and promoting articles that explain a story’s background issues.

READ: How to Build, Run and Grow a Successful Company Blog [Douglas Karr Interview]

8. Track and Measure the Results of Social Campaigns

This may seem like a moot point to some, but many marketers don’t track social media campaigns run by rivals, role models or even their own brands.

Since many social listening tools have analytics suites, you can collect data surrounding hashtag campaigns on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms.

Beyond tracking performance, this data is useful for:

  • Setting goals for future campaigns
  • Analyzing which demographics within your target audience were most active, tailoring upcoming ads and content toward them

9. Discover New Audience Spaces

A multi-channel social listening strategy can reveal audience activity on platforms you didn’t know about.

You may uncover conversations surrounding trends, competitors and even your business by searching through different forums, communities and social sites.

For example, people thinking about cosmetic surgery may not take to Twitter to express their concerns. Instead, niche forums are more common:

Cosmetic Surgery - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Social Listening and a List of 3 Media Monitoring Tools

As you discover platforms that audience members frequent, read their posts to gain more insights about their needs, desires and pain-points.

READ: 10 Mistakes that Keep Your Key Social Metrics from Growing

10. Answer Indirect Questions

Answering questions isn’t always a way to overtly promote your business. Rather, it introduces you to prospects and helps build rapport.

You’ll inevitably stumble upon queries as you track brand and industry keywords.

For example, if you make task managers, you’ll likely find questions about prioritization and project management. You can respond by giving an answer or link to a relevant blog post.

Task Manager - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business with Social Media Monitoring and 3 Tools List

It’s less common for people to ask for task manager recommendations. But when that time comes, feel free to make the case for your product.

11. Monitor Competitor Content

Monitoring how a competitor’s content performs on social media can help you develop blog ideas and tactics.

Since you likely share an audience with opposing businesses, content that works well for them can work well for you.

Start by tracking a content piece’s URL and title. Depending on your tool, this should generate engagement data – how many times it’s been shared and by whom. You may also see opinions and conversations about the piece.

Use these insights by:

  • Seeing which issues and pain points resonate with your audience
  • Modeling posts, studies and infographics off popular content
  • Reaching out to users when sharing your similar material you’ve made

Keyhole allows you to monitor competitor content such as their accounts and hashtags.

12. Create Customer and Prospect Personas

Analyzing the profiles of users who post with your monitored terms is a way to build buyer personas – representations of customer groups to help you understand your target markets.

First, make a spreadsheet and fill it with the profile URLs of people who use your brand-specific keywords and hashtags. Second, once you’re comfortable with the size your list, look at each profile for information about:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Position
  • Industry
  • Business size and scope
Buyer Persona - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Social Listening and a List of 3 Tools

Third, sort the profiles into groups based on this data. You may be surprised to learn which kinds of people make up your social audience.

Understanding who you’re communicating with should boost clicks and engagements as you craft messages and campaigns.

13. Research and Develop

You can think up ideas worth investigating by sifting through social listening reports, such as:

  • Creating new services or products
  • Launching events or campaigns your audience would likely enjoy
  • Altering brand positioning based on what consumers say about your and the competition

Depending on your organization’s structure, putting these ideas into action could involve collaborating with a different department or the team member beside you.

Regardless, uncovering them starts by tracking broad industry terms.

For example, if you’re a marketer for an analytics brand, you might monitor “metrics” and “social data.” You’ll eventually see someone express a need or desire. Reach out if you can already solve their pain point.

If not, consider taking the necessary steps to do so.

14. Detect and Mitigate Issues Before they Escalate

DKNY Crisis - 15 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Social Media Monitoring and List of 3 Tools
With its social listening strategy, DKNY reacted to this Facebook crisis within four hours.

Monitoring brand and industry keywords can inform you when concerns and problems develop, helping you quickly react.

Let’s say you’re in the software business. One day, you notice someone tweeting about a significant error.

You would immediately try to replicate that error, and:

  • If you can replicate it, try to fix it. Then, reach out to the user to explain it’s on the mend.
  • If you can’t replicate it, show your concern. Tweet with the user and ask for more information.

What’s the value of a speedy reaction?

Consumers expect you to swiftly address problems in the age of social media. To see why, read about Domino’s Pizza employees filming themselves ruining ingredients.

A slow, or non-existent, reaction can push customers away and damage your reputation.

15. Send Bottom-of-the-Funnel Customers to Gated Free Trials, Product Pages, or Waiting Lists

Bottom-of-the-funnel consumers are also always lurking around conversations about your industry, brand, or specific product.

These people have heard about your brand before.

And they’re ready to buy. They just need a few questions answered.

So they ask questions like “Is there a version that will include xyz feature coming soon?” OR “Can your product do this specific thing?” If you’re keeping tabs on conversations in your industry, you’ll be able to pull these prospects into the fold.

In 2017, Audi had a tweet where a prospective buyer (Godwin) asked if they had any new upgrades on a couple of their cars.

Audi responded saying the feature is coming in 2018, and sent the buyer a link where he could sign up with them to get updated once it’s out.

Image of Audi's tweet to the buyer

Once the buyer clicks the link, Audi sends him to a well-designed landing page where he’s being welcomed as a lead. The car brand gets his info and gets the chance to alert him once his desired feature is out in the market.

This means while Audi is responding to Godwin with a signup form to fill, there are probably other potential buyers around who have the same question Godwin asked and would sign up to get updates from Audi as well — via the same page Audi sent to Godwin.

This way, Audi is using social listening as a tactic to generate more leads for their new car upgrade coming in 2018.

It’s a powerful social listening strategy to monitor these industry interactions and earn the opportunity to convert bottom-of-the-funnel prospects into actual paying buyers.

And if, like Audi, you don’t already have the feature or exact product a potential buyer is asking for, have a well-designed page ready to convert the person into a lead — so you have the opportunity to draw them back to your business when it’s time.

16. Refer Top-of-the-Funnel Customers to Ungated Content

Top-of-the-funnel customers are also lurking around.

There’s always someone hearing about your brand or product for the first time, or seeing conversations about your brand or industry.

Unlike those on the bottom-of-the funnel, these people aren’t ready to buy anything.

They only want to learn more about the matter being discussed — your product, brand or industry.

You can refer these customers to a piece of content, a handy tool, or any value that answers their questions and get them ready to buy.

Audi, in the example above, sent ready-to-buy prospects right from social interactions to a gated page; should you do the same for top-of-the-funnel customers? Not quite.

Picture this for a moment: you go to Twitter and find a promoted tweet that interests you. The tweet is from a brand you’ve never seen or heard of before, promoting a product you don’t entirely understand.

So you’re curious. You want to learn more about about what’s being promoted. You reply the tweet asking “How do I get started?”

To which the brand replies, “Go to [this url] to learn how to get started.”

Would you click or not? You probably would. After all, you’re the one looking for answers.

But upon arrival on the page, you find a form asking for your personal information.

Would you give your information just to learn more about a product? You probably won’t. Especially when you’re just trying to see how to get started with a product.

If you were ready to get started, that’s a different case, you’d sign up. But gating a page that’ll teach you how to get started? Not ideal.

So it’s best to make your tool, content or any other value ungated for people who just want to “learn more”.

2 Social Listening Tools to Grow Your Business

A great social monitoring tool will analyze the most engaging posts about your brand, alert you when influencers talk about you or identify possible influencers, as well as indicate when a keyword or topic you’re tracking is being buzzed about on social platforms.

Here are 2 social listening tools that do all of the above.

1. Keyhole

Keyhole monitors real-time and historical data around URLs, hashtags, keywords and usernames on Twitter and Instagram.

A screenshot of Keyhole's social listening tracker.

By inputting up to five terms in this social listening tool’s search function, it will generate and track metrics such as:

  • The number of posts and people using your terms
  • User demographic information, including gender and location
  • Top posts, based on engagement data such as shares and replies
  • Influence data, such as which users are drawing the most attention to your tracked terms

In a shareable and printable dashboard, it displays this data in tables, timelines, pie charts and bar graphs.

Price: Starts at $179 USD; advanced plans vary

READ: Forbes Uses Keyhole to Track and Rank SXSW Hashtags

2. Talkwalker

Talkwalker tracks real-time and historical data surrounding keywords, taking data from almost all major social platforms. It also monitors blogs, forums and online news websites for keyword mentions.

For Twitter and Facebook, it provides analytics such as:

  • Engagement rate
  • Activity levels, including the times when users post with a given keyword
  • Share of voice, which is a calculation of how much a user or brand is contributing to online conversations about your keyword

You can use Talkwalker as a traditional media monitoring tool, too. It tracks keywords on global TV, radio and newswires.

Price: Starts at $800 USD per month; advanced plans vary

Whether people are having conversations directly about your brand, your industry, or your competitors, there’s a constant information exchange at high volumes.  

Social listening can contribute greatly to your business’s growth in a variety of different ways. 

You need to keep listening and monitoring to inform your social media and business strategies.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Top 13 Twitter Analytics Tools in 2019

Looking for the best Twitter analytics tools?

We’ve identified a list of the top 13 free and paid Twitter analytics platforms to help you determine which tool is the best for your business.

Updated on September 16th, 2019. This list now covers 13 tools. 

Jump Links:

Why do you need a Twitter Analytics tool?

Exploring the Top 13 Twitter Analytics Tools
1. Twitter Analytics (Native)
2. Keyhole
3. Hootsuite
4. Buffer
5. Sprout Social
6. Klear
7. Mentionmapp
8. Union Metrics
9. Agorapulse
10. Followerwonk
11. Quintly
12. Tweet Binder
13. ContentStudio

Why Do You Need a Twitter Analytics Tool?

Twitter has always been a challenging platform for businesses.

While businesses love having instant access to their customers and brand mentions, you can invest hours, days, weeks, and even years into the platform without having a sense of the ROI generated from Twitter.

We all know social engagement is important for brands, but how do you track the real world impact on your business?

Should you go after new followers or should you run a new Twitter campaign? Are there influencers out there who may be impactful to your brand?

Finding the right Twitter data analytics tool will provide you with the answer to those questions to help your social strategy flourish.

Features of the Best Twitter Analytics Tools

What can Twitter analytics tools do for your business? Before you start looking into investing in the best tool for your business, make sure you consider exactly what insight you want to gain.

Here are a few key reasons to use a Twitter data analytics tool:

Tracking important Twitter Metrics

  • Tweets that historically have the most engagement
  • Brand mentions
  • Insights from your competitors

Growing your Brand

  • Identify potential brand influencers
  • Grow your follower base
  • Grow your business

Guiding your Twitter Content Strategy

  • Discover what hashtags and topics your followers are discussing
  • Improve new content by leveraging data on what your audience finds most engaging
  • Manage your Tweet schedule
  • Better manage replies to brand mentions

Exploring the Top 13 Twitter Analytics Tools

Now that you’ve established what you’re looking for, review our research of the top 15 Twitter analytics tools.

1. Twitter Analytics (Native) – A good analytics tool for beginners

Features: The native Twitter Analytics platform offers a wide range of basic information. This free analytics tool includes data about both your Twitter account and general insights into what’s trending on Twitter.

Through Twitter Analytics, the main dashboard features a monthly summary of information such as the number of Tweets, Tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers. At a glance, you can also see your top tweets, top mentions, and top new followers per month.

Twitter’s audience insights break down your follower base by their interests, occupations, buying styles, wireless carriers, gender, and more. Many other top Twitter analytics tools do not offer this data.

The tool also offers general Twitter trend data, including trending topics, events, sports, movies, and more. This tool offers native ability to advertise directly to Tweets relating to any of these topics, and the ability to target by goal (followers, engagements, leads, website clicks, and more).

Main advantage: This is a simple tool for beginners, offering detailed audience demographics data and built-in advertising tools.

Disadvantage: The majority of data reports can span only a 3-month period. Most businesses will need more robust data reporting.

Pricing: Free

2. Keyhole – Social media data that helps you make great decisions

Keyhole is a live tracking tool for social media conversations. Their simply designed dashboards give you an overview of key data that helps you make meaningful decisions about your brand.

Keyhole features a full slate of analytics features and in-depth reporting. To start, their hashtag and keyword listening allows you to analyze industry conversations live and their account analysis tool lets you analyze and optimize your posting schedule and content. They also allow you to track and build automated reporting around individual campaigns, perform competitive analysis, and perform research on both live and historical data for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube.

Main advantage: Keyhole is a huge time-saver, and is primarily used for real-time social listening and gaining actionable insights through data.

Pricing: Keyhole ranges from $179/month for 3 hashtags and 3 account trackers to custom pricing available for Enterprise.

3. Hootsuite – All-In-One Tool for Social Content Management

Hootsuite is widely known as the most popular tool for managing social media content. It’s also a commonly used social listening tool. While it used to be the main tool on the market, it faces many more competitors now.

Hootsuite has a deep feature set beyond basic analytics, boasting social media scheduling tools, user / keyword / hashtag monitoring, content curation, and team management.

If you’re looking for Twitter analytics data, Hootsuite provides a dashboard overview of your basic metrics. You can also build unlimited reports, exportable in most common document formats. One of the most useful tools is the ability to track how fast your team members respond to brand mentions.

There are also a wide variety of add-ons from other data providers, some of which are free, but many of which come at additional monthly fees.

Main advantage: Consolidates data from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Large user base and support information.

Disadvantage: Hootsuite is much pricier than similar competitors.

Pricing: Hootsuite offers a 30-day free trial. $29/month for a single user, $129/month for 3 users with up to 20 profiles, and $599/month for up to 50 social profiles. Enterprise plans available.

4. Buffer – For easy, lightweight content scheduling

Buffer is primarily a social scheduling tool, but for those who are in need of a combined platform, it also provides Tweet-level analytics.

You can consider Buffer a lighter, less expensive version of Hootsuite, allowing users the ability to easily drop posts into a pre-planned content schedule.

From an analytics perspective, Buffer has announced Buffer Analyze, a more robust social media marketing tool, which promises the ability to track key metrics on the posts you’ve shared, including the ability to track what type of content has performed best.

Main advantage: Easy to use for scheduling content. The free tool is fairly robust.

Disadvantage: At present, data reporting is fairly limited, but Buffer Analyze may change that.

Pricing: Buffer Analyze is billed at $50 a month. Tweet-level analytics is included in both their Reply and Publish products. Reply will set your business back $225 a month, and Publish will set you back $99 a month.

5. Sprout Social – Another great all-in-one platform

Sprout Social is another full social media management solution. It offers tools to manage analytics tracking, engagement, publishing, listening, collaboration, and automation.

The Smart Inbox feature combines all messages from all major social profiles into a single stream.

Sprout Social’s data reporting tools are quite in depth. You can build several listening queries that monitor specific keywords or users in order to create a live feed of brand mentions, and analyze user sentiment or geolocations.

From an analytics standpoint, Sprout Social allows you to build custom reporting dashboards that include data around engagement, task performance, messages, top performing tweets, Twitter trends, Twitter comparisons, keyword reporting, and more. They allow these reports to be branded with your logo for easy sharing.

Main advantage: Robust reporting capabilities and built-in image editors and CRM tools.

Disadvantage: Reports do not incorporate unlimited historical data.

Pricing: Individual accounts are $99/month, including up to 10 social profiles. Corporate or Enterprise accounts start at $149 and $249/month respectively. They also offer a free 30-day trial.

6. Klear – Discover key influencers

Klear’s main functionality is to help your business identify key influencers on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, YouTube, and other blogs, and has over 5 years of historical data for your business to leverage.

Klear is simply designed, easy to use, and can provide helpful insights for small to medium businesses.

The analytics tool provides analytics for individual influencers in a beautiful dashboard, including engagement reports, audience demographics, popular content, and more.

Klear also offers monitoring tools that let you track KPIs, true reach, and estimated ROI.

Main advantage: Great for identifying influencers and their reach. Intuitive interface.

Disadvantage: Limited use, as it offers shallower data reporting for your business’s profiles.

Pricing: Klear offers a free version with limited features. A premium account with basic reporting is $249/month, with larger accounts and more robust features requiring a quote.

7. Mentionmapp – Discover content and discussions related to your business

Mentionmapp is a network visualization tool, offering interactive maps and webs to explore accounts and content topics related to your business

This tool visualizes user interactions through a connected cloud, identifying key relationships and highlighting major accounts that are driving certain conversation topics.

This also helps you identify related hashtags that you may not be participating in.

Recently, the tool has also added the ability to track real vs. fake users to be able to tie out fake engagements and users that are not relevant to your business.

Main advantage: Discover related content and related hashtags to your business through an intuitive visual cloud.

Disadvantage: The network/cloud visualization doesn’t provide for easy data reporting or monitoring.

Pricing: Free for up to 300 searches a month, or $27/month for unlimited searches.

8. Union Metrics – Detailed Twitter reporting

Union Metrics provides full analytics reporting that help you make meaningful decisions about your brand.

It features a full slate of analytics features. To start, their profile analysis tool lets you analyze and optimize your posting schedule and their keyword listening allows you to analyze industry conversations live. They also allow you to track and build automated reporting around individual campaigns, perform competitive analysis, and perform research on historical Twitter data.

Main advantage: Basic, affordable Twitter data analytics reporting solution.

Disadvantages: Unlike some other tools on this list, it only tracks Twitter profiles.

Pricing: Their pricing ranges from $49/month for one user and 3 profiles up to $199/month for unlimited users and 6 profiles.

9. Agorapulse – Incorporate data across all your social platforms

Similar to Hootsuite, Agorapulse is another all-in-one tool that allows you to manage your entire social media presence across all social profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.

Agorapulse offers content scheduling tools, including the ability to requeue or reschedule old posts. It also provides message feeds to help consolidate all incoming messages. From a listening perspective, Agorapulse features monitoring and chatter streams and allows you to track average response time on each platform.

This tool provides one-click Twitter analytics reporting that’s easily exportable to a PowerPoint presentation. You can also see the performance of key metrics like replies, impressions, and clicks over time. You can also track the number of interactions on specific hashtags to help you inform your content strategy.

Main advantage: Basic reporting across all social platforms.

Disadvantages: Limited ability to manage content on platforms within the app with occasional photo issues. Inability to combine reports for one brand across several platforms.

Pricing: Ranges from $99 a month for a two users to $499 for twenty users. Free trial available.

10. Followerwonk – Profile your followers and identify influencers

Followerwonk is one of the longest standing tools available to track Twitter followers. The tool includes strong visualizations that let you track who your followers are, where they are located, what they typically tweet about, and when they typically tweet.

The best feature of Followerwonk is the ability to track compare followers across multiple user accounts, allowing you to identify potential key followers that you’re missing out on.

Main advantage: Ability to build a story about your followers.

Disadvantages: The analytics are all follower/following-based, not providing additional data for your profile like engagement metrics.

Pricing: The free version offers a variety of tools to analyze an individual account. Their “Target” and “Multitask” levels for larger follower counts are available for $29 and $79/month respectively.

11. Quintly – Consolidated social media analytics reporting

Quintly provides in-depth analytics tracking for multiple social channels, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more.

It offers competitive benchmarking, allowing you to track your account performance versus that of your competitors. You can also track your key KPIs and centralize your online marketing success all in one place.

You can also automate your social media analytics reporting with the ability to create custom reports, including live reports with shareable links, customized to your brand.

Advantage: All-in-one social analytics solution with customizable, branded reports

Disadvantages: Pricier than similar analytics tools. Lacks deeper listening analytics of competitors.

Pricing: After the free 14-day trial, accounts start at $300 a month, based on the number of profiles.

12. Tweet Binder – Attractive Twitter analytics reports

Tweet Binder is a basic analytics reporting tool for Twitter and Instagram. The tool offers a variety of reports, including live reports, 30-day reports, or historical data reports.

The tool provides attractive infographics that are great for internal reporting, including statistics like estimated economic value, top contributors, potential reach, and highest potential influencers.

Advantage: Attractive reports for internal Twitter analytics reporting.

Disadvantages: Plans are quite expensive as they are offered in Euros. Data reporting is limited for Basic and Medium accounts.

Pricing: 79€/month for a basic plan with 7-day reports, up to 700€/month to unlock all features.

13. ContentStudio

Last but not least, ContentStudio is a content discovery and curation tool. Like other tools on our list, this is primarily a social listening tool, helping you monitor conversations and popular content across a variety of topics on all social platforms. There are also a variety of automation and publishing tools available.

With this tool, you can track what’s trending right now. As of 2018, the tool does not yet have a full analytics tool, but it promises to have one soon.

Advantage: Track conversations across all platforms.

Disadvantage: No established analytics reporting tool.

Pricing: ContentStudio starts at $49 a month for ten social accounts, and ranges up to $299 a month for 150 social accounts. 

Keyhole is a real-time brand and campaign monitoring tool that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free here.

The Top 16 Facebook Analytics Tools for Marketers

Top 16 Facebook analytics Tools

Updated on September 2019: this new Facebook Analytics tool list covers now 16 tools

A range of Facebook analytics tools competes for the same market, forcing marketers and community managers to decide between similar products.

It’s difficult to avoid this decision — essentially every brand and business has target markets active on social media’s most popular network. Thankfully, diverse costs and capabilities can make it easier to choose.

Looking at prices and differentiating features, learn about the top 20 Facebook analytics tools:

Jump Links to the 16 Facebook Analytics Tools:

1. Keyhole
2. Brand24
3. Brandwatch
4. Buffer
5. Mention
6. Cyfe
7. Facebook Insights
8. Oktopost
9. Quintly
10. Rival IQ
11. SharedCount
12. Social Bakers
13. Sotrender
14. Sprout Social
15. Sumall
16. Unmetric

1. Keyhole

Keyhole_Dashboard_Instagram_August2019
Sentiment-analysis-audemars-piguet-aug2019
Optimal-post-time-audemars-piguet
optimal-hashtag-audemars-piguet

Use Keyhole to get data and optimization strategies for any public Facebook page, whether it belongs to you or a competitor. Inputting the page’s name will reveal metrics surrounding fan growth, engagement by post type and best times to post based on engagement. A unique feature, the tool also calculates the ideal length of your updates by character count.

To better understand your own page or the competition’s strategies, you can export these data points — and more — in PDFs and Excel spreadsheets.

Give Facebook account tracking with Keyhole a shot here

Price: Starts at $179 USD per month

2. Brand24

Brand24-screenshot-sept2019

Try Brand24 to track metrics surrounding conversations across Facebook. It gives a stream of your company’s mentions, but the tool’s analytical value lies in the measurement of these mentions. For example, it quantifies sentiment and the influence of individual users. It also has a discussion volume chart, illustrating spikes and drops in mentions. This helps you visualize the popularity of events and social campaigns.

Price: $49 – $399 USD per month

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch_screenshot_july2019

Use Brandwatch to analyze a page’s fan base. Able to track data pertaining to any public page, the tool offers audience analytics such as gender, location, profession and interests. Along with mention volume and sentiment, the tool monitors what audience members are sharing to uncover popular topics. You can use this information to inform your Facebook content strategy, possibly giving you more ideas to post about.

Price: Contact Brandwatch to discuss a unique plan

4. Buffer

buffer-screenshot-sept2019

Try out Buffer if you need a scheduling tool with complementary analytics. It informs your Facebook strategy by offering basic post metrics, such as engagement, for updates you make through the tool. Based on this data, Buffer identifies your top post each day. To replicate its success, you can model future updates on its content type and posting time.

Price: From $50 USD per month

5. Mention

Mention_screenshot_july2019

Sign up for Mention to access its library of historical data, which updates every minute. In a variety of charts and graphs, it illustrates page analytics such as sentiment, engagement and demographic information — ranging from age to ethnicity. Like some other tools on this list, you can access data for any public page.

Price: Free – $600+ USD per month

6. Cyfe

cyfe-screenshot-august2019

Consider Cyfe if you want a customizable analytics dashboard. Along with finance and general web metrics, you can add and remove more than 50 Facebook widgets from your dashboard. These widgets track page metrics, post stats and demographic data. For example, you can see how your fan base has grown and engaged with you, as well as information such as their interests.

Price: Free – $89+ USD per month

7. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights - Top 20 Facebook Analytics Tools

Stick with Facebook Insights if you’re uncomfortable using or paying for a third-party tool. Available for each page you manage, it has basic — yet essential — metrics such as page likes and actions. Differentiating between paid and organic, you can get standard post data — reach, impressions and engagement. It also offers fan demographic information, including gender, location and language. Due to its range of metrics, some tools on this list integrate with Facebook Insights instead of offering unique data points.

Price: Free

8. Oktopost

Oktopost_screenshot_july2019

Quantify the financial impact of your social media strategies using Oktopost. The tool tracks conversions while identifying channels and messages that drive financial actions on your website. For example, it allows you to confidently say “this new customer came from our latest Facebook post.” Oktopost also uses engagement data to pinpoint the best posting times, allowing you to publish through its dashboard.

Price: Contact Oktopost for custom pricing

9. quintly

Quintly_screenshot_july2019

Try out quintly to measure your pages against competitors. You can access Facebook Insights through the tool, which will allow you to start comparing and contrasting pages. It visualizes stats — such as engagement — from these accounts in single graphs. These sorts of features make quintly a go-to tool for competitive goal setting.

Price: Starts at $300 USD per month

10. Rival IQ

RivalIQ_screenshot_july2019

Use Rival IQ — another competitive benchmarking tool for Facebook — to track opposing brands and measure your performance against theirs. Prioritizing growth, the tool records how audiences change on weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual bases. By giving you access to historical data, you can correlate audience size fluctuations to major events and business cycles. This pinpoints when rival are expanding their fan bases.

Price: $199 – $499 USD per month

11. SharedCount

sharedcount-screenshot-sept2019

Take SharedCount’s name literally. Answering more than a billion requests per month, the website tracks the social like, share and comment counts of content pieces. To see these stats, simply paste a URL into the search bar.

Price: $40 – $640 USD per month

12. Socialbakers

SocialBakers_screenshot_july2019

Try Socialbakers if you need a comprehensive dataset above all else. The features include custom benchmarking and competitive analysis, allowing you to create groups to track your Facebook performance against. The tool also differentiates between paid and non-paid content when measuring post performance. And of interest to companies with a worldwide presence, Socialbakers can segment data by individual brand and country.

Price: from $200 USD per month

13. Sotrender

Sotrender-screenshot-sept2019

Collect metrics from any public page in a single dashboard with Sotrender, allowing you to measure your performance and research competitors. On top of audience demographic information, the tool offers data such as post reach and impressions. You can see how these metrics vary between update types, including ones that have photos, videos and just text. Using the numbers it tracks, Sotrender makes suggestions about when to post and which kinds of media to use.

Price: $50 – $390 USD per month

14. Sprout Social

SproutSocial_screenshot_july2019

Choose Sprout Social to monitor the numbers behind different Facebook pages in one dashboard. As well as an inbox that brings messages from all pages into a filterable stream, you can access data visualizations for post metrics such as impressions and engagements. The platform also tracks page data, including fan growth. You can export these analytics to PDFs and CSVs.

Price: Custom pricing for Analytics Suite

15. SumAll

sumall-screenshot-sept2019

Connect unlimited Facebook accounts to SumAll. This feature, along with reports to which you can add your logo, make it an ideal analytics tool for social marketing agencies. SumAll focuses on goal setting and completion, charting your progress with standard growth and engagement metrics. You can set the tool to send emails summarizing this data, helping you stay on top of different accounts you handle.

Price: Free

16. Unmetric

Unmetric_screenshot_aug2019

Use Unmetric to guide your growth strategy through its reporting and historical analysis features. Containing Facebook Insights data, it emails you Excel and PowerPoint reports depending on the frequency you set. The metrics can be up to four years old, helping you find out how well past strategies worked for you and your competitors. Unmetric also separates paid from organic numbers when analyzing posts for standard metrics such as engagement.

Price: Custom pricing

The Final Verdict About these Facebook Analytics Tools

Some platforms should appeal to you, but the choice ultimately depends on:

  • Getting features that help grow your Facebook footprint
  • Measuring the metrics you value
  • Staying within your budget
  • Receiving a positive user experience

Use this list of 16 Facebook analytics tools as your guide to, at the very least, simplify the research and decision processes.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Get started for free

Top 15 Hashtag Analytics Tools

In a world with an overflow of information, setting up a social media campaign can be just the beginning of a complex process which consists of constant monitoring and evaluation of the audience’s needs and preferences and adjusting your efforts according to the gained insights.

Sounds challenging, doesn’t it?

Well, this process is made extremely easy with the right tools.

And luckily for you, there are a bunch of tools on the market created to make things a whole lot easier for you.

However, we will talk about the tools that can make your social media campaigns more effective a bit later in this article.

First, let’s cover the very reason these tools exist in the first place:

Jump Links to the 15 Hashtag Analytics Tools:

1. Keyhole
2. Hashtagify
3. Agorapulse
4. Mention
5. Brand24
6. Union Metrics
7. Twitter Binder
8. Sprout Social
9. Talkwalker
10. Display Purposes
11. RiteTag
12. Twubs
13. Socialert
14. Social Studio
15. BrandMentions

Hashtags and Their Significance

You’ve heard about hashtags, right? Of course, you have.

In fact, we bet that you’ve not only heard about them, but you use them quite often as well.

But, whether you use them or not is not even our question: in this post, we will not talk about the “if” – we will talk about the “how.”

By now, you might wonder what can be so complicated about #HowToUseHashtags that we have decided to dedicate a whole article to the topic.

Believe us, you are in for a surprise.

Hashtags are essential for creating a successful marketing campaign, as they label the content and are used to increase brand recognition.

They empower social media users to efficiently structure data, filter out all the irrelevant information and get exposed only to the content they are interested in, which consequently means that companies can make sure that they are reaching their target audience, and not wasting their efforts.

Apart from helping you get discovered, dedicated hashtags can also give you a real-time overview of the user-generated content as it is shared on social media.

Using hashtags is a win-win situation for both companies and the audience.

The problem is that not all companies and social media users fully leverage the power of hashtags. Statistical data shows more than a third of the companies that use social media as a part of their marketing strategy do not, in fact, track the effects of their activities.

This puts them in an unfavorable position since they are not taking advantage of the opportunity to optimize their campaigns to get better results.

However, it is important to note that these companies do not track the effects of their marketing efforts not because they do not want to, but because they are either not aware that they can, or they do not know how to do it.

If your case is similar to the ones we mentioned – do not despair; all you need to start is a detailed, comprehensive overview of the available tools and the way you can use them.

Which is where we come into play.

The Need for Hashtag Analytics Tools

Occasionally, a new trend emerges in the market and creates both opportunities and issues. As a result, a need for products that will enable users to use the opportunities and give them solutions for the problems they face arises as well.

The good news is that along with the demand for solutions, the supply increases as well.

The bad news is that, in situations when one is faced with endless options, making the right choice is much harder.

Knowing how confusing it must be when every emerging tool promises you stellar results, and not many of them deliver on their promises, we decided to do the hardest part of the job for you: list the most widely used legitimate hashtag tools and break down their features as well as the results you can expect.

What Can Hashtag Analytics Tools Do For You?

Using hashtag analytics software, you can analyze the metrics for the hashtags you use, and if and how the customers react to them. Monitoring your results in real-time allows you to discover the best practices in your industry and to tweak the content for it to appeal more to your target audience, which of course, translates to better results.

Basically, the need for using hashtag analytics comes down to the following several points:

  • You can discover current trends in your industry
  • You can track your hashtag supported marketing campaigns and analyze the audience’s engagement
  • You can track the positive and negative mentions containing your hashtags (sentiment analysis), and react accordingly
  • You gain insight into the current brand awareness levels
  • You can identify influencers relevant to your business as your potential brand ambassadors

Although most of the tools currently available will give you these basic insights, not every tool will be suitable for your individual case.

Let’s take a brief look at the differences.

Top Hashtag Tracking Tools

Out of the many tools available on the market, we picked the 15 hashtag analytics tools that have the best track record so far.

Let’s dig into the details!

1. Keyhole

Screenshot_keyhole_new_design_20190709

Keyhole is the front-runner among social media analytics tools for a reason: it provides in-depth data analysis in an easy to understand manner.

It is an all-in-one solution that:

  • Tracks of your campaigns’ reach and impact in real-time
  • Monitors the brands in your industry and your top competitors
  • Notifies you of both the positive and the negative mentions of your brand
  • Gives you valuable insights on your events
  • Provides you with tools that you can use to keep up with trends, research your industry and find out your customers’ needs

All of the insights above, no matter how advanced, are presented in simple reports that everyone can understand, regardless of their previous experience, which makes them practical and actionable.

But, although Keyhole offers various benefits, the best thing of all is that the tool does not only helps you track your current results but gives you recommendations on how you can optimize your posts and improve your results.

Pricing starts at $179/month

2. Hashtagify

Hashtagify_screenshot_aug2019

Just like Display Purposes and RiteTag, Hashtagify allows you to quickly find relevant hashtags connected to a particular keyword you enter. You can check the popularity of each hashtag of the results, displayed in a mini report. It’s also possible to save your searches if you login. Of course these basic features are offered for free, while the pro version offers a more in-depth hashtag analysis.

Pricing: Freemium

3. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse_screenshot_july2019

AgoraPulse is primarily a platform that simplifies the management of your social media presence, and secondarily a way to track your performance. The tool shows you all conversations connected to your pages on different social media platforms in a single dashboard, which makes following and appropriately reacting to all comments and mentions of your brand a breeze. With AgoraPulse you can also track the number of times your content has been shared, its reach, as well as influencers who could potentially be beneficial to your brand.

Pricing starts at $39/month

4. Mention

Mention_screenshot_july2019

Mention is a platform that empowers businesses to monitor their performance and the trends in their industry. The platform covers information available in over 40 different languages and exports the gathered data in segmented and understandable reports.

So, Mention is not only a tool that analyses social mentions across various platforms, but it is an analytics tool that allows users to track their activities, the results from those activities, and discover influencers who can help their brands reach a wider audience.

Pricing starts at $29/month

5. Brand24

Brand24_screenshot_july2019

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that tracks and analyses the mentions of your dedicated hashtags across various forums, websites, blogs, social media platforms et cetera. The data is gathered and presented in a comprehensible chart, that gives you a glimpse not only of the performance of your hashtags, but of the influencers that have been talking about your brand as well.

Pricing starts at $49/month

6. Union Metrics (Previously TweetReach)

Union Metrics is an easy to use tool that gives you an insight into the exposure and impact of your tweets, along with the discussions your brand is a part of. Its simple interface and affordability makes it suitable not only for businesses, but for individuals who want to get a glimpse of their position in Twitter’s world as well.

Pricing starts at $49/month

7. Twitter Binder

Twitterbinder_screenshot_aug2019

TweetBinder is a tool for everyone who wants to analyze the hashtags they use in their Twitter and Instagram campaigns, to research the users involved in the discussions connected to those hashtags and see their reach and overall influence. TweetBinder groups similar conversations and allows you to filter the results to gain a better perspective of the current situation.

Pricing starts at $79/month

8. Sprout Social

SproutSocial_screenshot_july2019

Sprout Social is a social listening platform that promises to improve communication between businesses and their customers by offering solutions related to:

  • Social media management
  • Social media marketing
  • Social media analytics
  • Social customer service

Pricing starts at $99/month

9. Talkwalker

Talkwalker_screenshot_aug2019

Talkwalker is a marketing tool that allows users to analyze their performance on various social media sites in real time, follow the trends in the industry, and later optimize their performance according to this information. The tool uses sources in 185 languages and is equipped with an automatic translation which makes it easy to follow data coming from different parts of the world. Another useful feature is the text and image recognition which allows users to get insights based on the position of their logo on social media.

Pricing starts at $500/month

10. Display Purposes

Display Purposes_screenshot_aug2019

If you are looking for a tool that can analyze your campaigns and produce extensive reports on the impact of your hashtags, Display Purposes is not for you (nor is any other free tool). However, if you wish to find out the relevant hashtags for your photos that can bring you greater reach, then look no more. Incredibly simple to use, Display Purposes will show you the best hashtags for your needs weighted against various factors such as location, language etc. Also, junk and generic hashtags are filtered out, which leaves you with only those that give your photos an actual chance to be seen.

Pricing: Free

11. RiteTag

Ritetag_screenshot_aug2019

RiteTag is a hashtag monitoring tool that allows users to check which hashtags they should use if they are to make their content as discoverable as possible. It shows the trending hashtags, popular accounts that use them, and evaluates the hashtags you use rating them as great, good, unused or overused. It is a simple and self-explanatory tool that anyone can use. The only problem is that just like other free tools, it is mainly focused on showing the frequency of usage of a particular hashtag, than digging into actual analytics.

Pricing: Freemium

12. Twubs

Twubs_screenshot_aug2019

Twubs is a tool that Twitter enthusiasts find particularly useful, as it is both a hashtag directory that aggregates all keywords related to a particular topic, as well as an engagement tracking tool. Twubs not only enables you to follow and analyze the conversations related to your brand, but it also allows you to register your own hashtag and create a landing page related to it, which you can use to host chat sessions and to display discussions from the Twitter chat.

Pricing: Freemium

13. Socialert

Socialert_screenshot_aug2019

Socialert is yet another tool that allows you to monitor your hashtags, their impact across different social media platforms and find active users that you can use to spread the word about your brand. All of this information can help you find out the preferences of the public, and create more engaging posts.

Pricing starts at $9.95/month

14. Social Studio

Social Studio is one of the products of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that enables businesses to closely follow the needs and reactions of their customers, to optimize their offerings, and increase their ROI. Apart from a way to communicate with the audience, Social Studio is also a collaboration software that lets businesses organize their teams and content on various platforms.

Pricing: Tailored according to the features the business needs.

15. BrandMentions

Brandmentions_screenshot_july2019

BrandMentions is another Social Media Analytics tool which can do brand monitoring, reputation management, business intelligence to competitor spying. This tool provides you with relevant information about the metrics of your brand awareness campaigns.

Pricing starts at $49 and goes up to $299 USD per month for each user

Final Notes

If you read the list and all the descriptions of the tools we covered, then you probably noticed that most of them offer similar features. The difference is the details they provide and accordingly – their price.

But, which one should you choose?

If you are an individual that wants to increase his or her reach, then we suggest you start with the free tools that mainly show you a way to get on the social media “map”.

If you are a business, on the other hand, a free, basic tool won’t do – if you want to improve your performance, optimize your offerings and create better communication with your customers, you simply have to pay for a tool that offers more features and provides more detailed reports. Believe us, the cost will be inconsiderable when you compare it to the value the gathered insights bring to your business.

However, note that every business is different, so ultimately, no list or article could tell you with complete certainty which tool will fit your needs best – if you want to find The One for you, the best you could do is try out a couple of tools and see for yourself which one you are the most comfortable with.

In fact, most of the tools available on the market are aware of this fact, which is why they offer free trials.

So, go ahead and test the waters of a couple of these tools, after which you can decide if you want to stay their customer, or you’d rather find another place to “bathe in”.

Keyhole is a real-time brand and campaign monitoring tool that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free here.

The Top 15 Instagram Analytics Tools [+ Metrics that Matter]

Instagram is a huge platform so you definitely need to know how best to engage your target customers on it. And Instagram analytics tools are your best bet when it comes to doing just that.

But there’s a plethora of these tools out there, which becomes a huge problem for many social media marketers — as picking the best Instagram analytics software can be difficult.

Here’s a list that will help you out — 15 Instagram analytics tools and their different features, followed by metrics that may influence your decision: 

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. AgoraPulse
3. Brandwatch
4. Hootsuite
5. Iconosquare
6. Instagram Insights
7. Minter.io
8. Quintly
9. Rival IQ
10. Social Bakers
11. Sproutsocial
12. Squarelovin
13. Synthesio
14. Unmetric
15. Union Metric

1. Keyhole

Keyhole helps you track relevant accounts and generates a visually rich report that shows you how to optimize your instagram marketing for better results.

For instance, it can show you when your users are most active so you can improve your efforts for increased engagement.

Neil Patel describes the tool this way: “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.” There are other great features it possesses as well.

It helps you monitor sentiments around your brand and oversee your overall brand health. Plus, you can also track web mentions.

Even more, it lets you track the influencers sharing Instagram posts with certain keywords or hashtags, the sentiments around those posts, the impressions and reach they generate, and even other keywords and hashtags users use alongside your searched terms.

This way, you can spot out the best influencers for your brand and see their engagement rates, reach, etc.

Keyhole_Dashboard_Instagram_August2019

For example, here is the Instagram dashboard generated from Keyhole that the watch brand Audemars Piguet could be tracking.

Price: Starts at $179 USD per month — custom pricing.

2. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse isn’t just a social media management app, it also shows you Instagram metrics critical for results on the platform.

This tool shows your Instagram marketing results instantly and lets you download it as a report to share with your clients, bosses or team.

Agorapulse_screenshot_july2019

It also helps you measure engagement on your account, showing you changes in the  percentage of specific metrics during a particular time period.

Price: $89 — $459 USD per month

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch provides you with data on conversations about your brand, competitors and industry.

This tool searches the entire Internet for reviews, comments and articles around your business. It also helps you see, particularly on Instagram, how you stack up against your competitors in terms of the volume of mentions you’re getting compared to theirs.

Brandwatch_screenshot_july2019

With Brandwatch, you can receive email alerts about critical Instagram conversations so you can quickly spring into action when needed.

Price: Contact Brandwatch to discuss a unique plan.

4. Hootsuite

Besides helping you publish Instagram content directly, Hootsuite also let’s you see critical analytics about your market on Instagram.

Hootsuite_screenshot_july2019

Like similar tools, it helps you keep track of your customers, competitor and brand performance on Instagram. You get to see visual reports of what’s working for your business on Instagram and what’s not.

Price: $29 USD per month — custom pricing.

5. Iconosquare

This tool shows you your community growth on Instagram over specific time periods — how far you’ve grown from period A to period B.

Iconosquare_screenshot_july2019


Iconosquare shows you where your Instagram users come from and the languages they use. It also reveals the number of impressions and reach you get from your Instagram posts and stories. Pretty much like most of the other tools, it tells you what works and what doesn’t for your Instagram audience.

Price: $29 per month — custom pricing.

6. Instagram Insights

Like most other social networks, Instagram has provided its own analytics feature.

It tells you in one glance how your stories and pictures perform with your audience and that lets you know what works best on the platform.

Instagram analytics shows you data in three sections: activity, content and audience — telling you the total number of engagements your account has over a specific time period, the posts that performed best and the audience data respectively.

All you need to get access to these analytics is to convert your Instagram account to a business profile.
For Influencers, there is also a new Instagram Creator Account that you should check.

Price: Free.

7. Minter.io

As shown in the image below, Minter.io provides you with Instagram metrics like most of the other tools mentioned in this list.

Minter_screenshot_aug2019

The tool gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your hashtags and keywords are faring on Instagram, the best performing content types, the most engaging photo filters and even the best times to post.

You also get to track how much Instagram traffic is sent to your website and the engagement levels your stories get. You can also export your data in a visually appealing format that allows you to easily keep other stakeholders informed about your Instagram marketing performance.

Price: $99 to $399 USD per year per account

8. Quintly

Quintly offers you an Instagram analytics feature that helps you measure the follower growth of your Instagram account and that of your competitors. This indicates how many unique consumers are finding your brand on the platform, compared to your competitors.

Quintly_screenshot_july2019

The software also provides an Instagram content analysis feature, where you can see which content types perform best so you can always replicate success.

Price: from 300 USD per month.

9. Rival IQ

With Rival IQ, you can run your Instagram competitive analysis in minutes.

You’ll see the speed at which your competitors are gaining followers, how often they post, what their engagement rates look like, and their most engaging Instagram content.

RivalIQ_screenshot_july2019

The tool also alerts you when a main competitor starts spending ad money on a post. Brands mostly boost posts that are already gaining success organically so this feature tells you what content performs great for your fellow industry players.

Price: $199 — $499 USD per month.

10. Socialbakers

Socialbakers helps you monitor and listen to conversations and topics your audience care about. This lets you know which content to create and how best to engage your audience and spike the right actions from them.

SocialBakers_screenshot_july2019

Like many other Instagram analytics tools mentioned here, this tool also helps you identify positive or negative sentiments around the posts on your searched keywords, hashtags or accounts. You can categorize posts by sentiments as well so you always understand where to look and respond to first.

Price: Starts at $200 per month – custom pricing.

11. Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides an Instagram analytics tool that gives you quality insights about your market and audience.

SproutSocial_screenshot_july2019

This tool lets you compare follower and engagement stats between brands on Instagram.

You get unlimited reports and data about specific posts, hashtags, keywords, audience and competitors.

With all this information, you can better create and execute Instagram marketing strategies that really move the needle for your business.

Price: $99 — $249 USD per month. Listening Suite as an Add-on.

12. Squarelovin

Squarelovin is another great Instagram analytics software.

Squarelovin_screenshot_aug2019

The tool lets you track and compare engagement rates, follower numbers and content performance. It also lets you see what times your users respond to images the most with likes and comments.

Price: Free.

13. Synthesio

This tool provides you with social listening and audience insights.

Synthesio_screenshot_aug2019

Synthesio has a robust metadata about the content, author, and tone of mentions in its social listening platform – and can easily be filtered. This means it provides an intelligent platform that analyzes conversations and figures out the sentiments around them.

Price: Contact Synthesio to discuss a unique plan.

14. Unmetric

Much like all the Instagram analytics tools featured in this piece, Unmetric provides you with critical data about your Instagram market.

Unmetric_screenshot_aug2019

It shows you which content performs best in your space, discovers branded content almost as soon as they hit Instagram and helps you benchmark all your data against that of your competitors so you can measure your efforts on Instagram.

Price: Free — $1000 USD per month.

15. Union Metrics

Union Metrics provides you with real-time insights from major social networks including Instagram.

Union Metrics instagram analytics

This tool provides similar analytics like most other Instagram analytics tools — showing you impressions, reach, best performing content, new ideas for content and more.

Price: $49 — $199 USD per month.

Important Instagram Metrics to Measure

Besides pricing and features, you want to ensure the Instagram analytics tool you’re buying or at least trying out measures the metrics you want to measure.

Related Topic: Reach vs Impressions: What’s the difference and why is it important?

Here are basic explanations of some important metrics to measure:

A. Profile Analytics

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Follower Growth: The increase in an account’s follower number after deducting unfollower numbers.

Engagement Rate: The total amount of likes, comments and reshares that posts receive, divided by the total number of posts. This rate is restricted to given time periods.

Optimal Post Time: The best time to post depending on which times the highest engagements happened in the past.

Optimal post time Instagram analytics

Optimal Post Filters: The ideal filters to use, typically based on which ones generated the highest engagement rate.

Optimal Hashtags: The best hashtags to use depending on which ones got the highest engagement rates before.

Optimal hashtag instagram analytics

B. Audience Analytics

Sentiment analysis Instagram Analytics

Top Followers: An account’s most followed and engaging followers.

Follower Age: The age ranges an account’s followers fall into.

Follower Gender: The gender ratio an account’s followers make up.

Follower Interests: The interests — ranging from sports to business — an account’s followers have.Follower Location: The geographic locations an account’s followers have listed in their profiles. Depending on the tool, tracked locations can range from country to city-level.

C. Hashtag and Keyword Analytics

Keyhole_Dashboard_Instagram_August2019

Activity Volume: The number of posts, over a given time period, made with a tracked hashtag or keyword.

Impressions: The number of times a post is displayed to users. A user can see a post more than once, meaning he or she can be responsible for many impressions.

Reach: The number of unique people who received impressions of a post.

Engagement: The number of likes and comments a post containing a tracked hashtag or keyword has earned.

Top Users: The Instagrammers who generate the highest reach, impression and engagement numbers per post using a tracked hashtag or keyword.

User Demographics: The gender, location, device use and other characteristics of users posting with a tracked hashtag or keyword.

Related Topic: 7 Important Instagram Analytics You Should Know.

The Final Verdict

It’s important that you pick the tool that not only suits your wallet but also tracks the main metrics you need. Try the tools out before deciding to pay for any of them and make a well-informed decision on the one that’s best for your Instagram marketing strategy.

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