An ultimate guide to social media analytics: 2025 edition

Social media analytics are merely numbers for an average social media user who is only interested in watching funny TikToks, but it’s bread-and-butter for most influencers and creators out there.

Social media is undeniably a powerful, attention-grabbing force that hooks most people for a good few minutes, if not hours, every day. No wonder social media unleashes business opportunities and job vacancies for many.

The current state of social media marketing wouldn’t be the same if social media metrics didn’t exist. Imagine, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook content without several likes, comments, shares, etc.

Agree or not, social media analytics makes this social media landscape what it is. There is much to understand about social media analytics, engagement metrics, and growth strategies.

Let’s explore this topic.

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics are statistics that reveal social media content performance on a specific network. Depending on the social media platform, this data is reported through an insights dashboard section called Analytics or Insights.

However, a lot of users, such as influencers, creators, and brands prefer third-party social media analytics tools for social media management, scheduling, and analytics. 

As a result, they get their hands on their social media statistics or content performance over the last few days, weeks, or months without any hassle.

Social media analytics aims to understand what type of content is working and which posts aren’t doing well.

It allows one to dive deep into content performance and navigate the social media content strategy accordingly. Engagement metrics, such as comments, likes, reshares, DMs, new followers, account reach, clicks, and impressions, make social media content reporting easier than ever.

Since social media numbers unveil how their social media content is performing and what strategies are working well, creators can predict the social media channel’s trajectory over the next few months.

Almost every major social media platform has an analytics feature that gives insights into social media performance and engagement. However, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest push users to switch to a professional or business account to get access to the analytics, which is understandable.

Example: Instagram has an Insights section that allows Instagrammers to access their Instagram statistics, such as impressions, reach, followers gained, CTR, and more. However, the Instagram user must switch to a professional account to access creator tools, such as Insights.

Why social media analytics are essential?

There are numerous reasons why social media analytics are necessary for running a smooth, successful social media content marketing campaign. Let’s briefly discuss the common reasons why social media analytics are crucial to any social media campaign:

1. Check-and-balance

Social media analytics allows you to keep a close eye on content performance, audience behaviors, and engagement metrics. Since these sections are packed with social media metrics, it is easier for social media managers to figure out content performance.

2. Strategic approach

Every social media manager has a unique social media strategy. Social media numbers can reveal whether or not the current strategic approach is right. Therefore, brands or influencers are keen to see all the metrics in green, meaning the numbers are in the upward direction.

3. Audience demographics

One of the important sections of social media analytics is the audience demographics. It refers to the details, such as age, gender, location, device, etc. It allows a social media user to understand who follows them on this social platform.

4. Winner content identification

Winner content is the content piece that outperforms the rest. Every social media post, whether text-based, video, or image, doesn’t perform equally. Therefore, analytics can help you identify the patterns that make some content perform better than others.

5. Performance reporting

The fundamental reason why social media analytics are so important is content performance monitoring and reporting. Undoubtedly, it would be impossible to continue publishing on social media without an analytics feature.

So, these points explain why social media analytics are vital for any social media campaign.

What are the challenges a user might face without social analytics?

It’s hard to imagine how someone would create, manage, and analyze social media content without diving deep into social media analytics. Most social media managers can identify top-performing social posts thanks to analytics tools providing in-depth social media reporting.

Brands, influencers, and social media managers would be in disarray if they lost access to their analytics. Here are the challenges every social media user would face without social media analytics:

1. Inability to identify industry trends and patterns

Identifying social media trends helps a creator or brand maintain audience interest. Without analytics, users might be unable to compare their social media content strategies to emerging industry patterns, such as trending hashtags, popular topics, or shifts in audience preferences.

It’s vital to calibrate your social media content with the industry trends and norms to stay relevant and popular. This lack of awareness can cause their content to appear outdated or irrelevant.

For instance, ContentStudio has a Discover feature that lets users find popular content across multiple niches. Without equipping yourself with such a tool, it’s highly unlikely to tap into the latest industry trends.

2. Difficulty measuring campaign performance

Social media analytics provide critical metrics to evaluate marketing campaigns’ performance. No access to analytics means putting out social media content blindfolded.

Without seeing all key social media metrics, users may not know which campaigns are delivering results and which are failing. As a result, the brand or creator has to face the consequences in the form of wasted resources and missed opportunities.

Threads is the X (Twitter) alternative launched by Instagram in 2023. It’s a new entrant to the social media platforms stage designed to post threaded posts to compete with X.

Threads didn’t have the Insights section for over a year, which made it difficult for users to analyze their Threads post performances. Instagram rolled out the Insights feature to Threads users in 2024, which massively improved the overall user experience.

3. Lack of insight into audience behavior

Audience behavior is a driving force that can skyrocket a social media campaign to new heights. The absence of social media analytics might drive users nuts when they struggle to understand their audience’s preferences, behaviors, or demographics.

Furthermore, lacking such essential insights makes it challenging to create content that resonates with followers. It also limits brands and creators’ ability to adapt strategies to cater to audience interests, potentially reducing engagement and growth opportunities.

One of the examples of a lack of insights is the Dailymotion Analytics – the user doesn’t get access to Analytics unless this person applies and gets approved as a Partner. On the contrary, YouTube provides access to Analytics without any such restriction.

4. Poor competitor evaluation

Every influencer, brand, and SAAS tool spies on its competitors. The reason is that competitors’ performance analysis is crucial to understanding industry standards and finding opportunities for improvement.

Often, analytics tools help brands or individuals identify their competitors, allowing users to learn more about their competitors. The lack of social media analytics may deprive many users of finding out about their competitors.

ContentStudio does have a competitor analysis feature that lets users discover and analyze their competitors on social media.

5. Reduced customer engagement

Social analytics help users understand what types of content drive audience interaction and engagement. Without such audience engagement insights, the users keep on publishing irrelevant or poorly timed content that fails to capture attention.

Over time, this can lead to lower engagement rates and weakened relationships with their followers. Therefore, social analytics can uncover integral engagement metrics that contribute to reshaping social content strategies for the better.

The above-mentioned screenshot is the statistics graph of a YouTube channel that stopped posting content and responding to the comments – eventually, it started to die off miserably.

6. Lower conversion rate

Conversion rate is simply the percentage of the customers converting compared to the total audience. When there is no social media analytics to look at, the brand or creator will continue to put out irrelevant or uninteresting content that won’t make any difference.

As a result, the conversion rate would continue to drop instead of rising. Therefore, choosing a social media management tool that offers comprehensive analytics for content performance analysis and audience behavioral understanding is necessary.

Replug is a great solution to keep track of your links’ clickability, conversion, click-through rate, and other link performance metrics.

How to use social media analytics to improve strategy

Social media analytics play a significant role in designing, executing, and analyzing social media marketing strategies. Let’s discuss the key steps of using these analytics to improve overall strategy:

#1: Choose a powerful social media analytics tool

First things first, get yourself equipped with a powerful analytics tool to have complete access to the social analytics data. There are several options on the market for choosing a social media analytics tool.

ContentStudio is a state-of-the-art social media management dashboard that helps brands, influencers, bloggers, and agencies create, manage, publish, schedule, and analyze social media content across all major social media platforms.

The best part about ContentStudio is that it has a comprehensive analytics section that helps users keep track of their social media content performance.

#2: Delegate the analytics reporting task

To make the most of your social media analytics, it’s necessary to capitalize on this valuable data. Delegate the analytics data to a team member who is good at data analysis and management.

Ask the team members to prepare a two-page report containing all the essential data in different diagrams and piecharts for everyone to understand.

Ensure the team prepares weekly, monthly, or quarterly social analytics reports for analysis. That will immensely contribute to improving your overall social media strategy.

ContentStudio allows users to add team members to their accounts so that you can delegate some social media tasks to them. 

#3: Handpick the top-performing topics to double-down

One of the best use cases of social media analytics is to select the top-performing social media posts and dissect them to understand why these social posts are doing well.

When you have figured out the reasons behind the success of a particular set of social media posts, you can double down on similar content to get more attention across all social platforms.

ContentStudio has an excellent social media analytics section that highlights the top-performing content and makes it easier for social media managers to dig deeper into successful social media content.

#4: Identify content gaps to expand within your niche

Finding the content gaps in your social media content marketing, especially if competitors haven’t covered them yet, means you hit the jackpot. Social analytics can be a useful tool for recognizing the potential topics that have been missing in your social media published content.

While you can use features like search, playlists, or tags on your social media platform to pinpoint the missing topics, don’t stop looking through your competitors’ content to see what they published and didn’t.

Make sure you find those content gaps in your social media content and keep on expanding within your niche to cover all the bases.

For instance, YouTube introduced a new AI-powered feature called “Inspiration.” It allows users to brainstorm ideas and get topic suggestions based on the top-performing content on the channel.

#5: Repackage low-performing social posts to repost

Since social media analytics can point out the successful content that is getting traction, it also helps you identify the social media pieces that haven’t done very well.

It provides you with the opportunity to revamp your social media content to make overall improvements in your social media strategy. One of the best ways to make such improvements is by repackaging the low-performing social media content either by repurposing or recreating it.

ContentStudio’s analytics section helps you identify top-performing content across all social media platforms. However, you can export the reports to go through the low-performing social posts for deep analysis.

These are some ways to capitalize on social media analytics to improve your social media marketing strategy.

Common challenges in social media analytics

Utilizing social media analytics isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There might be some hiccups along the way, especially if you haven’t done this before. Let’s crack open this part and try to comprehend what challenges some users might see when employing energies in social analytics:

Understanding the audience’s intent

Decoding audience intent is challenging due to the diversity of users and their behaviors on each social media platform. Social media posts that generate likes may not always convert to meaningful engagement or purchases.

Similarly, vanity metrics such as the subscriber count don’t always mean success. For instance, here’s the YouTube channel with over a thousand subscribers, but it has a low overall engagement on the channel:

Businesses, influencers, and experts often struggle distinguishing between passive interest and active buying signals. Without a clear intent, it gets hard to craft social media content that brings attention and engagement.

Therefore, determining the audience’s intent steers the social media strategy toward success. However, if the analytics tool doesn’t report on the respective metrics showcasing users’ intent, it gets even harder to succeed on social media.

Measuring social media campaigns’ ROI

One of the challenges of running social media campaigns is inaccurate measuring of ROI, as social media campaigns often generate intangible benefits like brand identity, awareness, and reputation.

Connecting social engagement metrics to business outcomes like sales or leads is the challenge. Brands and marketers can easily calculate their ROI by tracking conversion on their landing/sales pages, but social media analytics tools might not help in this regard.

For example, a YouTube creator may be able to get some clicks on the links in the YouTube video description, but it’ll be difficult to track which video converted the viewer into a buyer.

However, it will only happen if there is a unique link in every video’s description, which might not be possible to do.

Social media data accuracy

Social media analytics tools can’t usually differentiate between real users and fake accounts. Most social media platforms also provide inconsistent or incomplete data due to constant algorithm changes or data collection limitations.

Fake accounts, bot activities, or irrelevant metrics can distort analytics, making it harder to derive actionable insights. Social media data accuracy requires continuous monitoring and validation, which sometimes can be a headache.

Try fake followers checker tools, such as Modash or any other alternative to see the social media data accuracy.

Limited data accessibility

One of the challenges users face is limited data accessibility, as some social media platforms restrict access to detailed data due to privacy policies and API limitations.

The lack of granular insights hinders deeper analysis, especially for small businesses that can’t afford premium solutions. Therefore, it leads to underreporting numbers or unavailability of some tracking features.

For instance, YouTube has started asking users for consent to allow third-party tools to use their content to train their AI models. Users can restrict access to their YouTube content, limiting the data accessibility for these tools.

Requires a third-party powerful analytics tool

Almost every social media platform offers analytics, but these native analytics tools often lack advanced features, pushing users to rely on third-party tools for comprehensive insights.

Undoubtedly, some social analytics tools can be expensive and come with a learning curve. Choosing the right tool that integrates well with business needs becomes a crucial yet challenging task.

ContentStudio comes to the rescue as it’s one of the best social media dashboard tools with advanced social media management features. It helps users create, manage, publish, schedule, and analyze social media content across all major social media platforms.

Top 5 tools for social media analytics in 2025

Let’s take a quick look at some of the social media analytics tools to try in 2025:

1. ContentStudio

ContentStudio is an all-in-one dashboard that simplifies social media management for agencies, brands, and marketers. It provides the tools you need to efficiently plan, create, schedule, and analyze social media posts across multiple social media channels.

The platform is more than just a scheduling tool—it helps you streamline your workflow, track performance, and maintain consistency in your campaigns. 

Whether you’re managing multiple accounts or focusing on a single brand, ContentStudio empowers you to save time and achieve better results by centralizing all your social media activities in one place.

Key features:

• Social media scheduling
• Social content calendar
• AI-writing assistant
• Social media analytics
• Content approval workflow
• Influencer discovery
• Team members’ management
• Social queues for reposting

2. Rival IQ

Rival IQ offers robust social analytics to help you outperform your competitors. Start with its free head-to-head report to benchmark your brand against competitors.

It specializes in competitor analysis on social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. It also analyzes the latest social media trends, generates social audit reports, and performs user social listening.

All these social media analysis features help users uncover valuable insights about their social media strategies and overcome challenges. It’s a perfect social media analytics tool for marketers and influencers looking to refine their social media approach and want to stay ahead in the fast-paced social media world.

3. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a powerful social media analysis tool that uses advanced AI technology to monitor online conversations about your brand, products, or competitors across social media and the web. This powerful tool lets users stop guessing about their audience’s preferences and start making data-driven decisions.

Brands, agencies, and influencers can track mentions in real time, ensuring you’re always the first to know when your brand is discussed. It dives deep into the essential social media insights and helps users understand the audience’s thoughts and preferences.

4. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a specialized tool for maximizing X’s (Twitter) presence and engagement. It’s designed to look through the Twitter bios to connect with influencers and individuals aligned with the user’s niche.

It offers a comprehensive social media analysis tool that assists users in identifying shared connections, evaluating competitor strategies, and refining the targeting. It is handy for brands and influencers who want to sort their follower base by location, bio, and following patterns for better understanding.

Furthermore, its data-driven approach enables users to deliver the content their audience craves, fostering stronger relationships and growing their influence on the platform.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is an advanced social media analytics tool that leverages AI to provide users comprehensive access to vital information such as brand mentions across various platforms, including social media, blogs, forums, and podcasts.

It’s a fully equipped social analytics tool to track hashtags, conversations, and trends to help measure the impact of social media campaigns in terms of reach and engagement. Moreover, it provides actionable insights that help brands and agencies refine their social media content strategies over time.

Start measuring your social media analytics now

The purpose of writing this piece is twofold: every brand or individual who actively uses social media should know how to capitalize on social media analytics for growth. Secondly, it’s essential to opt for the right analytics tool for accurate monitoring and tracking.

A powerful analytics tool that provides in-depth insights into competitor strategies, audience demographics, and content performance, allowing users to make informed decisions regarding social media.

ContentStudio is an all-in-one social media management dashboard that helps brands, agencies, influencers, and marketers plan, publish, schedule, and analyze social media content across different social platforms.

FAQs

How to do a social media analysis?

Every social media manager has a different plan of action, but the fundamental idea of social media analysis is pretty much the same. Here’s how it works: Choose a social media arsenal (for analysis, tracking, and management), create a marketing strategy, follow the newest social trends, spy on competitors, execute social campaigns, and analyze social content performance.

How do I set up social media analytics?

The easiest to set up social media analytics is to sign up for an advanced social media management tool like ContentStudio. The benefit of opting for ContentStudio is that it isn’t just a social media scheduling tool, but instead, it’s a complete social media management toolkit that offers several features including social analytics.

How do you activate Instagram analytics?

To get access to Instagram analytics, switch your personal Instagram account to a professional or business account. That’s the only way to activate or access Instagram analytics.

What are the four types of social media analytics?

The four different types, are descriptive analytics, diagnostic analysis, predictive analysis, and prescriptive analysis.