Without analytics, SMM promotion turns into a "guess what will work" game, where every attempt is a financial risk. Fortunately, there are free tools that save your budget. In this article, we'll look at 5 free tools that allow you to analyze your SMM promotion, even if your budget is zero.
1. Built-in Social Media Analytics
Always use analytics. It is the most important tool that comes standard with all platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.- Audience demographics. The age, gender, location, and interests of your followers. This helps you create content that precisely meets their needs.
- Reach and impressions. How many unique users saw your content and how many times it was shown.
- Engagement. Likes, comments, saves, shares. This is a key metric that indicates how interesting your content is to the audience.
- Best time to post. The time of day and day of the week when your audience is most active. How to use: Regularly check the "Insights" or "Analytics" section and see which posts got the most engagement. If a product review video got a lot of saves, your audience finds it interesting. Make a few more videos like that.
2. Google Analytics
If you use social media to drive traffic to your website or online store, Google Analytics is an indispensable assistant. This service allows you to track a user's journey from a social media click to making a purchase. What you can learn:- Traffic sources. You'll see how many users came to your site from Instagram, Facebook, or other platforms. This helps you understand which platform brings the most traffic.
- User behavior. How much time they spent on the site, which pages they visited, and what they ultimately bought.
- Conversions. You can track how many purchases or leads were generated by users coming from social media. How to use: Install Google Analytics on your website. Use UTM tags in the links you post on social media.
3. Popsters
Popsters is a service for analyzing competitors' content. It allows you to analyze up to ten posts from any public account on various social media for free. It's a great way to "spy on" successful strategies. What you can learn:- Competitors' most popular posts. Which topics, formats, and types of content get the most engagement from their audience.
- Optimal posting time. When your competitors publish posts that get the most likes and comments.
- Audience engagement. How your competitors' engagement compares to yours. How to use: Enter a link to a competitor's account and select a time period. The service will provide a report that shows what "clicks" with their audience. Use this data for inspiration, but don't copy the content.
4. Free Audience Parsers
Parsers are programs that collect public data about social media users. Many have limited free functionality, which is enough for basic analysis. What you can learn:- Competitors' active audience. Who comments on and likes your competitors' posts. You can collect this audience and run targeted ads to them.
- Find opinion leaders. Find micro-bloggers with your target audience for cross-promotion or paid advertising. How to use: Find free parsers for the social network you need and try to gather a database of your competitors' followers or interest groups. This will help you set up more precise and effective ads.
