When it comes to trying to understand your social media audience, there are a multitude of tools out there.
Some are paid, but some are free or have free versions.
Because we know that running a business can be expensive, we’ve pulled together 10 free tools to help you understand your social media audience.
Facebook Audience Insights
As part of Facebook Ad Manager, you can find out a heap of information about not only your page likers but also people on Facebook in general.
From here, you can build your own custom audiences based on things like age, gender, location, interests, education level and relationship status.
You can choose to look at only people connected to pages you manage, or everyone on Facebook, narrowed down by your selected criteria.
Facebook Page Insights
If you’ve got a Facebook page, the Page insights section has a ton of info about your likers and followers.
There is so much to discover in here. Stats include follower and liker numbers, what reach your posts have had, how many page views you’ve had, and what actions have been taken on your page.
You can also get an overview of each post’s performance, what days and times your fans are online.
When looking at post performance, look at what’s had the most engagement, likes and comments, but also keep an eye on which posts caused people to unlike or unfollow your page. This can give you valuable insight into what people don’t want to see on your page.
Facebook Group Insights
A relatively new feature in Facebook-land, group insights were welcomed by group admins the world over.
Insights are split into Growth, Engagement and Member details.
Growth shows, unsurprisingly, how your group has grown. You can choose last 7, 28 or 60 days, or a custom period, but only backdated to when insights became available to your group.
Engagement shows number of posts, how many active members you have as well as popular days and times for engagement in the group.
Member details shows your top contributors, age and gender split as well as top countries and cities where your members are.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics gives you a decent set of data about, you guessed it, your Twitter audience.
You can gather data about your audience’s interests, gender, country, and more. You can also see data about your tweets, their impressions, and your top tweet.
It also shows how many people have visited your profile, how many times you’ve been mentioned and whether your followers have increased or decreased.
Stats are split by month so you can get a quick snapshot for each month if you’re in a rush to get some data out of Twitter to understand your social media audience.
LinkedIn Analytics
If you have a LinkedIn company page, you can use LinkedIn Analytics to find out more about your audience on this platform.
The data it shares about your followers includes their location, job title, how senior they are, what industry they are in, how big the company is and what their current employment status is.
You can use this data to find out who is engaging with your brand, and if they’re the kind of people that you want to attract.
Instagram Insights
If you’ve got a business Instagram account, the Instagram insights section gives you a wealth of information about the audiences for your account, posts and stories.
As with other platforms, you can find out what age bracket and gender your followers fall into, where they live (by country and city) and times and days when your audience is most active.
Also take a look at the Activity and Content sections to work out if your audience is engaging with your posts and stories, or if you need to change what you’re doing.
Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest Analytics offers insights to help you understand your social media audience on Pinterest.
Find out the size of your audience, where they live (split by region and country), what language they speak, their gender and interests.
You can also discover boards created by your followers with your pins and businesses that your followers engage with.
This can show you what their interests are and what they like to collect and pin on Pinterest.
Klout
While Klout has been fairly controversial, there are plenty of people who love it. By connecting as many social media profiles as possible, the tool builds a score for you to determine how influential you are in the world of social media.
It has been under fire for how it works out your score, as Barack Obama was once ranked with a lower Klout score than some bloggers.
You can check this one out and see what it thinks your Klout score is, and use this to inform what kind of content you’re posting and how frequently, but maybe don’t get too hung up on what your score is.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is great to show you what percentage of your website visitors and sales come from social platforms.
You can then see if there are any platforms that are doing really well in sending traffic to your website, who is buying the most, and which ones maybe aren’t worth all the effort you’re putting into them.
SocialRank
SocialRank helps you to understand your Instagram and Twitter audiences.
By connecting your profiles, SocialRank pulls through the profiles from your followers. You can then sort them by various filters, such as location, age, gender, company, number of followers, and even things like whether they use profanity, most engaged, and how valuable they are.
After this, you can export lists and use these to inform your future marketing campaigns. There are paid versions but there is also a free one, making this a social media tool to definitely test out.
Ultimately you want to work out who your social media audience is, what they want and what you can give them to make them stick around. Do you use any of these free tools to help you understand your social media audience? Let us know which ones you prefer in the comments below.
