Managing social media accounts without tracking analytics is like having a garden without weeding and tending the plants. It’s important for any size of company to measure their digital stats in a biweekly or monthly analytics dashboard so they can indicate what’s working and what isn’t—it may help you make more sales in the long run.

Here are our five favourite social analytics tools:

1. Hootsuite

Started in 2008 by Invoke Media Founder Ryan Holmes, Hootsuite was produced and is run right here in Canada—Vancouver to be exact. Holmes realized his company needed a tool to help auto-schedule posts and thus created the easy, convenient (and free) Hootsuite. If you go a step further and purchase an account, you can measure analytics using free real-time insights for your feeds, including what content resonates most and what brands are driving conversation. Expect this platform to keep growing—recently, CEO Ryan Holmes secured $60 million in new funding as the social marketing platform inches closer to an initial public offering.

Measure: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, Trendspottr, Mixi.

2. Sprout Social

In 2009, Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard was working at an enterprise software company, looking for tools to help connect social media to customers. The idea evolved to become Sprout Social in 2010—it became one of ten Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers and was added by Twitter to its list of certified products making it the sixth product to be certified for engagement analytics. Generate customized reports for individual platforms and export them as a PDF so the reports are easy to keep on hand—plus the reports are unlimited!

Measure: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Zendesk, UserVoice.

3. Hubspot

Founded in 2006 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),  Hubspot offers a social inbox that plugs into your contacts database so you can prioritize your engagement and focus on connections that count. This is a really great tool if you’re focused on engagement or making deeper connection. Another great feature is the content calendar that allows you to easily see what’s coming up in your social campaign schedule.

Measure: Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook.

4. Heartbeat

With Heartbeat, you can access 220+ billion conversations, 186 languages and 189 countries. A part of Sysomos, Heartbeat was founded by Dr. Nilesh Bansal and Dr. Nick Joudas—a spinoff of the University of Toronto research project BlogScope. This real-time social media monitoring platform collects all relevant online conversations so you can track and measure campaigns, brands and products, and easily identify and build relationships with key influencers. Get accurate interpretation of social media conversations from a 4-step spam-filtering process, keeping out the “noise.” This is best for a bigger company.

Measure: YouTube, Twitter, G+, Facebook.

5. Spredfast

Spredfast emphasizes listening and analytics solutions to help your business make better designs with your campaign engagement. Merging with Mass Relevance in 2014, it’s one of the biggest social media platforms, working with clients like Pepsi, Target and American Express. You can also integrate it with your existing applications, including Omniture, Google Analytics and Brandwatch. By understanding how your audience communicates better you can improve your social impact and report higher values to your management.

Measure: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn.

What social program do you use? Tweet us at @52pickupinc with the hashtag #MetricMaestros.

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