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Is social media marketing actually helping your business?
There are numerous ways to find out, and the plugins listed here can help.
Using the social media analytics plugins included below, you’ll discover how many people visit your website from social sites and how many clicks the share buttons on your site get.
Keep reading to find our top picks.
Best social media analytics plugins
You’ll love the plugins listed below if you want analytics on your website’s social media accounts.
Most of these plugins are free to use, while a couple of them have paid add-ons or subscription plans to access more advanced analytics. You may want to pick up a couple of these plugins for your site, so make sure to consider both the features and associated costs.
Here are my top picks for the best social media analytics plugins for WordPress.
1. Independent Analytics
Plugin Description
Independent Analytics isn’t the most obvious solution for social media analytics, but it can help round out your understanding of how social media is affecting your traffic.
The Independent Analytics plugin adds an analytics dashboard to your WP admin interface. From the dashboard, you can see all of your site’s views and visitors, plus there’s a Referrers page that shows you where all your traffic came from.
In the Referrers report, each traffic source includes a Referrer Type. For example, Google is labeled as a “Search” referrer while Twitter and Facebook are labeled as “Social” referrers. Scanning this report, you can quickly see how much of your site’s traffic is coming from social media networks. There are also filters that will let you narrow down your results to only social media sites in just a few clicks.
While Independent Analytics doesn’t include data on your social clicks and shares, it does show you how many visitors you get from each network. This feature alone could make it an excellent new addition to your site. If you want to get detailed insights on how many people clicked each link, you can set up campaign links, which are available in the Pro version.
2. GetSocial
Plugin Description
GetSocial is a social share button plugin, but it also includes analytics that is way more advanced than other plugins listed. While the share buttons are free, the analytics dashboard is only included with one of the paid plans, which start at $9/month. If you’re okay with paying for social media analytics, you won’t be disappointed.
The GetSocial platform includes robust analytics showing you your total visits, shares, referrals, and sharing rate. You can even see a breakdown of shares by visitor device and sharing source (copy & paste, mobile bar, inline bar). This makes it possible to review and compare the performance of your site’s various social promotion tools.
The analytics dashboard includes even more data for each page that gets shared. Check out their site with the link below if you want to see what other data is included in the reports.
3. Fuse Social Floating Sidebar
Plugin Description
If you don’t have social media share buttons on your site yet, this will be an awesome new plugin for you.
As the name suggests, Fuse Social Floating Sidebar adds a floating set of buttons to the side of the screen on all your pages. You can change the position and style of the buttons and select which networks you want to include. This plugin also includes a simple analytics dashboard in the Pro version.
The analytics can show you the click volume of each social network. This is displayed as a simple bar chart so that you can compare clicks between networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and LinkedIn.
If you need to add share buttons to your site and want simple analytics for button click data, this will be a good plugin to install.
4. MashShare
Plugin Description
MashShare is a feature-rich social share button plugin. It’s been around for years and has accumulated a lot of advanced functionality as well as many five-star reviews.
When it comes to analytics, MashShare has a unique approach. They offer a paid add-on that integrates with Google Analytics. Using this system, you can simply enable their add-on, and you’ll begin seeing button clicks show up in Google Analytics as events. If you want to get analytics without Google Analytics, then it may not be a good choice for your site.
Each Event Action is labeled by the network, so you can look up a page on your site and see its shares broken down by the social media network. If you use Google Analytics and would prefer to have your share button data included there, this will be a top choice for your site.
5. Sassy Social Share
Plugin Description
Sassy Social Share is another plugin for adding social promotion tools to your website. It’s compatible with more than 100+ social media sites, doesn’t require any API keys, is highly customizable, and includes both profile buttons and click-to-share buttons.
Like some of the other plugins listed here, Sassy Social Share includes analytics in one of its paid add-ons. It includes analytics via a Google Analytics integration that works with the Classic and Universal Tracking codes and is compatible with Google Tag Manager.
If you’ve switched to a Google Analytics alternative, like Independent Analytics, then these analytics won’t be a good solution for your site, but if you enjoy using GA, then this plugin will integrate well with your existing marketing toolset.
Which social analytics plugin is best?
I’ve got a few tips for you if you’re struggling to pick the best new plugin.
Independent Analytics is an awesome plugin to find out how many views and visitors you’re getting from social media sites. This will help you determine if your social media marketing is converting into real business value.
If you want detailed analytics for the performance of your share buttons and how often they get clicked, one of the paid plans offered by GetSocial will help you the most.
Thanks for browsing this collection of the best social media analytics WordPress plugins, and please share it with the buttons below if it helped you out today.
