Social Media Marketing helps you turn platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook into powerful income machines. Learn how to build a loyal following, create viral content, and promote products using advanced engagement and growth techniques. Whether you're a creator, coach, or affiliate marketer, discover proven strategies to drive targeted traffic, grow your brand, and convert followers into profits. Unlock simple, actionable social media marketing tactics for lasting success.
Instagram analytics tools can help you turn a mediocre Instagram strategy into a winning one.
Tracking your Instagram analytics is the only way to build an effective Instagram strategy. If you’re not tracking data, you’re just guessing about what works. You might luck out and have some success just based on your intuition — but without the numbers to back your work, you’ll never be able to test, refine or grow.
All good marketing decisions stem from good data — and there’s plenty of data available to tell you what’s working on Instagram (and what’s not) and inspire some ideas for new social media marketing strategies you might want to try.
Instagram has 1.39 billion users who spend an average of 11.7 hours using the app per month. Nearly two-thirds (62.3%) of them use the app to follow or research brands and products. But there’s an awful lot of content competing for their attention during that time.
So, where do you find the key Instagram metrics you need to refine your strategy? We’ve picked the best tools for effortless tracking in 2026.
Why you need Instagram analytics tools
Instagram analytics tools help you create performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss — to figure out what’s working and what’s not. They also provide the historical data you need to assess your Instagram marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.
Instagram analytics tools can help you answer questions like:
Is it worth it for my business to keep posting Reels?
What were our top Stories this year?
Should we post to our Instagram feed more often next month?
What kind of posts do my followers like to comment on?
… and many more. You can also figure out details like the best times to post on Instagram, specific to your industry.
According to Hootsuite research, the universal best times to post on Instagram are 3 PM to 9 PM on Mondays, 5 AM to 8 AM and 3 PM to 7 PM on Tuesdays, and 5 PM to 7 PM on Thursdays.
Time of day was localized across 118 countries where sample data came from, i.e. the graph is accurate across time zones.
9 best Instagram analytics tools for 2026
Analytics for Instagram go well beyond the data provided within the native Instagram analytics app. Here are our top picks for more robust Instagram analytics tools that provide the details and flexibility required for professional Instagram analysis.
Key benefits: Performance data from Instagram and all other major social networks in one place with easy-to-understand reports
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Solo social media marketers and marketing teams at larger organizations
Perch offers a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform and account individually — and it tracks all of the most important social media metrics.
With this wide array of available metrics to track, you’ll be able to see how your Instagram posts, Stories, Reels — and even ads — are performing at a glance.
Curious how your Instagram posts are really performing? Use this Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator to measure likes, comments, and shares and see how you stack up!
Best time to post recommendations
Ever spend a bunch of time writing and designing a social post only to have it fall completely flat? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But one of the most common reasons this happens is posting at the wrong time. A.k.a., posting when your target audiences are not online or not interested in engaging with you.
This is why our Best Time to Publish tool is one of the most popular features in Perch. It looks at your unique historical social media data and recommends the most optimal times to post based on three different goals:
Engagement
Impressions
Link clicks
Most social media analytics tools will only recommend posting times based on engagement metrics. Or they’ll use data from universal benchmarks instead of your unique performance history.
Other cool things you can do with Perch:
Customize report templates for only the data points and metrics you care about
Track competitor performance and measure it against your own
Compare your results to industry benchmarks
Monitor mentions, comments, and tags related to your business to avoid PR disasters before they happen
Key benefits: Free for all Instagram business profile accounts, available directly in the Instagram mobile app
Skill level: Beginner
Best for: Grabbing high-level insights on the go
Creator and business accounts have access to native Instagram business tools like Insights.
From the Insights tab, you can learn about who’s following you, when they’re most active, and what type of content is most popular. Some data disappears after 90 days, so consider the following free Instagram analytics tools for more detailed reporting.
Key benefits: Simple and user-friendly solutions for basic performance tracking
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, solo social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses
Later is a social media management platform similar to Hootsuite (you can compare Later and Hootsuite here). It comes with a variety of features, from analytics to scheduling tools, but it really shines through as a platform for smaller brands and creators who like to visualize and preview social media content before they post.
While Later can also help you measure the performance of your Instagram content and optimize posting times, the platform lacks some more advanced analytics features like competitive analysis and industry benchmarking.
Key benefits: Simple solutions for basic Instagram performance tracking, free plan
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Business owners who run their own social media, solo social media managers at small-to-medium-sized businesses, agencies
Buffer is another social media scheduler that comes with tools to help you build your presence on social media. It allows you to schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Mastodon.
But when it comes to analytics, Buffer is relatively light on features. It doesn’t offer analytics for all platforms and doesn’t come with social listening features, paid content tracking, or competitive benchmarking. However, Buffer’s user-friendly dashboard is simple and straightforward, making it great for social media managers who just want to get in, schedule, and get out.
Be sure to read our guide to Hootsuite vs. Buffer for more on how these platforms compare.
Key benefits: In-depth reporting across social networks
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: Marketing teams at larger organizations
Sprout Social is another top contender in the battle of social media management tools, and it may be worth your consideration. Offering scheduling and analytics for all the major social media platforms, Sprout can help you plan and execute your Instagram — and wider social media — strategy.
Like Hootsuite, Sprout offers a full-featured analytics dashboard, which provides details on both your paid and organic posts and helps you decide when to publish different content types for the best results. You can also easily white-label and download reports from the Sprout dashboard.
Sprout is quite a bit more expensive than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite offers more features and integrations. Compare Hootsuite and Sprout to see which one works best for you.
Panoramiq Insights adds powerful Instagram analytics to your Hootsuite workflow. The app allows you to analyze account activity, follower demographics (super handy for targeting campaigns!), and measure the success of your posts and Stories.
As the name suggests, this Instagram business tool gives you a panoramic view of how people engage with your account. Plus, it’s called multiview for a reason: adding Panoramiq Multiview into the Hootsuite workflow allows you to monitor and respond to mentions, comments, and tags all in one stream. You can even add multiple Instagram profiles to one stream to further streamline your Instagram engagement.
Automate tracking mentions of your company, competitors, and keywords. This tool is compatible with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and other web sources like blogs. That means you can see where Instagram fits into the bigger picture and where your brand is being mentioned most. And you can sync it all up with Hootsuite.
If influencer marketing is part of your strategy, you want to analyze a specific competitor, or simply like to creep on celebrities, Phlanx’s Instagram engagement calculator gives you handy insights into total followers, engagement rates, and average likes and comments on posts.
You can’t choose a specific time period, but this is still a good basic tool to understand how other accounts are performing on Instagram. For example, it can tell you that Taylor Swift gets an impressive 2.23% engagement rate despite having comments turned off.
Instagram analytics data is most useful when it’s compiled into a report that allows you to compare results and spot trends. We’ve created a free Instagram analytics report template you can use to fill in your data and share your findings.
If you’d rather get your Instagram analytics reports automatically, check out the Instagram analytics built into Perch by Hootsuite.
Bonus: Get a free social media analytics report templatethat shows you the most important metrics to track for each network.
Save time managing your Instagram presence with Perch by Hootsuite. Schedule posts, Reels, and Stories ahead of time, track performance, find your best times to publish, and build Instagram analytics reports from one place. Try it free today.
The best social listening tools in 2026 use AI to surface sentiment, trends, and competitive insights automatically, not just track mentions.
Enterprise teams need tools that cover multiple platforms, support collaboration, and integrate with existing tech stacks like CRMs and BI tools.
Social listening and social monitoring are different: monitoring tracks mentions, while listening analyzes patterns, sentiment, and context behind conversations.
Free tools like Google Alerts can get you started, but paid platforms offer the depth, historical data, and sentiment analysis needed for strategic decisions.
What are social listening tools?
Social listening tools are software that track what people say about your brand, competitors, and industry online. They scan social media, blogs, forums, and news sites — where users spend an average of 141 minutes per day — to measure sentiment, spot trends, and catch relevant conversations as they happen.
Behind the scenes, many tools use AI and natural language processing to sort through all that data and surface what matters most, using features like keyword tracking, sentiment analysis, and predictive trend detection.
Key features of social listening tools
Every platform is a little different, but most social listening tools share the same core features:
Keyword and brand monitoring: Tracks mentions of your brand, products, competitors, hashtags, and key topics across social media.
Real-time alerts: Pings your team right away when something important happens, like a spike in mentions or a viral post.
Competitive monitoring: Tracks your competitors’ brand mentions, campaigns, and share of voice.
Sentiment analysis: Sorts your brand mentions into positive, negative, or neutral, so you can quickly understand how people feel.
Trend and topic analysis: Highlights rising conversations, emerging themes, and shifts in attention over time.
Reporting and analytics dashboards: Turns raw data into clear charts, summaries, and reports you can easily share.
AI-powered insights: Uses machine learning to automate sentiment scoring, generate report summaries, and flag anomalies before they become crises.
Social listening vs. social monitoring
These two terms get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing.
Social monitoring is the tactical side: Tracking individual mentions, responding to comments, and flagging alerts in real time. It answers the question, “What did someone just say about us?”
Social listening goes deeper. It analyzes patterns, sentiment trends, and the broader context behind those conversations over time. It answers the question, “What does all of this mean for our brand, and what should we do about it?”
Both matter. Monitoring keeps you responsive. Listening drives strategy. The best social listening tools handle both, so your team can react quickly and plan ahead.
What can social listening tools do for your brand?
Social listening tools track conversations so you can keep a pulse on how people really feel about your brand, competitors, and industry.
They’re used for everything from sentiment analysis and trend detection to crisis management. Here are some of the most common use cases:
Trend detection: Spot emerging topics and conversations before they peak, so your team can create timely, relevant content.
Crisis management: Catch spikes in negative sentiment early and respond to potential crises before they become full-blown PR problems.
Competitive intelligence: Track what people are saying about your competitors, their campaigns, and their product launches.
Product development: Surface customer complaints, feature requests, and unmet needs that can inform your product roadmap.
Customer insights: Understand how your audience talks about your brand, what they care about, and what drives their purchasing decisions.
How is AI changing social listening tools?
With consumers spending nearly 2.5 trillion hours on social apps in 2025, AI has moved social listening well beyond simple keyword tracking. Modern tools use machine learning and natural language processing to understand context, detect emotion, and surface insights that would take a human team weeks to find manually.
Here’s what AI-powered social listening looks like in practice:
Automated sentiment analysis: AI classifies mentions as positive, negative, or neutral at scale, often detecting sarcasm and nuance that basic keyword tools miss.
Predictive trend detection: Machine learning models identify rising topics and conversations before they peak, giving your team a head start on content and messaging.
Generative report summaries: Tools like Wisdom, Hootsuite’s social-first AI, can generate plain-language summaries of complex social data, making it faster to brief leadership or share insights across teams.
Image and video recognition: Visual AI identifies brand logos, products, and scenes in images and videos, even when your brand isn’t mentioned in the text.
Natural language querying: Instead of building complex Boolean queries, some platforms now let you type questions in plain English and get relevant results.
For enterprise teams, AI reduces the manual work of query building and data analysis, so you spend less time pulling reports and more time acting on what they tell you.
Why does social listening matter?
Whether you’re managing brand reputation, creating content, or empowering employees, the right listening tools help you make faster, smarter decisions.
Here’s how two Hootsuite customers are putting social listening into action:
Crisis prevention and reputation management
During a major rebrand following a merger, Corewell Health used Hootsuite’s listening and analytics tools to monitor how people were responding across 21 hospitals and hundreds of accounts.
One NBA team used Hootsuite and Lumen by Talkwalker to analyze fan sentiment and engagement patterns during the off-season.
They discovered that fans preferred authentic, behind-the-scenes content over promotional posts and reshaped their strategy accordingly.
Results:
352% average increase in social video views
46% increase in impressions
A new full-time content role approved to expand the strategy
Bonus!!!
Discover the best way to gather insights and intel from your audience, competitors, industry, and favorite aspirational brands in our complete guide to advanced social listening.
We’ve compared the top 13 tools for 2026, from free options to enterprise platforms, so you can quickly evaluate features like sentiment analysis, real-time alerts, and historical data access.
What are the best all-in-one social listening tools?
All-in-one social listening tools let teams monitor conversations and manage social media in one place. They usually include features like publishing, engagement, and analytics, making it easier to handle multiple workflows without switching tools.
Here are the best all-in-one social listening tools:
1. Perch by Hootsuite
Perch surfaces real-time brand mentions, sentiment trends, and key metrics in one view. It also includes scheduling and analytics, all from a single dashboard.
Listening
Every Perch plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.
Use Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands, and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand performance.
You can track mentions of your brand, competitors, products — up to two custom keywords over the last seven days.
Quick Search tracks engagement patterns and conversation volume across social platforms in real time. Use it to analyze things like:
Key metrics: Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts?
Top themes: How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
Results: Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms, and you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.
Pricing: Starting at $99/month.
Best for: Perch is ideal for teams that want integrated social media management and listening in one intuitive dashboard. It offers user-friendly tools and integrations with social media tools.
Limitations:
Quick Search is limited to a 7-day lookback on standard plans.
Perch is best for listening insights tied to content planning and performance. For deeper sentiment analysis and large-scale social intelligence, Lumen by Talkwalker is the stronger fit.
2. Lumen by Talkwalker
Lumen by Talkwalker provides comprehensive social listening and consumer intelligence across global markets.
Its social data library covers 30+ social platforms — including emerging platforms like Bluesky — and more than 150 million web pages across 239 countries and regions. Teams can segment channels, audiences, markets, and topics to monitor the conversations that matter most.
Lumen helps brands understand the full impact of their online presence by measuring engagement volume, reach, sentiment, share of voice, trend momentum, and more. It’s especially useful for global teams that need to track brand health, monitor competitors, identify emerging trends, and understand audience sentiment at scale.
Best for: Lumen is best suited for global brands that need multilingual sentiment analysis, trend tracking, and visual content recognition across massive data sets.
Limitations:
Enterprise pricing may be out of reach for smaller teams or limited budgets.
The depth of features can require onboarding time to use effectively.
Popular social listening tools
These popular social listening tools focus mainly on listening and analyzing online conversations, not publishing or engagement. Teams often choose them when they need deeper insight into conversations, trends, and how people feel about their brand.
Take a look at the most popular social listening tools:
3. Brandwatch
Brandwatch’s interface helps brands monitor and analyze conversations across millions of online sources.
Brandwatch uses a library of 1.7 trillion historical conversations from 2010 to help brands track industry trends online. 501 million new conversations are added every day.
Brandwatch provides access to conversations from 100 million unique sites and can integrate your own customer data. You can track key social listening metrics like brand awareness, social sentiment, and social share of voice.
For even easier tracking of your social listening queries, you can integrate Brandwatch into your Hootsuite dashboard.
Pricing: Pricing for this enterprise-level social listening tool is available upon request.
Best for: Brandwatch is a top-tier choice for enterprise teams focused on deep research and historical analysis, but with a steeper learning curve and heavier lift for setup and query building.
Limitations:
Steep learning curve, especially for complex Boolean query building.
Enterprise-only pricing makes it inaccessible for smaller teams.
4. Brand24
Brand24’s dashboard displays competitor mentions, sentiment analysis, and influence scores.
Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool that covers the major social platforms as well as blogs, news sites, and other online sources. It lets you track trends in reach and brand awareness, and set up alerts for critical notifications.
You can also gain valuable insights into social sentiment. Plus, the influence score lets you identify top influencers and creators in your niche.
Create reports you can easily share across your team and with company leaders.
Pricing: Starting at $199/month after a 14-day free trial (annual billing offers a discount).
Best for: Brand24 is good for small businesses seeking fast, affordable social listening, offering strong basics but limited historical depth and scalability.
Limitations:
Limited historical data (roughly one year of storage).
May not scale well for enterprise teams managing multiple brands or regions.
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social uses AI to surface customer sentiment and competitive insights from social conversations.
Sprout Social helps you track conversations about your brand, understand your audience demographics, and identify influencers in your niche.
Hashtag and mention monitoring, along with sentiment analysis, are baked into the solution. However, more detailed social listening can only be unlocked with an add-on.
Pricing: Starting at $79/user/month after a 30-day free trial.
Best for: Sprout Social fits mid-sized teams that prioritize user experience and lightweight listening, though it may lack the depth needed for advanced use cases.
Limitations:
Full social listening requires a paid add-on on top of already higher per-user pricing.
Historical data access is limited compared to dedicated listening platforms.
6. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps brands discover trending content and monitor media coverage across the web.
BuzzSumo is a tool that helps brands monitor major media mentions. They can set up alerts for mentions of their own brand or industry trends to stay aware of upcoming trending topics and changes.
BuzzSumo has an archive of 8 billion articles from the past five years to analyze and search for your queries. You can also monitor brand mentions and track alerts about your competing brands.
Pricing: Starting at $199/month.
Best for: BuzzSumo is useful for monitoring media mentions and content trends, though it lacks true social listening capabilities like sentiment or influencer tracking.
Limitations:
No sentiment analysis, so you can’t gauge how people feel about your brand.
Limited social media coverage; better suited for content and media monitoring than social listening.
7. Keyhole
Keyhole tracks hashtag performance, campaign metrics, and sentiment changes over time.
Keyhole offers a social listening tool that tracks keywords, mentions, and hashtags across multiple platforms. It graphs trends over time along with social share of voice. Keyhole even tracks the sentiment in every mention and changes over time.
On top of that, the tool helps identify key influencers in your niche and compares the performance of the various influencers you identify.
Keyhole offers historical data for X dating back to 2015 (available on request), while other platforms have more limited data.
Best for: Keyhole is a helpful tool for tracking campaigns, hashtags, and influencers. It’s best for short-term or channel-specific insights rather than ongoing strategy.
Limitations:
Historical data outside of X is limited.
Better suited for campaign-level tracking than always-on brand listening.
8. Later
Later’s social listening features focus exclusively on Instagram engagement and mentions.
Later provides social listening capabilities specifically for Instagram. The platform helps you monitor conversations, track hashtags, and analyze sentiment for Instagram posts and stories.
While Later is best known as a scheduling and publishing tool, its listening features are designed for brands that focus heavily on Instagram engagement.
Pricing: Social listening is included on Later’s Scale plan.
Best for: Instagram-focused brands and influencers who need platform-specific listening without the complexity of multi-channel tools.
Lacks the depth and historical data of dedicated listening platforms.
FAQ: Social listening tools
What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Social listening and social monitoring are related but serve different purposes. Social monitoring tracks individual mentions, comments, and tags in real time to help teams respond quickly to customer inquiries or brand mentions. Social listening goes deeper by analyzing patterns, sentiment trends, and the broader context of conversations over time to inform strategic decisions. Monitoring answers “What are people saying right now?” while listening answers “What does this mean for our brand strategy?”
How much do social listening tools cost?
Social listening tool pricing varies widely based on features, data access, and scale. Free tools like Google Alerts and Social Mention offer basic mention tracking, while paid platforms start around $79-$199 per month for small business plans. Enterprise-level tools like Lumen by Talkwalker, Brandwatch, and Sprinklr require custom quotes and typically cost thousands per month, but they offer extensive historical data, AI-powered insights, multilingual support, and integration with existing tech stacks.
Can social listening tools track conversations on all platforms?
Most social listening tools cover major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube, but coverage varies by tool. Enterprise platforms like Lumen by Talkwalker and Brandwatch track 30+ social networks plus millions of web pages, blogs, forums, and news sites. Some tools also monitor emerging platforms like Bluesky, while others focus on specific channels. Always verify platform coverage before committing to a tool, especially if your audience is active on niche or regional platforms.
How does AI improve social listening?
AI improves social listening by automating sentiment analysis, detecting sarcasm and nuance that keyword tools miss, and identifying emerging trends before they peak. Machine learning models can analyze images and videos to spot your brand even when it’s not mentioned in text, while natural language processing lets you query data in plain English instead of building complex Boolean searches. Generative AI features like Wisdom can summarize large social data sets into actionable insights, saving your team hours of manual analysis.
What metrics should I track with social listening tools?
Key social listening metrics include brand mentions (volume and reach), sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral), share of voice (how your brand compares to competitors), engagement rate, and trending topics or hashtags. Enterprise teams should also track crisis indicators like spikes in negative sentiment, influencer mentions and their reach, customer pain points for product development, and campaign performance across channels. The right metrics depend on your goals—reputation management requires different KPIs than product research or competitive intelligence.
Do I need social listening if I already have social media management tools?
Social media management tools help you publish content, schedule posts, and respond to direct mentions, but they don’t capture untagged conversations, competitor mentions, or broader industry trends. Social listening fills that gap by monitoring conversations your brand isn’t directly tagged in and analyzing sentiment patterns over time. Many enterprise teams use both: management tools for day-to-day operations and listening tools for strategic insights. All-in-one platforms like Hootsuite combine social management and listening capabilities, while Lumen by Talkwalker adds deeper social intelligence for enterprise teams.
Brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment at your fingertips. Plan, schedule, publish, and measure posts in Perch; manage comments and customer conversations in Nest; and keep up with trends and social listening in Lumen. Try it free today.
Enhanced
~1-year storage
