Social Analytics: How Necessary Are They? Our resident 'geek' tells us if social media analytics add up to business success.

Q: Do better social media analytics really help?

A: There's an ever-growing range of companies offering an array of social media analytics tools, from entry-level platforms such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social to sophisticated stand-alone products like Socialbakers and Radian6.

All of these products use an API to capture data—the exact same data already available to you and your business for free from Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and many other social media networks. The only differences between the native analytics and the more sophisticated—and expensive—options are the interface and the math used to calculate ambiguous metrics like "potential reach" and "engagement."