Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are being used by billions of people each day. While these platforms are a great way to keep in touch with friends and family, they are also an outstanding opportunity for businesses to market their products and services, to increase their brand awareness, to boost their sales and their revenue as well as to diversify their target market.

Marketers are aware of the potential of these platforms, and many of them are already using social media marketing to reach and engage target customers. Having said that, here is an overview of the top 5 best free analytics tools that will come in handy for every marketer:

1. MOZ Analytics

Previously known as SEOMoz, MOZ Analytics is a useful, feature-rich and easy-to-use application that allows you to keep an eye on all your social media statistics. In other words, this analytics tool puts all the stats at your fingertips, and this will certainly add to your marketing efforts - moreover, there is another notable SEO (search engine optimization) feature embedded in MOZ Analytics that allows you to see just how SEO-friendly your marketing campaign is, in the long run.

2. Google Social Analytics

Google has lately released the Social Analytics app, a free analytics program designed to help you improve the ranking of your website. The newly implemented social media feature allows you to monitor your social media efforts in real-time - for instance, it helps you see how many people mention your website or your business on Twitter or Facebook, it helps you gather feedback and it also helps you see how many people liked or shared your content on social media. Google has managed to maintain its supremacy amongst search engines over the years, and Google Plus has quickly become very popular amongst Internet users - the giant corporation makes no compromise in terms of service quality, and Google Social Analytics certainly testifies to that.

3. SumAll

Another very useful and sought-after free analytics tool for social media marketers is the SumAll application. In a nutshell, this is an all-in-one, all-purpose analytics tool that allows you to monitor your marketing efforts across more than just one social networking platform: in other words, it allows you to track your Facebook mentions, your Twitter mentions, your Google Plus shares and so on. Samuel from Moving Labor shares his experience, "You have full control over all these aspects, from the main dashboard - besides this, you can always count on SumAll to provide you with in-depth, real-time reports on the retweets, likes, shares and such".

4. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is undoubtedly one of the most important analytics tools you can use. At the time being, Facebook has more than 1 billion active users - and the Facebook Insights app is specifically designed to help you monitor the evolution of your brand on this social networking platform. Completely free of charge, Facebook Insights can certainly help you take your marketing efforts to the next level: the tool has a user-friendly interface, it is comprehensive and it tells you how many people saw your posts, who liked the post, who liked your page and so forth. This valuable information will help you understand where does your business stand, in terms of customer engagement.

5. Twitter Analytics

Twitter is the second most popular social media platform in the world, right after Facebook. That being said, Twitter Analytics is a free analytics tool that allows you keep track of how many impressions every tweet received, what is the average engagement rate for each tweet and so forth. Overall, it is safe to say that Twitter Analytics is a very complex application that will become every marketer's best friend - not only does this tool offer you daily statistics, but it can also offer you an overview of the impressions your account has received throughout a four-week period.

Twitter Analytics is definitely a great way to figure out which tweets appeal the most to the wide public (based on the "Favorite" and "Retweet" rates), and it can also help you track the number of impressions as well as the overall engagement rate, in an efficient and professional manner.