Competitor analysis on social media doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are five methods to using competition analysis, regardless of whether you utilise Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, or YouTube.
1) Figure out your brand goals and metrics
Decide what you want before analysing and contrasting the performances of rivals. Always begin with the end in mind, which should be your brand’s objectives.
Find out the responses to questions like:
- What are your objectives for social media marketing?
- What role do these play in your overall brand objectives?
- How will you gauge success using key performance indicators (KPIs)?
- Who are the perfect customers you wish to attract?
2) Identify your brand competitors
If you don’t know who your competitors are or which social media platforms they utilise, it’s impossible to assess them on social media.
Keep an eye out for both your direct and indirect competitors, or companies that provide comparable goods or services or those that address the same issue as you. Next, list your top five rivals.
3) Collect and analyze data
The majority of this procedure is made up of data collection and processing. To make it simpler, pick a practical analytic tool from the ones listed above to research, examine, and contrast the performance of your rivals.
Although you may already have brand KPIs, here are some crucial social media indicators to monitor for competition analysis:
- Reach/impressions on accounts
- Count of supporters
- Participation rates
- Social media advertising trends
- Ratio of voices
- estimated organic page visitors
- how many keywords the rival is using
Following are some of the queries you should think of in order to further simplify your study of your social media competitors:
- What is the audience growth rate of your rivals?
- How would you describe their content strategy? Which types of content—informative, entertaining, aspirational, or promotional—do they prioritise? What content types do they employ? Is it carousels, texts, live events, or videos? What timeframe do they post updates?
- Which posts receive the most shares, likes, and other forms of engagement?
- What is the typical level of engagement?
- What sorts of social media marketing do they employ in addition to natural advertising? Is it influencer marketing, paid advertisements, referrals, sponsored articles, or compensated partnerships?
- How do they plan to use hashtags? They use what hashtags, exactly? How frequently and how many?
4) Create a social media strategy
When assessing your social media rivals, data analysis is crucial, but data interpretation is more essential. If you don’t know how to apply the data gathered for business intelligence, everything in your spreadsheet is just lines, figures, and charts.
“When your competitors have amazing stats, it’s crucial to discover what they are doing successfully to design a better social media plan,” says Meagan Williamson, a Pinterest marketing specialist and business coach. Additionally, their shortcomings—those things they don’t do well—can present opportunity for the expansion of your brand. Create a data-driven approach that enables you to assess what is and is not working as well as how you can use these insights to achieve your business objectives.
Make a four-part SWOT analysis table for your approach using the information from the spreadsheet.
5) Keep tabs on account progress
That’s not the end of your social media competition study. You must monitor both your profile and, naturally, the competition. As a result, you can:
- Track brand development
- Immediately take note of fresh competition
- Check the effectiveness of your social media campaign.
- Find fresh prospects for growth
- Keep your marketing strategy current.
- It’s important to keep up with both business and social media developments.
Follow a schedule to examine your social media competition on a regular basis, whether it be monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or annually. Make sure to update your competition research spreadsheet as well in order to spot any new chances or dangers.
Wrap up
Building a strong social presence, client trust, and brand credibility is possible with the help of social media competitive analysis, which is essential to the growth of your brand.
You can perform this research for any of your social media pages once you have mastered the aforementioned processes. To enhance your social media strategy, identify your brand objectives and transform studied, categorised analytics into context-rich insights.
