How do you expect to remain at the top of your market if you don’t take the time to conduct a social media competitor analysis? We’re here to tell you that doing so can become quite challenging, even for the most business-savvy companies.
It’s essential to perform a competitive analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. From there, you can use the competitor analysis tools provided to help improve your social media strategy in the future.
Get ready to become the master of social media after checking out this need-to-know guide from SEO to content types, we’re going to cover it all.
What is a Social Media Competitor Analysis?
Social media competitor analyses are an easy way to spy on your competition without doing anything illegal. You give yourself a front-row seat to the things they’re doing on social media to attract the attention of their customers.
Using the available competitor analysis tools, you can ensure you’re kept updated on everything your competitors do in terms of their social media ads and daily posts. Still unsure of what you learn when you perform a competitive analysis?
The things you’ll learn include:
- The type of content your competitor’s craft
- Level of engagement per each piece of content
- Length of social media captions
- Types of content competitors post
There are several varieties of content out there for companies to use, but it doesn’t mean that every form will work for your company. However, if you notice certain forms of content your competitors use, and it’s working, you might want to work it into your social media strategy.
You might want to utilize the same forms of content because you and your competitors are trying to obtain the attention and loyalty of the same customers. Therefore you need to produce content they’ll identify with and engage with as you begin publishing it on your social media platforms.
There are tons of other pieces of information you’ll learn when you complete a competitor analysis, and it’s essential to review each piece of the data. You never know how it can be helpful in the future.
What is the Goal of Social Media Analyses?
Before you enter any business market, what’s the first thing you do? You complete an analysis of the market because it helps you better understand how well your brand will perform once it enters that market.
The same idea applies when you complete a competitive analysis. Social media insights are essential and can help you determine the types of metrics you need to use to improve marketing efforts in the future.
Before you complete the analysis, ensure you create a list of questions that you can answer during the process. Are the strategies your company uses working to achieve your goals?
Are there changes you can make to improve your strategy to see better results? Are there more audiences your company could reach to increase your bottom line?
This is the goal of a competitor analysis to help you get the specific answers you need moving forward. Social media is about trial and error and finding the things that work for your company.
As you learn things you can do better, you continue to rework your strategy to achieve the optimal results.
Steps to Complete a Thorough Social Media Competitive Analysis
Now that we’ve given you information on what a competitive social media analysis is and the goals it hopes to achieve, it’s time to learn how to do it correctly. You’ll find steps below, and all you’ve got to do is follow them.
You’ll find the steps and in-depth detail about what to do during each phase to get the optimal results.
Identify Your Competitors
The first step in the competitor analysis process is identifying who your competitors are. If you don’t know who your competitors are, it will be challenging to determine who you should watch and keep track of.
When you’re creating your list of competitors, make a note of the top 5 because it provides you variety as you review and research each company. Ensure the competitors you choose to research align with your brand.
This means they seek to do the same things your brand does and offers the same kind of services. Choose people that perform at the same level your company does or better because these are the people you want to study and do better than moving forward.
The competitors you study don’t have to be local to your business; you can incorporate some international brands into the mix. After you create a list of the competitors, you want to research, create a list and compare the quality of the services and products they offer in comparison to your brand.
Also, note how they promote their products to their target audience. It’s all about identifying the factors that can help you get one step ahead of your competitors.
Another thing to keep in mind as you select the competitors you will use to analyze is to ensure they’re active across social media. If they don’t have a strong social media presence, there isn’t going to be anything to compare between other brands and yours.
If you’re unsure of who your competition is, take some time to use the search engine to find out who’s out there and begin building your list from there.
Start gathering the Data
You’ve taken the time to create a list of the competitors you want to compare your business to, and it’s now time to move forward with gathering your data. This process differs based on the social media platforms you use to post and promote your business.
Each page has its own set of data you’ll receive and a checklist you should use to survey the social media accounts of your competitors.
When you review the pages of your competitors on Facebook, do an overall review of their entire page. Doing this will show you the basics of the customer’s page, including the exact number of people who regularly follow and engage with their social media page.
If there are some tabs you notice they use that offer various features, you need to make a note of these tabs. Ensure you make a note of the tabs that each competitor uses because if they’re using the same tab, it shows that something is working for them.
This means that if it works for your competitor, it might be something that works for your business too. The Facebook competitor report is the best way to gather all the information and data you need about your competitors.
This will provide the additional information you’ll need to complete a comprehensive competitor analysis, including:
- Most used and engaged with images
- Popular posts
- Engagement each post gets
- The average number of engagements
The best part of the Facebook competitor report is showing you how specific competitors compare to what you’re doing across your Facebook page. This information and more should be used in the sheet you use to document the data about your competitors.
More than 1 billion people use Instagram every day, including businesses globally. Instagram doesn’t offer the same amount of public data as Facebook would, but it does offer an Instagram competitor report.
Ensure you understand what you need to measure across the board for all your competitors. The items to measure include:
- Best performing posts
- Growth of their audience
- Hashtags they use to increase page awareness
- Media they send
Measuring audience growth is crucial because it tells you how quickly your competitor’s audiences are growing compared to yours. If their audience is growing quicker than yours, you need to pay closer attention to the rest of the data you collect.
Another piece of data to review is how your competitors send out information and publish their content. When you launch a social media account, one thing you discuss with your team is how often you will post on social media.
How well your competitor’s posts are performing will help you determine if you’re posting at the right frequency to keep up with the competition. Hashtags are what hold the social media world together.
It makes it easier for businesses to expand their reach and appear in relevant searches by followers. Make a note of the types of hashtags your competitors use and how many they include in their captions.
Using too many general hashtags will cause your post to be buried under the rest of the post using the same hashtags. This is why you need to carefully choose the hashtags you put under your posts to increase your chances of appearing higher in searches.
The last social media platform we are going to examine is Twitter. When you review your competitors on Twitter, you will need to utilize some analytical tools to get the most data out of it.
When you use the right software to compare your Twitter profile to your competitors, it will provide you with a report of how you stand up against everyone else. The report will provide you with data about how many followers you gain and lose in a single day.
It also gives you insight into the mentions and comments received on specific posts. This will make it easier for you to determine the type of posts your followers engage with the most.
In-Depth Review of Competitor Activity
The next phase in the competitive analysis is to analyze the activity on your competitor’s pages. There are several questions you need to ask and answer to ensure you’re collecting the right data.
- Do your competitors respond to the comments left by their followers?
- Do they have long lapses of time between their posts?
- When was the last time they posted, and what type of content was it?
This phase of the competitor analysis isn’t the most challenging because it’s easy to determine if your competitors are active on their social media profiles. After receiving the answers to these questions, think about performing a competitor keyword analysis.
This will tell you whether your competitors use short or long-tail keywords and how many of them they sprinkle throughout their content. Keywords are crucial to search media optimization because they help your posts appear higher in search engines.
Keywords are crucial. They can be used in everything your company does.
Keywords should be a routine part of your company website design and the content you publish, including:
- Meta description
- Title
- Body
- Images
Ensure you take the time to optimize your content to ensure you’re competing with the rest of the businesses in your market. You might also consider reviewing the voice of each brand to determine how well they follow and use that voice across all the content and posts they create.
You might even find your competitors have some content titles that you’ve not tried but want to use in the future to strengthen your marketing strategy.
Put the Data to Use
The last step in the data analysis process is to use the data you’ve collected and put it to use. You and your team should sit down and determine how to use the data to strengthen your marketing strategy.
A competitor analysis aims to create a strategy that works for you while allowing you to level up and rise above your competitors. There will be things you’ve collected when conducting the competitive analysis that you think will work and other things you want to steer clear of altogether when you’re on social media.
How to Perform a Social Media Competitor Analysis?
When you perform a social media competitor analysis, there are several things you need to collect to properly compare how well you’re doing versus others in the industry. Make a list of the competitors you want to review, and don’t forget to put the data you collect to good use.
Are you in need of help advertising across your social media platforms? Contact Latitude Park and let us help you get a leg up on your competition.
