IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

“Wondering if you can stay ahead and win the social media competition?”

You are at the right place.

If you desperately want to stay top in the social media competition and if you are worried about it, forget all your worries;

Just start with social media competitor analysis.

If you are still in doubt then let me tell you the importance of social media competitor analysis for your business.

Social media competitor analysis is a type of analysis that is prepared for examining the social media competitors’ performance.

It is a process of benchmarking your own results against your competitors in social media.

This process will make you able to identify the opportunities for growth and test new strategies that have worked for others.

Social media competitor analysis helps you to figure out:

• Your competitors in social media
• The platforms they are on
• The strategies they are using
• Their strengths and weakness
• Weakness and social threats of your business
• Gaps in your marketing strategy

Social media competitor analysis is done to learn not only about your competitors but also the insights of our own business.

It will help you to:

1) Dive deeper in to your market segments

Social media competitor analysis helps you to analyze the weakness and gaps of your own business.

It gives you more insights into your own business and helps you to develop by analyzing the strategies of your competitors

It helps you to understand the social behaviour of your competitors and provides you with advanced ideas of your market segment’s fares on digital platforms.

Social media competitor analysis helps you to figure out how you need to build your content strategy, how much effort you have to take, how you should inform people about your business offerings etc. even if your market segment is absent in social media platforms. 

2) Learn what strategies will work

Every business has different social media marketing strategies. 

While some rely on articles and reports, some rely on short video clips, product photos and other media posts.

Since not every social media works out for every business, you have to learn what type of social media marketing will help you and what social media marketing is popular in your industry.

Learn more social media marketing courses from the best digital marketing company.

Make sure that you are depending on tested strategies. Never rely on some experimental medium or content types on assumptions.

3) Set accurate expectations (KPI)

To set goals in your segments, you need to analyze your competitors and find their strengths for which clients choose them and the weaknesses which you can take advantage of.

4) Follow the market trends

A regular social media competitor analysis will help you to identify the market trends like hashtags, season sales, etc, and also the challenges in social media that your competitors have started and engaged in or participated in.

So conduct social media competitor analysis on a regular schedule to keep updated.

To become successful in social media competition it is essential to do social media competitor analysis. But how can we do social media competitor analysis?

 Let’s take a look at;

Determine your competitors

Identify your competitors using your business keywords that you are trying to rank in your website.

 For identifying your competitors use google keyword planner for help as it is the best place for identifying the keywords. 

Besides primary keywords, you can also search your target keywords in the tool for identifying your competitors.

For that choose the most relevant keywords to your business and search them in google and find your competitors.

We suggest you to focus on your direct competitors first and the others optionally as direct competitors are the ones who offer products or services similar to you and indirect are the ones whose products or services can replace yours.

Analyze the competitors in social media

Identify your competitors on Facebook. Facebook has its library that includes ads that are running across Instagram and Facebook.

You can find your competitors by searching locations, account name, keywords, etc, and also you can see the impressions that ads received, demographic information on ads, etc.

 Collect

Since you have collected the list of your competitors, analyze their social media accounts, what they are up to.

Go through their social networks. Make a note of the following:

• What social networks are the on
• Number of followers
• Post frequency
• Engagement rate
• Number of hashtags they use
• Often used hashtags
• Tonality 

You can find these information by clicking your social competitors’ profile. Collect these information from your own account as well to analyze.

For conducting a social media competitor analysis these informations are essential.

 Analyze 

After gathering all information, the next step is to analyze.

Try to do a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis helps you to get a more clear vision of your competitors and makes it easy to compare with your information.

S: Strength

W: Weakness 

O: Opportunities

T: Threats

SWOT analysis helps you find the strength involving factors in your business or brand as well as the competitors. 

Strength and weakness are the main factors you should focus on first to improve and win in social media competition.

Opportunities and threats are the factors that are based on external factors.

While conducting social media competitor analysis , followers, impressions, engagement, mentions and important metrics are also analyzed.

 Implement

After analyzing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, the gaps that can be filled now. It’s time for implementing your social media content strategy

First, experiment with your new strategy and if it is providing you better results, continue depending on it.

It may include new unique content, customized hashtags for business. etc.

You can also use social media competitor analysis tools to get better results, and thus you can know how businesses use social media to connect with customers.

As I explained before, social media competitor analysis helps us to identify data from dozens of networks, people, and activities. We can do analysis manually and by using tools also.

For conducting social media competitors analysis some tools are used. 

These tools help us to get better results and to improve your social media presence.

There are a lot of automated tools available for competitor analysis and it can make your work easier.

Benefits of social media competitor analysis tools:

Time saving 

These tools help to provide information in less time than you take in manual analysis. These tools are equipped in accomplishing the tasks whether it is single page analysis or different competitor analysis.

Provides you extra information

Since social media platforms do not let us know the engagement rate of the pages that do not belong to us, it becomes a hassle to calculate it manually. But for tools, they do it very well within less time.

Easy to review

You do not have to set up any excel or google sheet to gather the information if you are using the tools.

Here is a list of some social media competitor analysis tools

• Sprout social
• Brand watch
• Buffer
• Brand24
• SEMrush
• Similar web
• SpyFu
• Owler
• Buzzsumo
• Social blade
• Hoot suite
• Sendible tool

Here is a list of some free social media competitor analysis tools

• Social mention
• Similar web
• Buzzsumo
• SpyFu
• Crayon
• Ubersuggest
• SEMrush

Sprout social

Sprout social is used for comparing key performance metrics and seeing what type of content performs best. 

It’s reports can track fundamental metrics like audience growth,engagement, and post volume of each network. 

Using Sprout social you can examine your followers according to their demographic characteristics. 

Social media analysis tools of Sprout social

• Campaign analytics
• competitor monitoring
• Post scheduling
• Influencer tracking
• Customizable reports
• Multi channel data collection

 Hoot suite

Hoot suite is the most efficient tool in social media competitive analysis. It manages analyzing and listening to your content.

Hote suite follows your competitors specific keywords, hashtags by following their social media activity.

Social media analysis tools of hoot suite

• Competitor monitoring
• Campaign analytics
• Customizable reports
• Post scheduling

Brand watch

You can learn your brand’s performance against your competitor with Brand watch social media analysis tool.

Using your insights it shapes and improves your social media strategy. It offers some powerful analysis tools.

Social media analysis tools of Brand watch

• Competitive analysis
• Influencer marketing
• Trend tracking
• Reputation management
• Sentiment analysis
• Audience segmentation

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo helps you to find out your competitors’ most shared contents or posts.

It is a cloud based platform that helps you to find trending stories, new keywords, customer queries and content success that are important and relevant to your brand.

• Competitor monitoring
• Influencer marketing
• Trend tracking