It is no longer news that severe brand competition exists throughout the Internet in every industry. So, how can you outcompete your brand competitors on social media and expand your business? By analysing social media competitors.
When you get knowledge of your competitors’ strategies, you are able to reinforce your brand’s strengths, fix its weaknesses, and seize opportunities. In this tutorial, we will discuss the meaning of social media competitor analysis, its benefits, the stages involved in conducting this research, and a list of the necessary tools.
What is a competitive analysis of social media?
Social media competitor analysis is the act of examining your competitors’ social media presence in order to identify growth prospects and formulate brand expansion strategy. This study enables you to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your competition in order to design a viable social marketing strategy. It also offers vital information about your target demographic, the reason they are interested in competitive brands, and how these brands excel at social media marketing.
Why is competitor analysis in social media so important?
The advantages of social media competitive analysis extend beyond the approach you use to evaluate your SEO competition. It permits you to:
- Improve your knowledge of your ideal clients
By conducting a social media competitive analysis, you can acquire a deeper understanding of your ideal customers. Understanding your consumer personas enables you to achieve greater marketing success since you comprehend:
Which social networking sites your potential clientele utilise
How people engage with content
The types of information they are seeking
What pain sites they require remedies for
When they are most engaged on social media.
- Develop a superior social strategy
When you comprehend how and why your competitors are outperforming your business on social media, you may design a successful social media plan or enhance an existing one.
A social media competitor analysis encourages you to strive for excellence by comparing your tactics and outcomes to those of your competitors. In addition, you can identify opportunities for brand expansion and risks you must address.
- Create relevant content
It is natural for your target customers to choose brands whose values and content they share. An analysis of your social media competitors will raise your profile among your ideal clientele.
This is due to the fact that you will determine the types and styles of content customers desire. Additionally, you may use the content gaps you identify to produce new, valuable material for your audience.
- Better marketing and positioning
By doing a social media competitive analysis, you may increase the marketing effectiveness of your social platforms. You will begin to employ relevant, underutilised social media features and methods once you observe what is working for your competition.
In addition, this enables you to develop a positioning strategy to distinguish your brand from the competition and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Six instruments for competitive analysis on social media
In addition to your typical analytic tools, which we will discuss later, you need social media-specific tools to do effective competitor analysis on these platforms. We’ve listed six choices below:
Not Only Analytics
Not Just Analytics, originally known as Ninjalistics, is an Instagram and TikTok analytics programme. Using this social media competition software, you can track the development of rival profiles, the hashtags they employ, and their interaction rates.
Simply enter the profiles of your competitors into Not Just Analytics and examine them. Not Just Analytics displays the following after studying Isis Brenna’s Instagram page, a marketing strategist for business coaches:
- SocialMention
BrandMentions’ Social Mention is a search engine that collects user-generated material from social media, blogs, news, and videos.
Social Mention records and displays all talks about a competitor brand, including who is discussing them, what they are saying, and on which platforms.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is a social media management application that allows you to monitor all of your social media networks from a single location. It is most effective for agencies.
This application allows you to track and compare the performance of your content in order to promote brand growth. Furthermore, Socialbakers offers free competition analysis tools for Instagram and Facebook, with the ability to evaluate up to five competitor profiles.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool package for improved brand marketing. It provides scheduling, analytics, and competitive analysis capabilities for all sizes and types of businesses.
The competitor analysis function in Sprout Social allows you to track your competitors’ audience growth and publication schedules.
Sociality.io
Sociality is a comprehensive social listening, scheduling, and competitor analysis application.
You may learn about your competitors’ paid ad campaigns, social media performance indicators, and content strategy and history using this social media competition analysis tool.
BigSpy
BigSpy is a free tool for researching your competitors’ social media advertisements. This ad library contains a database of adverts from many social networks.
BigSpy assists both small and large organisations in finding campaign inspiration from their competitors in order to produce stronger marketing campaigns and social media strategies.
How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis on Social Media
Competitor analysis on social media does not have to be difficult. Here are the five stages to study competition firms, whether you utilise Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, or YouTube.
- Determine your brand’s goals and measurements.
Determine your goals before examining and comparing the performance of competitors. It’s critical to always begin with the end in mind – your brand objectives.
Determine the answers to the following questions:
What are your social media marketing objectives?
How do these relate to your overall brand objectives?
What key performance indicators (KPIs) will you use to gauge your progress?
Who are the ideal clients you’d like to attract?
- Determine your brand’s competitors
You can’t study your competition on social media unless you know who they are and which social platforms they utilise.
Keep an eye out for both direct and indirect competitors, or organisations who offer similar products or services or solve the same problem as you. Then, make a list of your top five competitors.
You can find out who your competitors are by doing the following:
Using the free SEO competition research tool from Moz
Enter your site’s domain and press the Analyze domain button. You’ll be given a list of your top competitors as well as keywords to target. You may visit their websites, see their social media handles, and see what they’re up to.
Utilizing a search on Google
If you use the search engine result page, also known as the SERP, you will be able to locate competitors who rank for your keywords on social media. However, this can be a challenging procedure.
When you conduct a search, enter the phrase that you want to focus on, and make a note of the websites and, in particular, the social media accounts that come up in the results.
For instance, if you input the phrase “launch copywriter,” the following results will appear on the first page of your search:
The websites that are ranking, as seen in the snapshot you just looked at, are most likely rivals for that keyword. You will, however, need to investigate their social accounts to see whether or not they are also competitors on social media.
An Instagram profile ranks as the fifth most relevant result for this search, making it the only social media profile to appear on page one of the results. Therefore, if you wanted to establish a great social presence as a launch copywriter, you would examine this profile in order to learn more about their techniques.
Conducting searches on the social network of interest
If you want to increase the visibility of your brand for a particular product or keyword on a social media platform, enter the term in the search bar of that platform, and then look through the accounts or hashtags that come up to see if there are any rivals whose strategies you’d like to study. You can do this by entering the term.
- Obtain and scrutinise relevant information
The majority of this procedure is taken up by the analysis and acquisition of data. Studying, analysing, and contrasting the performance of your competitors may be made much simpler by selecting, from among the available convenient analysis tools listed above, the one that best suits your needs.
And while you may have key performance indicators for your brand, the following social media metrics are the most critical ones to track during competitive analysis:
Account visibility and impressions
The total number of supporters
Engagement rates
Insights from social media advertisements
A voice in the matter
a rough estimate of the page’s organic visitors
The number of keywords that are used by the competitor
Metrics 6 and 7 may be determined with relative ease by using a straightforward programme known as Keywords Everywhere.
Install the extension for Google Chrome to use this tool. When you are finished, go to Google Search and enter in “[the social media platform] + [brand name].” Then, drag your cursor over the metric kw(us), which will bring up the following:
If you type “Instagram.com Nike” into the search bar, you will see the following results:
This demonstrates that Nike’s Instagram page ranks for a total of 782 keywords and receives between 29,600 and 30,000 visits per month.
The following are some questions that you should think about in order to further simplify your research of your competitors’ performance on social media:
What is the audience growth rate of some of your competitors?
I’m curious about their content approach, how does it look? What kinds of content do they tend to emphasise, such as educational, amusing, motivational, or commercial ones? In what content forms do they publish their articles? Is it videos, messages, lives, carousels, etc.? When do they typically upload new content?
Which posts receive the most engagement—that is, the most likes, comments, and shares—and why is that?
What is the typical rate of engagement with their brand?
What kinds of social media marketing, in addition to organic promotions, do they engage in more frequently? Is it paid advertisements, sponsored postings, collaborative projects, word-of-mouth promotion, or influencer marketing?
How does their approach for using hashtags look? Which hashtags do they utilise in their posts? How many, and how frequently do they occur?
Put all of the information that you have studied up to this point into a spreadsheet. Because of this, it is simple to monitor and assess the data at a glance:
A bonus is that you don’t have to start from scratch to create a spreadsheet because Sprout Social provides a template for social media competitor analysis that you can utilise.
- Create a social media plan
The evaluation of your social media competition requires both the analysis and interpretation of data. Data analysis is crucial, but data interpretation is more necessary. In the absence of an understanding of how to apply the data gathered for business intelligence, the contents of your spreadsheet will consist merely of lines, numbers, and charts.
“When your competitors have amazing stats, it is crucial to understand what they are doing successfully in order to design a superior social media plan,” says Meagan Williamson, a Pinterest marketing specialist and business coach. In addition, your brand may be able to capitalise on possibilities presented by your competitors’ shortcomings, or the things that they do poorly. Construct a strategy that is data-driven so that you can examine what aspects of your organisation are successful and which are not, as well as how you can best use this information to advance your company’s objectives.
Create a SWOT analysis table for your approach using the information from the spreadsheet. It should have four parts.
Your brand’s SWOT analysis should be a well-thought-out summary of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to assist you in making informed business decisions.
- Monitor the status of the account regularly.
The completion of your competitive analysis for social media is not the end of the process. You need to keep an eye on both your own profile and, of course, the other businesses in your industry. Because of this, you are able to:
Track the development of the brand.
Keep an eye out for fresh competition.
Check to see if your approach for social media is producing results.
Locate potential areas for additional expansion.
Keep your marketing plan up-to-date
It is essential to keep up with the latest trends in both the industry and social media.
Maintain a schedule to routinely examine your social media competition on a regular basis, whether that be on a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or yearly basis. Also, make sure that your competitor research spreadsheet is always up to date so that you can discover any new chances or dangers.
Wrap up
Conducting a competitive analysis on social media is essential to the expansion of your brand since it enables you to establish a strong social presence, earn the confidence of customers, and strengthen your brand’s reputation.
You will be able to undertake this analysis for any of your social media profiles once you have mastered the techniques outlined above. Find out what your brand’s goals are, then transform your studied and categorized metrics into insights that are rich in context in order to enhance your social media strategy.