8 Simple Tips for Social Media Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is an important part of leading your business to the top. It enables brands to identify their shortcomings and build an effective strategy to overcome such challenges. Here are 8 tips for social media competitive analysis.

Find your Competitors

The first thing with competitive analysis is identifying the competitors you have. This means finding the businesses that are in the same field or industry that your business works in. they are going to be your competitors. 

However, this does not mean you pick the top brands in the industry; the key is to identify other businesses that closely align with yours in terms of services and customer base. These companies will have a similar or better performance as your business and will often intersect with your audience base.

Define your Goals

There is no point in starting a process if you don’t know where it ends, you’ll just end up in a never-ending loop of what-ifs and whatnots. Hence, always have a clear goal in mind about the end results. Consider identifying the purpose of your strategy and what you will achieve in the end. 

For example, for some businesses and brands, these goals could include improving their organic reach on social media platforms. For others, it can be improving the quality of their content or managing the paid campaigns on the right platform that works for the business.

Deciding about your goals makes it easier to identify the steps you need to take to fulfil these goals.

Find the Right Platform

Identifying the competitors is just the beginning of the process; now, you need to find the right platform that will work best for your brand. Since you already know the competitors, utilize their social media profiles to identify which platform server is the best for your industry. 

Find their profiles on different social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and so on. Understand where they are most active and which platforms have low amounts of interactions. This should help you identify the platform where your ideal audience is present.

Understand the Growth

After identifying each competitor and the platforms they are active in, you need to understand how they interact with their customers. This should be done for each of the platforms where they have an engaging audience. 

You’ll need to find the number of followers they have on an account, what content they publish on a regular basis, and what tone they use while communicating with their audience. 

Similarly, follow the steps for other activities as well, such as their active hours, number of posts per week, types of posts, boosting posts and so on. This will only be possible with the help of an analytics tool to understand the strategies and content of your competitor.

Content

Now the most important thing, their content. A well-curated content can make or break the connection between your audience and your brand. When it comes to publishing content on social media platforms, it is essential to understand that people aren’t interested in finding generalized content from brands they follow.

That is why only relevant and engaging content prevails on such platforms. Identify what kind of content they are posting per week and how is it different from your own content. Are your competitors offering original or curated content, do they post promotional posts as well? 

Are they publishing videos along with images every week? And also identify the frequency of their posts on each platform, which can help when creating your own content strategy.

Check Engagement

When trying to analyze your competitors, you need to check certain engagement metrics such as post engagement rate, engagement of customers on the boosted posts, hashtags included in each post that was used by the customers, number of likes, shares and so on.

Understand how their audience is engaging with the comment. An easy way to achieve this is by analyzing the like shares and comments on a handful of their posts for at least the past one month.

Active Hours

Find out the right time when most of your audience is online and browsing these social media. There is no point in filing your accounts with posts if people aren’t there to see them in time. They’ll just be pushed to the bottom after a while if there is no engagement. 

Competitive Analysis Tool

Lastly, find the right tool to monitor and analyze these social media analytics. Choose the right tool based on the requirements you have with your clients. For example, if sending weekly reports is a must, find a tool that offers such capabilities. Your aim should be to streamline the whole process and not get entangled in repetitive tasks that only eat up your valuable time.