Looking for social media success?
A quickest and easiest way to achieve this is to do social media competitive analysis.
There are several brands that earn grand success with their social media strategies and set benchmarks for their competitors.
To stack up against similar brands in your industry, you need to do an extensive social media competitor analysis.
Here are the steps to start with-
1) Find Your Competitors on Social Media
In order to start the social media competitive analysis, the first thing to do is to identify your competitors and also the platforms used by them.
You may have an idea of your main competitors, but that’s not enough.
You have to go after your competitors successful on social media and growing their business through it.
Google helps you to easily find your competition and competitors.
For example, if your company sold digital marketing course, you would search for the best digital marketing institute.
Suppose you’re XYZ digital marketing institute in Delhi, your competitors will be as shown in the image-
Search the websites that are in your specific industry.
Now, after this, explore each website and measure their activeness on the social media platforms they use.
You will find social media links are located at either the header or footer of the site.
Keeping your industry in mind, try to find at least five competitors and archive them in a sheet. This will be your data storage place.
Else you can use a social media tool, like Sprout Social which provides a spreadsheet with sections for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can choose any social network for your analysis. You may also notice, your competitors promote themselves on at least four to five platforms.
This procedure may consume a long time if you’re in a highly competitive industry. But, as much you go deep, the better results will be.
2) Archive Your Data
Once you’ve found the competitors, the next step is to collect data.
Now, data collection will depend on the platform you’re working.
Here, you can see the example of Facebook competition analysis-
Facebook Competitive Analysis
First, manually review your competitor’s page. You will come how many followers and likes are on the page.
Note down if they have any special section on their page and that is trending in your industry.
This means it’s working for them and you can take the example of the shop section enabled at the top of their page.
You should not assume that follower counts are your complete analysis.
You can take note of other activities doing well for them.
You can take help of different social media tools to measure those activities.
You can see how many posts and at which time your competitor’s posts on their Facebook page.
You can also check the excessiveness of the type of content posted on the page, like its text, images or videos.
Include all of this in your spreadsheet, as well as any additional metrics that are important to your brand.
3) Evaluate Actions taken by Your Competitors
After data collection, now it’s time to understand the way these platforms are used by your competitors.
Examine the following things-
- Which time the last posting was done?
- Is there any long gap between the posts?
- Quick or late response for the comments?
You can easily determine the social activeness of your competitor brands by answering these three questions.
Activeness will be calculated if they post at a gap of a few days.
Next important thing is the type of content used by your competitors in their posts.
So go through the last 10 posts of your competitor to know how many of them are promotional.
Promotional posts are a contest, a sale or products including links.
Once you have analyzed each competitor, put the data in your spreadsheet.
4) Find What Sort of Website Content They Have
Website analysis is the last step of the social media analysis.
As you know content marketing and social media are integral and therefore many companies use blogs to create content to be published on social media.
Now, you’ve to measure your competitor sites and their blog section.
When you reach their blog section and analyze the content, you come to know which content idea is going for you.
For better and quick results, you can take help of Buzzsumo and plug each site into it. This will let you which post has how many likes, shares, and comments.
This step is optional and can be chosen on preference. Although, if you’re in an industry where blogging is important, then you would go for following this step.
5) Put Your Data to Do
Now, you are ready with all sorts of data and thus you need to use it relevantly.
Using your brand’s social media analytics, you can compare your brand to your competitors.
Remember the social media competitive analysis isn’t something to clone every activity done by competitors.
It’s a guide that lets you understand the game of social media in a particular industry.
For instance, the analysis result states that if most of the competitor publishes promotional posts 20% of the time. You better not to go beyond that, or else take risk of turning off your audience.
Conclusion
Knowing your social media competition could be quite helpful in making your own strategy.
Here are 5 steps that will not only let you how to do social media competition analysis but also how to use them for your own branding and other goals.
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