How To Analyze Your Competitor For Social Media Strategies
They say, keep your friends closer, keep your competitors even closer.
Why? Apart from having a pulse on what they are up to, it also helps get a sniff on their latest strategies for the future.
For instance, social media. It takes quite a long span of time before your business becomes socially active and accepted. Moreover, it is challenging. Social media has set an equal level field for everyone to reach out, interact and win their customers. This makes it even difficult to strategize your marketing.
That is why it is important to do a competitor analysis and gain an in-depth understanding of their social media strategies and how it works for them.
To begin with, what is Competitor analysis?
According to this Entrepreneur post, Competitor Analysis is, “Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.”
Once you know how your competitors use social media to their marketing advantage, you can relate it to your offerings and devise a better social media strategy. Such a improvised strategy will help reach your marketing goals and will also lead to beating your competitors at their own game.
But, copying the strategy of your competitors is a recipe for disaster.
Jack Ma, the founder of Asian eCommerce giant Alibaba says, “You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy, and you die.”
The key to successful competitor analysis is Identify Competitors -> Observe Their Tactics -> Measure Metrics -> Improve Successful Models.
How to do a competitor analysis for social media strategy?
Here is an exhaustive list of questions and checks you can do to figure out the social media strategy of your competitors.
Identify your competition
Sounds so simple right? You might be assuming that you know all of them by names. Or, do you? Social media is such a vast space. It is never possible to have all the information about one particular person or a brand.
Moreover, your competition can come from two different sources:
- Direct competitors: those who sell to the same market as you, with identical or near identical offerings.
- Indirect competitors: those who are not selling the same thing as you, but having a substitute or complementary offering that could be eating into your market share.
Identifying at least four direct and indirect competitors will give you a broad picture about how your competition is leveraging social media for marketing and selling advantage.
Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram make it easy to find your competitors. All you have to do is to follow on brand and similar brand names pop up as suggestions.
Also notice that some of the brands in the pic above have a blue tick alongside their profiles which stands for officially verified profiles. Verified profiles enjoy greater social recognition than others. If your competitor has a verified sign, probably you might also want to get verified.
What are the social platforms they are active on
Not every competitor is going to rely on the same platform with equal force. Each one will have their own choice of where they will shine the most. The choice could have been made based on the traction they received, ease of creating posts, higher RoI and so on.
Observe and devise your strategy for each social media platform in tune with your competitors. This will save you the effort to be active on all social media platforms. Also, it helps you know which platforms your competitors have a weak presence. Building your presence on such platforms will give you an upper hand.
What kind of posts do they create
Images, videos, blog post shares, contests, events — there are plenty of post types that help build social presence. Knowing which kind your competitor uses the most helps to plan your future posts too.
Tools like SEMRush makes it easy to list out the top performing content of your competitors. You can zero in on all their top content in a single dashboard thus making it easy to plan for your next social media posts.
How often do they post
Posting a social media post is like delivering a speech. You have to give it when there is maximum audience. Each social media platform has its own time span when the reach is maximum. This HubSpot infographic describes the best times to post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.
It is great to follow these best times. But, it is also wise to check if your competitors have figured out some other times for social media posting. Check for how often they post and at what times they post to fine tune your social media schedule.
Social Media Metrics
Facebook likes, Instagram and Twitter Followers, YouTube subscribers, LinkedIn connections all have tales to tell about your competitor’s social media activity. These social media metrics help you benchmark your social media position directly against your competitors for a comparison.
You can also look into metrics like engagement rate per post, distribution of interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.) to know how your competitors fare against your brand.
How do they use paid and organic posts
Social media allows your brand to maximize your post’s reach using paid adverts. But, not all adverts must go the paid route. If you are clueless about a direction or not getting adequate results, observe how competitors distinguish in using paid and organic posts.
Understanding how they write ad copies for paid ads and how organic posts are created will also help you spot strengths and weaknesses in your competitors. Armed with such information you can easily create a content calendar that will maximize your social media reach.
Tools to help you analyze your competitor’s social media strategy
Now that you know how to do competitor analysis for social media strategy, here are some tools that makes the work easier:
BuzzSumo
An online portal that lists out details of social shares and reach that competitor content receives.
SEMRush
Basically, a search term analysis tool with advanced tools for social media tracking, analyzing engagement trends, social mentions, hashtag popularity and so on.
Hootsuite Streams
A comprehensive social media management and monitoring tool that integrates all social media platforms under one interface. Of course, you can watch your competitors too.
Sprout Social
A social media management tool to deliver and measure social media presence across several channels. Has in-built tools for Social CRM, monitoring, analytics, etc.
Conclusion
In business, you don’t always have to have a direct confrontation to win competitors. Sometimes, knowing what they do and being better than them helps you to win. Especially, in a cut-throat scenario like social media marketing. Now that you know how to analyze your competitor’s social media strategy, get going to being better than them.
