Douglas FloresEveryone’s social media journey is different, including your competitors’ and your own brand’s. Learning from one another is a beautiful thing. The question is, “How?”
Whether you’re a small, niche-focused company or a multinational conglomerate, a social media competition study can help you better understand your industry and your target demographic.
Let’s take the plunge into the world of social media competition benchmarking.
What is a competitive analysis in social media?
Analysis of your competitors’ activities on social media can serve as a guide to developing and sustaining a successful digital strategy.
It’s the practise of keeping tabs on your rivals’ social media activity and gathering data on their content, customer service, and marketing strategies. What works, what needs rethinking, and how to improve your marketing strategy are all things you can learn from this.
Why Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis?
Monitoring and analysing your competitors is just as important as keeping tabs on the success of your own brand. By analysing the competition on social media, your company can:
- Find your rivals and observe their every move.
- Determine which social media platforms they utilise.
- Find out who their audience is and how they behave.
- Figure out when your audience is most likely to see your updates.
- Motivate yourself with their writing.
- Examine your social media plan for weaknesses and make adjustments as needed.
- Check your standing in your field.
- Find emerging market tendencies.
There’s no end to the possibilities here. Read on to learn the ins and outs of disclosing all this vital data.
How to analyse the social media competition.
Let’s find out how to do a social media competition study to better our marketing tactics.
You need to find your rivals on social media.
The first order of business is to study the rival firms. It’s important to keep in mind that there are a few different factors to think about.
Straight up rivals
Check out the competition first because chances are you have a target market and a similar offering.
Indirect rivals
You should also look into your industry’s indirect rivals, which might be either high- or low-end alternatives. These fresh perspectives can help you better understand your target market.
Conducting a keyword search on Google is a great first step in analysing the competition. Find out where your competitors are in relation to the top 10 industry or product keywords related to your brand. Find out who you’re up against in the marketplace with this useful information. You should also keep an eye on the companies who spend money on Google advertisements to boost their visibility in organic search results.
Choose the top five brands that are most applicable to your research and investigate them further on social media. Keep an eye out for brands that have similar target demographics and effective results, as search engine results may vary from those of social media platforms.
Use social media to compile the necessary information.
In-depth research into your competitors’ social media advantages and disadvantages should begin when you’ve identified your target competition group.
Discuss issues like:
Which social media do they prefer?
What is the size and rate of expansion of their fan base?
With what regularity do they update?
What does their material consist of?
In what ways do people interact with their posts?
How would you describe the hashtags they use?
To what extent do they interact with the community and how quickly do they respond to comments?
What distinguishes them from other similar products?
Additionally, your business’s objectives and current stage of development should guide your selection of relevant KPIs. If you are a start-up, you should probably concentrate on growing your fan following before you worry about increasing engagement.
You may easily keep tabs on the advertising tactics of your competitors and conduct more in-depth analyses thanks to the resources at your disposal.
You may, with Benchmark, keep an eye on what your rivals are up to in terms of social media activity like posts, campaigns, hashtags, and user interactions, for instance. Keep an eye on what the competition is doing and take note of their strategies, achievements, and setbacks.
Compare your outcomes to those of similar organisations.
Once you have collected this valuable information, you can either put it all in an Excel spreadsheet or look at smarter solutions to help you save time and gain more insight.
Taking a look at how your content strategy stacks up against the competition is a crucial step. When it comes to social media, are your rivals providing unique, curated, or promotional content? Do they mostly share motivational or edifying content? And what kind of file types do they use?
Using this information, you can adjust your own content strategy in a data-driven way, increasing the likelihood of a positive response from your audience.
Figure out the best method to move forward and the resources you’ll need.
It’s time to put together a social media strategy based on your research and analysis.
However, this is only the beginning of the arduous effort involved in competitive analysis. Research of this nature should be performed at regular intervals (at least once every six months) to keep up with the latest developments.
You can do it manually or using high-tech software. The following metrics should be considered each week:
- Content Audience Engagement
- Media Hashtags for Profit
- Using a specialist tool, such as Benchmark, can help your company save time and gain valuable information.
As a conclusion.
Is it time to compare yourself to the competition? It may seem like a lot of work, but if you can find the right information and put it to use, your social media will explode. The more you put it into practise, the more success you’ll have in business.