10 Tips and Tricks to Perform Competitor Analysis for Social Media

When you are doing business but have no idea about what your competitors are doing, you will lag for sure. Because whether you are a big, medium, or small business, you need to know about who your competitors are, and what they are doing. Now, this knowledge has become simpler due to various social media platforms. Just perform a competitor analysis for social media and you’ll get an idea of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Don’t you know how to do so? Just read this article to learn the 10 tips and tricks to perform competitor analysis for social media. 

What is Competitor Analysis for Social Media and how is It Helpful? 

Competitor analysis for social media refers to an analysis you perform on your competitors on social media to find out their strengths or qualities and weaknesses or flaws to compare them to yours. Thus you can improve your performance and outperform your competitors. 

This analysis will aid you in the following ways: 

• Help you recognize your social media competitors. 
• You’ll know on which social platforms they are active.
• You’ll get an idea about the way they are utilizing those social platforms.
• You’ll understand the way their social strategy is performing. 
• Compare your social outcomes against your competitors. 
• Recognize the social threats in your niche. 
• Identify the gaps or lacking in your social media marketing strategies.

Learn more: How to do Competitor Analysis for Social Media in Bangladesh

What Insights Can Social Media Competitor Analysis Give You Other than About Your Competitors? 

Social media competitor analysis not only lets you know about your competitors but also gives you insights regarding the following:

• Performance standards for your business like voice share, average followers, and engagement rates.
• The fresh and superior concept for content that relates with the target audience or doesn’t relate with the audience that you like to avoid.
• What is the best time to post on social media in Bangladesh?
• Knowledge about the way to connect with the audience on specific platforms either formally or casually.
• Knowledge about potential client pain points.
• Concepts for methods to make your brand different.
• And much more.

Precisely, competitor analysis for social media will offer you based on your investment in it. You can choose to perform an annual social media competitive report or appoint anyone on your team who’ll keep solely keep track of the competitors. Mostly, businesses perform monthly or quarterly reports.

No matter what analysis level you choose, your derived insights are going to be precious.

How to Perform Social Media Competitive Analysis?

Now, let’s directly enter our main topic of discussion. You can perform the competitor analysis for social media easily by following these 10 steps:

1.     Recognize your prime competitors.

2.     Identify the competitive objectives or goals and KPIs.

3.     Select the social networks you like to monitor.

4.     Check the performance growth of social networks over time. 

5.     Have a look at the content strategy of your competitors. 

6.     Have a look at the engagement metrics of your competitors. 

7.     Try to know the way people engage with the content of your social competitors, and check when they are active. 

8.    Get to know the paid social media campaigns of your competitors. 

9.    Perform a SWOT Analysis.

10.  Keep the analysis updated with continuous monitoring of social media.

Let’s explain each of these steps.

1. Recognize your prime competitors:

When you are performing competitor analysis for social media but don’t know who your competitors are, you won’t be able to move even a little bit. You need to do the following to get started with the social media competitive analysis:

• Find out the competitive keywords. Google Ads Keyword Planner is the easiest way for you to get your competitive keywords. This is a free tool and will offer you a list of relevant keywords. 
• Look for the companies who are ranking for those keywords. Google searching will help you do so. 
• Find out which companies appear in your search results when searching for those keywords.
• Check out similar brands that your clients like. It means checking who your direct competitors are. 
• Don’t forget to look for those who are offering the lower-end or higher-end substitutes for your service or products i.e. your indirect competitors. 
• Try listing the prime or top five competitors among them. 

It’s all about figuring out your brand’s social media competitors who are performing like you or outperforming you. Again, whose target audience matches yours whether you are a local, national, or international company. 

2. Identify the competitive objectives or goals and KPIs:

Suppose, you have started a social media competitive analysis but you have no idea what you want to achieve or what your objectives or goals are, then you’ll be going nowhere. You need to define what your objectives or goals are as your goals can be any one of the following:

• Improving natural reach
• Optimizing paid social media
• Emphasizing efforts on the exact social media channels
• Improving messages on social media posts. 

You need to define your goals because it eases your measurement and evaluation of your outcomes or results. You also need to have an exact idea of KPIs to exactly measuring this analysis’s outcomes or results. 

3. Select the social networks you like to monitor:

Once you are done with the above things, try selecting the social networks where your top competitors are mostly active. 

• Facebook Competitive Analysis

Facebook is a known and popular social media platform for a long time. So, you need to start your competitive analysis by manually searching your competitors’ Facebook pages. You’ll be able to know their number of followers, the features or tabs they are utilizing, and the like. Facebook has introduced several new tabs with the time that you might not have noticed yet, visiting your competitors’ pages can introduce those to you. 

You can discover many new features or tabs that your competitors are using and you can also apply those to your page to get better outcomes. 

• Instagram Competitor Analysis

You might have noticed by now that Instagram has gained immense popularity nowadays. People are more likely to share images and videos on Instagram than on other social media. So, this platform has a lot of engagement. If you are not following this platform and your competitors are doing so, your business will be losing a large part of your audience.

Applying this platform depends on your audience type whether they love to spend time over here or not. If you are doing a complete analysis of all social media platforms and trying to get which will be the most effective platform for you, you need to exert all your efforts on that most effective platform. When you come to find out that you’ve no Instagram presence but your audiences are more likely to use this platform, you must open an Instagram account in this scenario. 

• Twitter Competitor Analysis

No matter which social platform you are performing your competitor analysis, may it be Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, try using a competitor analysis tool which I’ll discuss later. These tools will let you compare your profile with your competitors. It will give you a complete report of your competitors such as engagement rates, received messages’ amount, and more. Add all these data to your competitor analysis spreadsheet, and any specific metric crucial for your business.

You can also perform competitor analysis on some additional social networks such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and the like depending on your audience and business type.

Read also: How to Measure the Success of Social Media Marketing Campaigns

4. Check the performance growth of social networks over time:

When you’re done choosing your preferable social networks, try finding how your competitors are engaging their audience and developing their social networks. You’ll require tracking certain metrics to do this such as content metrics, profile metrics, and brand metrics. 

Content metrics let you know the following:

• Type of your competitors’ content such as text, image, or video.
• The number of posts they boost.
• The number of ads they run.
• Their use of live videos.
• The ratio of their image to the video post.
• The number of their used social media services.

Profile metrics let you know the following:

• The number of followers they have.
• The average post numbers they publish each week.
• Their most active social media site.
• The number of likes, shares, and comments each of their posts gets.

Brand metrics will let you know the following: 

• Their voice tones in each of their profile updates.
• The issue types they highlight on their profiles.
• The performance of their posts among their followers.
• Their applied branding methods. 

Which type of metrics you’ll focus on depends on your business goals. Suppose, if your business goal is to improve the content, you need to concentrate on content metrics. When your goal is brand development, concentrate on profile metrics and brand metrics.

Read also: Why Small Businesses Should Use and Invest in Social Media Marketing in Bangladesh

5. Have a look at the content strategy of your competitors:

Developing a well-built content strategy is the first and foremost duty for you to attract and engage your audience on social media. Because the audience no longer prefers the generalized content. They will love your content if it can answer their frequent queries, they find it helpful, and engaging. You need to fulfill Google’s E-E-A-T criteria i.e. you need to show your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Like you, your competitors will also strive to do the above things. So, you need to carefully check out their content strategy to find out the following: 

• Their messages
• Their formats
• Their hashtags
• Their campaigns
• Their captions

Apart from the above, you need to see how often your competitors post on social media such as daily, weekly, or monthly. It will give insight into developing your content calendar.

Read also: How to Develop Pillar Content Strategy for Social Media in Bangladesh

6. Have a look at the engagement metrics of your competitors:

One of the ways to recognize growth opportunities is through engagement rates. If you want to know about the performance of your competitors, check the following things:

• How many posts do they publish?
• How many replies they’ve given?
• How many likes they’ve got?
• What is their response time?
• Their way of responding to clients.

You need to check the below-mentioned metrics if you want to know the above things:

• Engagement rate and profile engagement
• Engagement rate and post engagement
• Engagement of boosted posts
• Evolution of engagement (daily or monthly)
• Types of posts ranked by engagement
• Likes, Shares, and Comments
• Hashtag engagement

7. Try to know the way people engage with the content of your social competitors, and check when they are active: 

You can evaluate 10 posts at a time or a month’s data once based on the thoroughness you need in your reporting. Find out how many likes, shares, retweets, or comments your competitor’s every post has got, then based on that derive the average rate for each engagement. 

When you are aware of the engagement ways of people with your social competitors’ posts, find out when your audience is active. It is equally crucial as the other factors because posting a post when your audience is offline has no value. Social media posting can enhance brand awareness but posting whenever you like won’t get you any results. So, increase the chances of getting your target audience by posting at the right time. 

8. Get to know the paid social media campaigns of your competitors:

This is also quite important trick or step in analyzing your social media competitors. Because your competitors are attracting their clients not only for free but also by making some investments. You won’t be able to find the actual amount they have invested but you can find it by visiting their social pages. Just look for any paid ads on those pages.

You can get an idea from doing the above, you can also view the left column side of Twitter and look for “Who to follow”, if your competitors appear there, it will denote that they are investing to have more Twitter followers. When you can’t get data regarding your competitors’ paid ads, try using social media competitor analysis tools.

Recommended reading: How To Plan A Social Media Campaign in Bangladesh

9.    Perform a SWOT Analysis:

After you have gathered all the data discussed above, perform a SWOT analysis. I think you are already aware of it. You just need to figure out your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Here, strengths and weaknesses are internal matters of your company, you need to figure out carefully where your company is excelling and where it’s lacking. 

Conversely,  opportunities and threats are external matters or factors. Find out what opportunities and threats exist in the external environment of your business. For this, you need to critically evaluate your competition to get an idea of exactly which sort of threats and opportunities you’ll face. 

An ideal SWOT analysis will take a deep dig into your brand’s total strategy of social media marketing.  

10.  Keep the analysis updated with continuous monitoring of social media

Just performing a social media competitor analysis won’t keep you ahead of your rivals. You also need to keep this analysis updated by regular monitoring of social media to find out the latest trends, or even new competitors in your niche. There is no substitute for keeping yourself always updated.

Social Media Competitive Analysis Tools

Many advanced analytical tools are available in the market. Among them, the following are the most mentionable:

• Hootsuite Streams

This competitive analysis tool lets you track keywords, rivals, and hashtags across each social network. Just combine the data of all your rivals’ social accounts into a stream and review them whenever you need. 

• Socialinsider

Socialinsider will let you perform a fast social media competitive analysis. You can also perform this analysis on all social media platforms. You’ll be able to prepare social media competitor analysis report with it. 

• Mentyonlitics

This monitoring tool for social media lets you follow all mentions of both your company and competitors, and keywords on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and other web resources like blogs, forums, and news. You can always know what all are saying about your company or brand. 

• Brandwatch

Brandwatch will show your brand’s social share of voice (SOV). This SOV is estimated as how many times people are having talks about your brand online versus the interaction numbers about your rivals. 

• Talkwalker

It’s a social listening platform with more than 150 million information sources consisting of forums, social networks, blogs, videos, reviews, and news. This tool will let you perform a social media competitive analysis, and find out industry trends that will boost the performance of your account.

Learn More: A Detailed Guide to Social Media Audit

Final Words:

The 10 tips and tricks to perform competitor analysis for social media I’ve discussed above must have made you confident enough to perform this analysis right now. In case, you need any help or assistance regarding this issue or any type of digital marketing, please contact digiSocial.