How to carry out social media competitor analysis for your business
Social media competitor analysis is a task all online businesses should consider. Social media has quickly taken over, and it’s difficult to get an edge over your competitors, especially if you’re just starting out. As a newbie, you have to struggle to get followers, create content and establish a connection with your audience.
However, the good news is that you can still get ahead of your business rivals thanks to competitor analysis.
What is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis refers to the process of identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strong and weak points as compared to your own product or service. When carrying out competitor analysis for social media, you’re looking at your competitor’s social activity and accounts.
How Do You Perform a Social Media Competitive Analysis?
Below are a few steps on how to conduct a social media competitive analysis.Know Who Your Competitors are. Here, we are talking about demographics and mapping out the real target audiences.
While some companies have no problem identifying who their competition is, some do require work , especially for international businesses. You can identify who your competitors are by using the Google search.
- Know Their Brand Voice: Do your competitors post as a person within the brand or as the voice of the brand? Although most big brands post as the brand, posting as a person within the brand can add a personal touch.
- Identify What Their Fan to Follower Ratio is: Once you’ve known who your competitors are, it’s time to take note of their fan-to-follower ratio. You’ll notice that some brands only follow a handful of people, while others follow everyone that follows them, especially on Twitter.
- Establish How Active they are on Social Media: This will require some manual work. Take note of how many times they’ve posted unique content and the duration.
- Measure Their Engagement Rate with Fans: When analysing their engagement data, take a couple of posts and note how many comments they get, retweets, likes, or repins. You need to take the average engagement per post and divide this by the number of fans they have.
- Determine The Type of Content Being posted: Are they posting polls, videos, photos, trivia or contests as part of their content? Having this information will help you in regards to engagement and fan involvement. Check to see if they use hashtags frequently, if they repost content from other brands, or if they are using a link shortener service.
- Are They Using Paid Media? While it’s hard to know the exact amount of money your competitors are spending on social media, you can find out if they do spend money by looking for sponsored ads on both Facebook and Twitter. Hosting a lot of giveaways could also be an indication that they are spending a huge amount of money to increase their following.
Tools You Can Use For Competitor Analysis
You can now find a variety of tools that can offer insights into a range of areas.
Here are some tools you need to consider:.
- SEMrush: With tools from SEMrush, you can view your competitor’s keywords, rankings, and even paid search. You can opt for the free version, which gives you limited results for up to 10 URLs. Alternatively, you can go for the premium version to see all the data for only $70 a month.
- CRO Monitor: This tool shows you when the competition is carrying out A/B tests, taking screenshots that are displayed in a dashboard, or visiting pages from different IP addresses. You can use the free version or upgrade to view different watch lists.
- Alexa: Being one of the most popular tools, Alexa mainly ranks websites based on their traffic volume. With Alexa, you can know the time spent on the site, demographics, bounce rate, and daily page views per visitor.
- Buzzsumo: Buzzsumo allows you to search for content by entering your competitor’s URL or by typing in a keyword. You can then narrow down the results by shares across social sites, content type, and publish date. With the paid account, you have access to more tools and data.
Competitor analysis for social media allows you to look at how your target audience engages with your competitors. This gives you an insight on how to interact and engage with them on social media. Moreover, you can identify their weaknesses and use this as an opportunity to increase your brand’s exposure.