How to Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

Jun 12

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, understanding your competition is crucial. Conducting a social media competitive analysis allows you to gain valuable insights into your industry's landscape and refine your strategy to stay ahead. Here’s how you can perform this analysis effectively:

1. Identify Your Competitors

The first step in any successful competitor analysis is identifying who your competitors actually are. This process involves more than just recognizing the most prominent names in your industry. Start by compiling a comprehensive list of businesses that directly compete with yours in terms of products, services, or market share. Don't overlook the indirect competitors who might not offer the same things but still target similar demographics on social media.

To thoroughly understand your unique competitive landscape, consider various sources to identify these rivals:

Customer feedback: Pay attention to names that come up when customers compare options or mention other businesses they've considered.
Social media searches: Use keywords related to your industry on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to see which companies are engaging with similar topics.
Industry forums and blogs: These can be goldmines for discovering lesser-known competitors who might be gaining traction.
Market reports: Comprehensive industry reports often list key players and can provide insights into market shares and segments.

Once you have a list, categorize these competitors into tiers based on their market influence or direct threat to your business. Top-tier competitors are the ones most similar to you in terms of product/service offerings and market reach. Lower tiers might include smaller or emerging businesses that are starting to make a name for themselves. Understanding the different layers of competition helps you prioritize your analysis and focus your strategic efforts effectively.

2. Choose the Right Platforms

Selecting the right platforms for competitor analysis is crucial. It's important not to waste resources monitoring platforms where neither your audience nor your competitors are significantly active. Start by pinpointing where your competitors have established a presence. Are they leveraging the visual appeal of Instagram, the professionalism of LinkedIn, or the conversational nature of Twitter? Perhaps they are using newer platforms like TikTok to engage with a younger demographic.

To effectively choose which platforms to focus on, consider the following steps:

Review Their Presence: Check each competitor’s level of activity and engagement on various platforms. Note where they post most frequently and where they receive the most interaction from their audience.
Assess Platform Relevance: Align this with the nature of your business and the habits of your target audience. For instance, a B2B company might prioritize LinkedIn, while a fashion retailer would find more value on Instagram and Pinterest.
Analyze Content Types: Observe the type of content your competitors post on these platforms. Videos, live sessions, infographics, and user-generated content can all have different impacts and may be more effective on one platform over another.
Spy on Ads: Many social media platforms allow you to view the ads that a business is running. This can be invaluable to understand where they are investing their ad spend and what kind of promotional efforts they are focusing on.
Use Tools: Utilize tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or BuzzSumo to track where your competitors’ content is performing best. These tools can provide analytics across multiple platforms, making it easier to spot trends and successful strategies.

By focusing on the right platforms, you can more efficiently allocate your efforts and gain meaningful insights into your competitors' strategies. This focused approach helps you refine your own social media strategy to better engage with your audience and achieve your marketing goals.

3. Analyze Their Content

Deeply examining your competitors' content strategies is key to understanding what resonates with your shared audience and identifying gaps in your own content. When analyzing their content, consider several dimensions to get a comprehensive view:

Content Type: Identify the kinds of content your competitors are posting. Are they using more images, videos, infographics, or written posts? Noticing a trend towards video content, for example, might indicate that your audience prefers more dynamic and engaging formats.
Engagement Levels: Look at which posts are receiving the most likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement. High-engagement posts can provide insights into what topics or formats your audience finds most compelling.
Posting Frequency: Track how often your competitors post and at what times. This can reveal insights into optimal posting schedules and how often your target audience likes to see new content.
Themes and Topics: Note the recurring themes and topics covered in their posts. Are there industry trends they are consistently mentioning? How do they position themselves in relation to these topics? This could guide you on crucial industry discussions you might be missing.
Visual and Audio Quality: Assess the quality of visuals and audio used in their content. High-quality, professional-looking images, videos, and sound can significantly affect audience perception and engagement rates.
Tone of Voice: Observe the tone they use. Is it formal, casual, humorous, or authoritative? The tone that resonates with your audience could inform how you might want to communicate your messages.
User Interaction: Look at how they interact with their audience in comments and posts. Do they respond quickly, are they helpful, do they engage in conversations or merely thank users for comments? This interaction level can tell you a lot about customer service priorities and community engagement strategies.
Content Success and Failures: It's just as important to note what doesn't work. Which posts get little to no engagement? Learning from the content that fails to engage can be as instructive as understanding what works.

By meticulously analyzing these elements, you not only gain insights into what types of content you should be producing but also how to effectively communicate and engage with your audience. This analysis can directly feed into refining your content strategy to better compete in the digital space.

4. Assess Their Engagement

Understanding how competitors interact with their followers gives critical insights into effective community management practices. Observe the promptness and tone of their responses to comments and customer service inquiries. Do they provide solutions, or are they primarily acknowledging feedback? Additionally, look at how they utilize interactive content such as polls, contests, or live sessions to foster engagement. Such activities can significantly boost participation and loyalty, revealing what might resonate with your own audience.

5. Evaluate Their Followers

Studying the growth trends and demographics of your competitors’ followers can provide valuable clues about the market. Analyze changes in follower counts and scrutinize any available demographic data such as age, location, and interests. This analysis helps you understand who is attracted to their content and why. Knowing these details allows you to tailor your content and marketing strategies more effectively to appeal to similar segments.

6. Review Hashtags and Campaigns

Hashtags and campaigns are instrumental in amplifying reach and engagement. Identifying which hashtags your competitors frequently use and assessing the engagement levels of these tags can provide crucial insights. Also, observe the specific campaigns they launch, whether these are promotional, seasonal, or cause-related, and note how they integrate these campaigns with their overall social media strategy.

When analyzing hashtags, consider how broad or niche the tags are. Broad hashtags may reach a wider audience, but niche tags often drive more targeted engagement. Look for patterns in the types of hashtags that garner the most likes, comments, and shares. Are they related to specific products, events, or general industry terms?

For campaigns, evaluate their execution and results:

Campaign Type: Are they running contests, giveaways, partnerships, or awareness campaigns? Each type serves different purposes and generates different types of engagement.
Content Integration: How well is the campaign integrated with their regular content? Does it feel seamless or disjointed?
Audience Response: How does the audience react to these campaigns? Positive reactions and high engagement levels indicate a successful alignment with audience interests.
Frequency and Timing: How often do your competitors launch campaigns, and at what times of year? Timing can significantly affect a campaign's success, particularly if it aligns with relevant events or seasons.

By understanding these elements, you can better gauge which strategies might be effective for your own social media efforts and identify opportunities to innovate beyond what your competitors are doing. This analysis will help you refine your use of hashtags and campaigns to maximize engagement and reach on your social channels.

7. Use Tools and Metrics

Leveraging the right tools can transform how you gather and interpret social media data, making your analysis both accurate and scalable. Tools like Social Blade, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or BuzzSumo offer comprehensive analytics that cover everything from engagement rate and follower growth to content reach and keyword popularity. These platforms allow you to track your competitors' performance over time, providing insights into their content strategy's effectiveness. Focus on metrics that are most indicative of success in your industry, such as engagement rates, which reflect how compelling and relevant the audience finds the content, or follower growth rate, which indicates the brand's increasing popularity or visibility.

8. Perform a SWOT Analysis

After gathering and analyzing the data, use it to conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in comparison to your competitors. This analysis helps to visualize where you stand in relation to the competition:

Strengths: What are you doing better than your competitors? What unique resources and capabilities do you possess?
Weaknesses: Where do you fall short? What elements of your social media strategy could be improved?
Opportunities: What trends or gaps in the market can you exploit? Are there under-served audiences or rising trends that you can capitalize on?
Threats: What are the external risks to your social media strategy? Are competitors doing something you are not?

9. Implement Actionable Insights

With a clear understanding of where your social media strategy stands relative to your competitors, begin implementing actionable insights. Adjust your content strategy to incorporate more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Perhaps you need to shift your posting schedule to times when engagement rates are higher, or maybe you need to invest more in video content if that’s what drives interaction. Also, consider refining your engagement tactics—such as improving response times and increasing interactivity with polls and contests. Additionally, strategic promotional methods like targeted ads or influencer partnerships could be enhanced to better reach and engage potential customers. By continuously applying these insights, you can dynamically adjust your strategy to stay ahead in the competitive landscape.

Regularly revisiting and revising your strategy based on new data ensures that your social media efforts remain robust and responsive to the ever-changing digital marketing environment.

See more at: eNRG Media Group