Struggling to outperform your competition on social media? Nothing feels better than outperforming your opponents on social media. To do this, you must keep a careful watch on what your competitors are doing a.k.a. performing a social media competitive analysis.
You must understand what is working for them and how they are doing compared to your content. This not only allows you to assess your social media performance but also provides you with the tools to enhance your approach.
In this blog, we’ll cover all you need to know about social media competitive analysis, from data collecting strategies and procedures to drawing conclusions and presenting your results.
What is a Social Media Competitive Analysis?
The process of identifying your top rivals and obtaining information about their performance (both positive and negative) to compare to your own is known as social media competitive analysis. It is one of the most effective and systematic methods to examine how your online presence compares to the competition, and it can assist both B2B and B2C businesses.
This form of analysis will force you to look at indicators like follower count, posting frequency, engagement rate, hashtags, and more. You’ll learn what works (and what doesn’t), and you’ll find new methods to improve your plan.
You’ll examine important metrics such as follower numbers, engagements, and reach across several platforms, noting their accomplishments and the kind of content that gets the most favorable engagement.
Then, you use this data as a benchmark to compare your performance and identify methods to enhance them.
What is the Main Purpose of Doing a Social Media Competitive Analysis?
Social media competitive analysis helps you peel back the layers of bluster surrounding your industry and its players.
Did a competitor’s social post go viral?
Should you copy it or not?
What type of outcomes do you expect to accomplish if you do?
Is it on the brand to replicate that social post?
This blog post will break down how to perform a social media competitive analysis for your business. We’ll cover how to identify your competition, determine which data to focus on, and compile and analyze your data.
Once you’ve completed your own analysis, you’ll develop meaningful insights. You’ll know which businesses are producing the most successful content, what types of content are generating the most interaction, and what you can do next to improve your brand’s social media positioning.
4 Most Effective Tips To Run a Social Media Competitive Analysis
Social media competitive analysis entails a set of tasks that must be completed many times. And, when it comes to establishing and finishing successful projects, planning is the key to delivering insightful analyses and executing a fantastic job.
You need to know precisely what duties you need to perform at each stage and how to complete them as fast and correctly as possible.
As we break down our method, you’ll see that we concentrate on one aspect at a time. We separate the identification of your competitors from the collection and analysis of data. This simplifies the whole procedure. It also expedites the procedure. As you go through each phase of your social media competitive analysis, you’ll feel a greater feeling of accomplishment and happiness.
1. Identify Your Competitors
The first step in doing a social media competitive analysis is determining who your major competitors are. Concentrate on the brands whose services or products are most closely related to yours. And you probably already know who they are.
To begin, you should target three to five rivals. Investigate each of their social media profiles; you’ll most likely want to target the firms with the most followers and activity.
On the contrary, if you don’t know who your biggest competitors are, Google them! Look for terms that are linked to your solution.
For example, if you own a sporting goods firm, put “sporting goods company” or “sports goods producers” into Google. The results that appear are prospective rivals for your analysis. It’s that simple!
2. Start Collecting Social Media Data of Your Competitors
The next step is to gather social media data. You may adopt one of two methods.
To begin, you can manually gather social media data. Visit all of your selected businesses’ social media pages and take note of their follower count, likes per post, interactions, shares, and more.
Many social media networks, such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, include native analytics tools that may assist you in scraping data about your competition.
This method, however, is time-consuming and inefficient since you must visit each social media outlet individually and input all of the data into a spreadsheet.
Because follower numbers and likes fluctuate all the time, the data will never be totally up to date. Furthermore, drawing comparisons across multiple channels and calculating sophisticated metrics is substantially more difficult.
The second alternative is to automate the acquisition of social media data. Tools like Predis.ai gather public data from your competitor’s social media accounts and aggregate it all in one place.
In this manner, you can get precise, full, and timely data from your social media competition study, allowing you to derive relevant comparison insights.
You just need to add the business profiles you wish to monitor. Predis.ai’s competitive analysis dashboards provide accurate, up-to-date information in a single location.
3. Analyze the Social Media Data That You’ve Collected
After you’ve gathered your data, it’s time to begin evaluating it. Analysis can be seen as a wide word with several applications. For clarity, we prefer to conceive of analysis as a series of questions that provide insights.
Check Which Brand Has Remained Consistent Over Time
On social media, consistency is essential. It’s all part of the process of building a successful brand. When evaluating your competitors, consider how consistent they have been in providing the content.
Depending on the indicators you’re looking at, you should be able to tell if a brand has been consistent or has dropped the ball someplace.
Where are Your Competitors Underperforming?
Can you identify any areas where your rivals seem to be failing to produce results?
This may need a bit more work to determine, but once you’ve defined what ‘underperformance’ looks like, you’ll be able to immediately understand where rivals are failing.
For example, looking at engagement values vs. the number of articles published is a simple approach to see whether the competition is failing.
Here are some questions to consider:
- Can you tell how many likes, shares, or reactions they receive on average?
- How does one brand compare to all others?
- Which brand gets the lowest engagement?
- What is the size of the brand’s audience on the social platform that you are focused on?
- Is the engagement ratio (in relation to audience size) low or high?
- How do you determine what low or high engagement values are for your brand and industry?
Which Types of Content are Good Performers and Why?
Identifying top-performing social media material is going to be one of the most important components of your investigation. When doing so, don’t stop at determining if blog articles or videos are effective; instead, go further.
Pay close attention to your competitors’ videos. Examine them.
Here are some questions to consider:
- Did the video seem structured, and what did the structure include?
- How long is each video on average?
- Who appears in their videos?
- What kinds of information do they share?
- Do they make any offers?
- How strong are their calls to action?
How Often Are Your Competitors Publishing Content?
Understanding the regularity with which your rival releases content is also important. Frequency is important since all companies must sell themselves in order to remain relevant, yet they all have financial limits.
Yes, some businesses have higher resources, but that doesn’t guarantee they know how to efficiently employ them.
When you study your competitor’s frequency of social posting, you may categorize the sorts of posts they produce by format. This will allow you to observe the content kinds people are concentrating on.
You’ll be able to establish a strategy for your content creation based on the sorts of content proven to achieve results after you’ve recognized the types of content brands are creating.
4. Take Action
Finally, after you’ve met with your marketing team, be sure to act on your findings and start making adjustments to your social media plan. Try out some fresh hashtags that your rival has used and that you haven’t used previously.
Alternatively, consider providing more evergreen content since such sorts of pieces generate high interaction rates from your competitors. You may also include freshly found keywords in your account biographies to make your brand more apparent to consumers who are actively searching.
Whatever path you choose, the key line is to put what you’ve learned into practice and don’t be hesitant to experiment with your plan. That is, after all, why you did a social media competitive analysis in the first place!
Examples of Social Media Competitive Analysis
You could be asking what indicators to evaluate in a social media competitive study and what conclusions to take from your results.
The metrics you monitor are usually determined by your social media KPIs. Here are some indicators for measuring social media success across several platforms.
1. Instagram Social Media Competitive Analysis
Instagram, being an image-based medium, is popular among beauty firms. It’s a terrific platform for them to advertise their goods and repost user-generated material, including selfies from beauty bloggers and makeup artists.
For this example, you will see how you can use Predis.ai to do Instagram competitor analysis. In Predis.ai we have added Starbucks’s Instagram account for analysis. You can enter any public profile that you want to analyze.
Straightaway you can see that Predis.ai gives you all necessary metrics at the top. You can see their engagement rates, number of followers, average likes and comments.
Predis.ai uses AI to classify your competitors content, organizes it and shows it to you in an easy to read and comprehend format. You can easily find out meaningful insights and plan your social media strategy.
You can check your competitor’s content distribution and engagement patterns across posts. Their AI logically combines posts in categories and shows you in a sunburst chart. You can click on any category to see the corresponding posts. This is a great feature as you can directly study your competitor’s posts from Predis.ai. This can help you a ton to analyze the type of content your competitors are using and what is working or not working for them.
2. YouTube Social Media Competitive Analysis
Let’s use the well-known vehicle companies for our YouTube competitive analysis scenario.
Because YouTube has a 30-day data restriction, we’ll examine a time period closer to the publication of this blog post: the first two weeks of November.
According to the Key Metrics chart, Mercedes-Benz is significantly more active on YouTube than BMW.
However, the top four most-viewed videos of this time span are all from BMW. This is consistent with what we witnessed on Facebook. BMW may post less often, but its messages seem to get more attention from fans.
Of course, Mercedes-Benz continues to be the leader in Total Video Views. However, the corporation would be wise to investigate how BMW distributes its material in order to get a pretty high degree of attention for the few videos it publishes.
3. Facebook Social Media Competitive Analysis
If Facebook is your primary channel, you should examine how you compare to their competition on the network.
For this analysis, we have chosen Mercedes and Chanel. On Predis.ai we can see that they have a good amount of followers and posts but the average engagement rate is low.
It can be observed that they have a good amount of content around the Luxury category, as they are a luxury brand. The categories which pop up are all around their business like design, automobiles, cars, transport, motor, and so on. It is
You can see the posts categorized with their AI. Meaningful insights can be derived from the average engagement rate, the share of voice, and engagement percentage. You can observe that they have a better share of voice in the Fashion, Art, and Travel categories.
4. Twitter Social Media Competitive Analysis
Let’s have a look at Twitter now. We picked three prominent fast-food restaurants for this example: Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Chipotle.
Wendy’s has over 4 million followers, much more than competitors Taco Bell or Chipotle. The second graph, on the other hand, shows an unusual surge in Chipotle’s followers over the course of three days.
Based on this information, you should investigate what Chipotle was blogging about over those three days to determine whether a similar strategy may work for you. Perhaps one of its postings has gone viral! So let’s go a little further.
The table below displays the most retweeted tweets from Chipotle throughout those three days. Of course, there will be a Halloween contest! Perhaps that’s a strategy you should keep in mind for your client’s next Halloween promotion.
5. LinkedIn Social Media Competitive Analysis
Finally, for LinkedIn, consider two US retail behemoths: Walmart and Target.
As seen in the graphic below, Walmart is obviously the market leader in this channel.
Walmart’s fan base is also rapidly expanding. It drops somewhat on weekends, which makes sense given that LinkedIn is a professional site that receives greater traffic throughout the week.
We can observe, however, that the shift in followers over time suggests a trend. This might be due to trends on LinkedIn, or it could be because the two organizations used identical techniques – and had comparable results.
When we check into Followers Change Per Weekday, we can see that Walmart’s busiest days are Monday through Wednesday. Target might maybe strive to offer fresh employment openings and other forms of information on certain days as well.
Wrapping It Up
Analyzing your competitors’ moves is a critical component of any marketing plan. Because of the widespread use of social media, knowing the complexity of how your competitors use their social media platforms may offer you a significant competitive edge and should be a goal for every organization.
Following our tutorial on how to analyze and arrange your rivals’ data with a social media competitive analysis might help you go ahead and dominate the industry. Keep this blog in mind as you begin your approach, and do leave a comment if you have any further tips!
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