Attempting to make your business’s voice heard amid thousands of others is difficult, to say the least.
Then throw in the fact that you’re now dealing with businesses who are fighting for the same dollars and eyeballs that you are.
Your social media team can be inspired by what the competition is doing if they conduct a thorough competitive study.
By reading this post, you’re going to learn: How to find your true competition (even if it’s not who you might think it is).
How to find the correct data and metrics to track on your competition.
The best way to put what you learn to use in your social media campaigns.
Use Template to Analyze Your Social Media Competitors
Before you can start undertaking competitive research, you’ll need somewhere to store your data and conclusions. Our competitive analysis sample document can help you out here. Grab it now and deliver the inside scoop about your competition more effortlessly.
Precisely what does it entail to do an analysis of the competition?
A competitor analysis on social media is exactly what it sounds like. To put it briefly:
Identifying your competition (even emerging competitors you may not have heard of) (including emerging competitors you may not have heard about).
Assessing what they’re doing (and how well they’re performing) on social media.
You may then use this information to shape your own approach to social media promotion (and zig when everyone else zags).
Step One: Construct Your Toolkit
Finding the correct tools to help with your study is the first step in conducting a social media competitor analysis. While you may uncover a great amount of information via just scanning your competitor’s profiles, having tools will allow you to delve deeper into your study and find the data you’re looking for.
Step Two: Discover Your Competitors
Finding the rivals you wish to keep an eye on is the next phase in your competition study. This is a critical element of your study since who you choose as your competitors will establish what you’re going to measure your social approach against.
Before you start straight into your study there are two things you need to accomplish first:
Identify if you’re working with direct or indirect competitors.
Recognize the difficulty of your competitors (local, regional, national, global, etc).
Magazines and Journals in the Field
It’s common practise for businesses to publish periodicals for their employees to keep them abreast of developments and share useful advice.
Think your sector is too boring to have its own media? It’s possible that you’ll be taken aback. You’ll need to use Google’s search engine once more to locate them (or whatever search engine you prefer to use).
Three Steps: Choose out the five most formidable rivals you face
One of the trickiest portions of your procedure, given that you may have compiled a long list of rivals after conducting your study.
Instead of having a list of competitors that spans a page or two down your paper, restrict your field down to your top five. These can range from small regional businesses to large national chains, giving rise to the possibility of both direct and indirect competition.
Besides from these four criteria, you might also consider:
- Comparable in size to the target demographic.
- Provided services.
- Identical number of physical sites.
- Step Four: Establish Competitive Analysis Objectives
There’s a good reason why your team is spending so much time learning about and keeping tabs on the competition. But if you don’t know what that reason is, you’re going to end yourself sitting on a pile of data wondering what you can do with it.
- To make sure that your team doesn’t waste their time, take the time to ask why this analysis is necessary and what questions are you expecting to answer?
- You could, for instance, ask, “What voids are our competitors leaving that we could fill to attract our target audience to choose us?“
What is it that our rivals have mastered that would be a major time and resource drain for us to imitate?
How quickly are they growing compared to us?
What types of material are they providing that is causing their audience to interact with it?
How often do they address their devoted followers?
These questions aren’t all comprehensive by any means, but they can serve as a jumping off point for your team.
Choose Which Channels You Want to Keep an Eye On
So you have your top five competitors.
So, what do we do now?
Now is the time to decide which stations you want to keep an eye on. There are two paths you can take with this method.
The first is to watch the channels that you are active on and only observe channels that both you and your competitors are on. If you and your rival are both on Twitter and Facebook, you would focus solely on the former.
The alternative is to keep an eye on your rivals‘ social media profiles regardless of whether or not they use the same platforms that you do.
Look Out Their Content Strategy
The next step of your analysis is going to involve investigating and assessing your competitor’s content strategy for every channel that they are active on. For this phase of your research, refer to the Content Strategy tab in your template:
Determine Post Type
The first content strategy statistic your team is going to track is post type. There are four types of postings that a brand can share on social media:
Posts that the company later shares after someone else published the initial article, photo, video, etc. are called “curated.”
The term “original” is used to describe social media posts that have been made and published by the brand itself.
Content whose primary purpose is to persuade readers to make a purchase or sign up for a service is considered promotional.
Educational: Posts where their major objective is to educate the intended audience.