How to Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis

Social media is no longer just a platform for entertainment and social interactions. It is now also a powerful marketing channel where businesses engage with their audience and build brand recognition. In a recent survey, it was noted that 73% of marketers believe their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” in growing their businesses. But how do you stand out when there are lots of competitors competing for the same attention?

If you want to stand out as a business on social media, you need to know what your competitors are doing to gain traction on various social platforms. Most importantly, you need to discover areas where you are lacking and then build a failproof social media strategy. For these reasons, you may need to conduct a social media competitive analysis.

A social media competitive analysis allows you to study your competitors’ tactics, strengths, and weaknesses, offering insights that can help you sharpen your own approach and get ahead. After reading this guide, you will understand how to perform a social media competitive analysis in detail including its significance and how it will shape your social media strategy.

The Benefits of Conducting a Social Media Competitive Analysis

Conducting a detailed social media competitive analysis offers a number of benefits that can help enhance your brand’s performance on social media. It can help you:

• Know your target audience: When you analyze your competitor’s social media channels, you will get to understand who they interact with and how they do so. As a result, you will gain valuable insights about your shared audience. You will get to know who they are, what they like, the kinds of content they find appealing, and the right messaging to reach and engage them.
• Create a solid social media strategy: social media competitor analysis will provide you with valuable information on what works and what doesn’t. This information will further guide you in coming up with a better and more effective social media engagement strategy for your brand.
• Catch trends early: You can easily spot emerging trends early when you keep up with what your competitors are doing. In turn, this can help you adjust your social media marketing strategy by hopping on those trends promptly.
• Identify content gaps: With social media competitor analysis, you should be able to discover areas your competitors might be missing or lacking. This then will allow you to know where to fill in with unique content that draws attention to your brand.
• Improve your social customer care:  Learning how your competitors interact with customers on social media can inform you on how to better handle your social customer care. You can observe their average response time, how they interact, and how they handle issues.
• Improve your engagement tactics: Your competitor’s engagement rates may be several steps ahead of yours. Therefore, knowing what they did to reach such a level can also help you improve your own social media engagement.

How to Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis

To reap the above benefits, you must first know how to conduct a sound social media competitive analysis. Here’s a simple guide to help you get started:

1. Identify and Select Your Key Competitors
2. Evaluate Your Competitor’s Social Media Presence
3. Figure Out Your Competitor’s Content Strategy
4. Study Your Competitor’s Campaigns, Promotions, and Special Content
5. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
6. Come up with an Action Plan
7. Put your Plan into Action and Monitor Progress

1. Identify and Select Your Key Competitors

The first step to conducting a social media competitive analysis is determining your real competitors. Competitors offer a reference point, allowing you to gauge the expectations of your shared audience. Also, by looking at their strategies you get to know what to do to succeed in the social media space.

You need to select both your direct and indirect industry competitors who are competing for the same audience as you. The competitors you select must be brands that have seen major success in social media marketing. That is businesses with good traction and engagement on social media.

Competitors to Analyze

There are two main categories of competitors that you need to focus on in your social media competitor analysis. They are:

• Direct Competitors: These brands are in the same niche market or industry as you. That is they sell similar products or services as your business. They are the most apparent competitors as they target the same audience and therefore, the same market share. 
• Indirect Competitors: These competitors do not necessarily sell the same product or service as you. However, they may sell to the same customers or fulfill similar needs. For instance, if you sell fitness equipment, a gym providing membership plans can be an indirect competitor.

How to Find Your Social Media Competitors

Here are a few accessible tools and strategies you can use to find your competitors:

• Google and Social Media Platform Searches: Start by looking up your target keywords on Google and this would bring forward your main competitors and even their social media accounts. However, since your focus is on social media, pay attention to competing brands that stand out in social platform searches. Social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have search functions that let you look up keywords directly. This can help you identify active brands within your niche on those platforms.
• Make use of Listening Tools: There are tools with social listening features that you can use to monitor conversations revolving around certain industry keywords, your brand, or that of your competitors. These tools are called social listening tools, and examples of such tools include Sprout Social, Sprinklr, and Hootsuite. You use them to gather competitive social media insights and discover lesser-known competitors that could be influencing your audience.
• Analyze Your Audience’s Interests: Tools like Facebook Audience Insights can show you what other brands your audience follows and engage with. If these brands offer similar services or products as you, they are your potential competitors.

That said, to avoid making your social media competitive analysis too overwhelming, select only 3-5 competitors for a start and analyze them.

2. Evaluate Your Competitor’s Social Media Presence

Once you have identified and selected your competitors, the next phase is to thoroughly analyze their social media activity. Your main aim in this phase is to determine their presence and success level on various social networks. You need to analyze the following aspects:

• Competitors’ social media channels: You need to determine the specific social media channels your competitors have and are active on. From here, you will know the social media sites to emphasize during your competitive analysis.
• Content Posting frequency and schedule: take note of the patterns of their posts, regarding the number and time of the day each post goes up on their social media accounts. Establish whether they post daily or weekly, and the amount of posts they make each day or each week.
• Followership: Check the number of followers your competitors have on each social media platform to analyze their reach. Also, note how these figures change over time, whether they increase or decrease. If the follower count is rising rapidly, it may indicate strategies worth looking into.
• Engagement Metrics: you can estimate the level of your competitor’s social media engagement by analyzing the number of likes, comments, and shares registered on their posts. 
• Audience Demographics: Evaluate the key demographics of your competitors’ followers, including but not limited to their age range, geographical location, gender, and interests. This will help you understand if you are indeed reaching the right people and assist you in identifying new potential customers to interact with.

This data is going to help you in assessing your level of success. It can also indicate how much effort and consistency you need to put in so as to improve your social media marketing approach.

3. Figure Out Your Competitor’s Content Strategy

Your competitor’s social media content should serve as a case study on how to engage your target audience effectively. This is because It provides a ton of context around what is and isn’t interesting to their viewers. Having said that, you have to check through your competitor’s content to get trends and practices that are worth implementing. You should analyze the following aspects:

• Type of content: Determine the kind of content your competitors are seemingly focused on, whether that be videos, infographics, blog links, memes, etc. You can also see their top and bottom-performing content to identify which formats and topics work best for them. This analysis enables you to gain insight into what is effective and what does not deliver value so that you can refine your content strategy.
• Themes and Topics: You should figure out what themes or topics they are fond of repeating on their social media pages. Then check to see if these themes and topics have been effective.
• The tone of their posts: You should analyze how they communicate with their audience. Are they usually formal, casual, humorous, or professional?
• Hashtags and Keywords usage: Monitor and examine the effectiveness of the hashtags and keywords they use for discoverability.
• Visual elements: Take a look at how they have branded or designed their social media pages including the color palettes, graphic aesthetics, and any other unique branding elements.  
• CTA (Call-to-action) tactics: Check to see whether or not your competitors are using clear CTAs. For example, check if they ask followers to share, like, comment, sign up, or head to their website.

The analysis obtained from this phase will allow you to identify new trends and also gaps in your social media content strategy.

4. Study Your Competitor’s Campaigns, Promotions, and Special Content

Many brands on social media carry out marketing campaigns that attract more audiences. These campaigns could be special promos to celebrate a festive season or could just be a partnership with other brands or influencers. Therefore, when you study how your competitors run these promotions on social media, you get to know what their audience responds to and which tactics land.

These are the types of  social media campaigns You Should Observe:

• Themed or seasonal promotions: See how your competitors create or customize their social media campaigns for different holidays, occasions, or trends. For example, they might offer holiday-themed content or seasonal limited-time offers during special weekends or times surrounding major holidays.
• Social media Influencer Partnerships: Find out what social media influencers your competitors partner with to boost their visibility. This is important because influencers add credibility and euphoria to a product or service. Understanding who your competitors work with, how they team up, and on what platforms, you should be able to come up with a good influencer marketing strategy of your own.  

This phase will help you spot working campaigns and collaborations that you can explore to easily convert our target audience.

5. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is very useful in organizing the data you have collected from your Social media competitive analysis. It is a strategic planning tool that aims to evaluate important internal and external variables that are relevant to the achievement of a project, business, or situation. When applied to a social media competitive analysis, a SWOT analysis is useful in demonstrating how your social media activity performs relative to your competitors.

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The SWOT analysis is made up of four components which are:

• Strengths (Internal Advantages): This involves identifying the areas where your business is already performing better than your competitors on social media. This could be your top-notch content or high audience engagement. When you understand your strengths, you will know what to keep doing and even scale up.
• Weaknesses (Internal limitations): You should also acknowledge the areas where your competitors perform better than you on social media. For example, they may have a stronger brand message, more posts, or even collaborations with influencers. Discovering and bridging these gaps can help you improve.
• Opportunities (External Factors You Can Leverage): Think about additional strategies or trends your competitors are not utilizing that you can capitalize on. They could be missing out on new content types, or emerging trends, or they rarely engage with followers. These gaps are opportunities for you to differentiate your brand and grow.
• Threats (External risks to tackle): Be mindful of external factors that may threaten your social media strategy and be ready to address them head-on. It could be social media algorithm changes, the entry of new brands, or changes in audience preference.

This SWOT analysis will allow you to identify where you stand and what action plan can improve your social media marketing efforts. You should also revisit your SWOT analysis regularly to ensure that you have a current, effective strategy for dealing with future threats.

6. Come up with an Action Plan

After you have done the SWOT Analysis, the next step is to come up with a clearly defined action plan. In your planning, you need to specify the particular existing opportunities that you will exploit and any possible weaknesses in your strategy that require attention. Set realistic targets for your plan. For instance, you might want to aim at a 20 percent increase in the level of engagement or a 10 percent increase in the number of followers.

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Additionally, revise your content and engagement strategies based on what’s working well for your competitors. Use any opportunities you’ve identified in your analysis to come up with original content elements or engagement strategies that your competition has yet to utilize. You could even consider reaching out to a content marketing agency or a content creator for more effective content writing. 

7. Put Your Plan into Action and Monitor Progress

After you’ve made an actionable strategy, the next thing is to implement it and monitor how it performs. Social media is dynamic, which is why continuous tracking is important. Therefore, pay close attention to key social media metrics like engagement rate, follower growth, or reach of posts to see what is working and focus on those elements.

Additionally, plan to redo your social media competitor analysis quarterly or bi-annually to stay up-to-date with industry trends and shifts in competitor strategies.

Key Strategies for Success with Social Media Competitor Analysis

Carrying out a social media competitive analysis is a very useful practice for formulating your own social media strategy. Knowing what has been effective to your competition, measuring your performance, and developing an effective strategy will help you boost your brand visibility and interaction on social media channels.

Ultimately, to be successful on social media, you will need to stay updated on trends, carry out more research, leverage your findings, and continually optimize your approach.

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