How to Do a Competitive Analysis on Social Media
Social Media is an extremely powerful platform where you can connect with millions of customers across the globe. Due to the current level of the business industry, it is daunting to implement a particular digital marketing strategy without using social media. Despite the platform being cost-effective, it gives you a chance to connect with millions of people worldwide.
When using these platforms, you need to understand the power of competitive analysis on social media. According to research, approximately 70% of business owners strongly believe in the power of doing competitive analysis for their brands. The truth is that social media is mostly used by developing brands to attract customers.
However, most developing brands undergo struggles when implementing an active social media marketing strategy that suits their objective in business. This is why it’s essential to do a competitive analysis on social media before making any step to acquire potential customers. Note that this is important, especially in the industry where trends keep changing constantly.
The main secret to creating a successful social media campaign is by carrying out a detailed competitive analysis. This article discusses some of the basic steps it takes to do a competitive data analysis on social media. Stay tuned for more actionable insights!
Identify Your Competitors
When doing competitive analysis on social media, you need to begin by identifying your competitors and what they are doing. Remember that competitors are also working hard to ensure that they appear at the top of your brand. Evaluate some of the major businesses across your industry and their target market.
To be on a better end, you should create a list of at least two competitors. However, you need to focus on working with a number of five competitors to be in a position to carry out a well-rounded analysis. If you find it challenging to identify competitors, you can change your style and go for some of the biggest brands you admire.
Use data visualization tool for charts to visualize a list of the top brands and how they are performing in the business. After creating the list, track the data constantly to ensure that you are working towards a defined goal. When listing your competitors, consider things such as
- The number of followers
- The brand voice
- Handles on different platforms
- Number of engagements on different platforms
Identify Your Post Schedule
Timing is a crucial aspect that will likely affect your social media strategy. It can affect your impressions, engagement, and click-through rate, thus affecting the general performance of your business brand. There are multiple factors you need to consider before making a post. Some people say that it is good to hit the lunch group while others prefer morning hours.
Despite all these pieces of advice, you need to find out the most favorable time when you can perfectly hit your target market. The best thing to do is analyze the timing of your competitors’ posts. Identify some of the most and the least engaged posts while recording the information on a spreadsheet. The good thing is that you can easily tell when your competitor posts content on their accounts.
Try and estimate to check when followers are always active to identify the best time when you can publish content on your social media accounts. Also, you can use this information to collect insights from consumers that will enable you to create a better social media strategy.
Uncover the Post Frequency
As you continue doing your research, evaluate the frequency of your competitors when posting content on their social media platforms. You might have good content, but the frequency at which you publish the content affects the final results. Check on the number of times that your competitors post daily, weekly, and even monthly.
Arrange these numbers depending on the social media platforms being used. This is meant to give you a clear picture of some of the platforms that are likely to perform better than others. When you find out that your competitors post twice a day, try and implement this operating frequency and evaluate the outcomes.
If you find it challenging to find this information, you can adopt a different strategy. When you are a beginner, make
one post on Facebook as well as Instagram and make three posts on Twitter per day. However, the industry regulations recommend making three posts both on Facebook and Instagram per day and about ten posts on Twitter daily.
Identify Different Types of Posts
There are different types of posts that are tailored to specific audiences. When doing analysis, it is vital to take screenshots of the social posts that your competitors make. Identify the trend available in the posts made by your competitors and implement a similar thing in your social content. Remember that the schedule and the platform remain the same regardless of the content you post.
Also, as you adopt a new social media strategy from some of your close competitors, they are busy trying out something new. Just like you, your competitors are constantly looking for new content they can use on their social media platforms. This means that you need to be consistent in what you do by considering the factors outlined below.
- Cross promoting content
- Posting native content
- Sharing content from other publications
- The use of hashtags
Collect Data from Your Channels
After gathering all the information outlined above, implement everything perfectly and create a schedule for gathering data. The data you collect from your sources is meant to help you identify the best type of content that resonates with your audience as well as the best time to post. Identify a list of content that performs well and capitalize on it.
Implement data visualization to get a big picture of your social media platforms to identify any progress. You need to be in a position to identify the strides you have made, such as the follower count and the engagement rate. Keep a constant eye on what your competitors are doing to ensure that you are not left behind.
Wrapping Up
There is power in using your competitors’ data to run your business brand. This has been proved by researchers who say that 69% of organizations that utilize external data to run their brands gain better insights that impact their business success.
