Stay Ahead of the Game: Why Social Media Competitive Analysis is Essential for Your Business

To ensure that you are performing as well as your competitors in your industry, it’s important to invest time and effort into analyzing their social media strategy through a competitive social media analysis.

Conducting a social media competitive analysis is vital because it enables you to identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as your own. Through this process, you can discover opportunities to grow your business and pinpoint potential threats that you can take swift action to protect yourself from.

A social media competitive analysis can help you identify your competitors, what platforms they use, how they use them, and what problems they are trying to solve for their customers. By doing so, you can gauge how well their social media strategy is performing and how you can improve yours.

In addition, a competitive analysis might spark ideas for creative campaigns, inspire unique ways to use your social media channels, find new ways to make your brand stand out and uncover niches that nobody has identified so far. By paying attention to what your competitors are doing, you could also figure out the best time to put up social media posts and understand how to better communicate with your audience across various platforms.

The main steps that constitute a social media competitive analysis are identifying your competitors, getting relevant data, evaluating their strategies, carrying out a SWOT analysis, and monitoring the data regularly. By following these steps, you can conduct an effective social media competitive analysis that will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

To identify your competitors, start by determining the keywords your business is trying to rank for using Google AdWords Key Planner. Inputting the top five or ten keywords on Google search and going through the organic search results and paid ads that come up as a response to your search can also help you identify your top competitors. Additionally, tools like Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Analytics can help you discover other brands your audience follows, which can be counted as your competitors.

After identifying your competitors, you can use quantitative and qualitative criteria to evaluate their strategies, paying attention to their content strategy, ads or promotion strategy, and communication tone. Analyzing their advertising strategy would include identifying the targeted ads they use, while communication analysis means understanding how your competitors interact with their audience. You can conduct a SWOT analysis using all the data and information mentioned in the previous step to find out where you stand against your competitors.

Lastly, social media competitive analysis is not a one-time task but should be done at regular intervals. Tools like BuzzSumo, HootSuite Streams, and Brandwatch can help you analyze and keep track of your competitors’ social media strategies and compare their performance with your own.