Being present on social media is not rocket science for brands, but being active and engaging can be a real challenge. In an era of fierce competition, it is taking increasingly more effort to stand out from the crowd and come with a better proposition than your competitors. However, if you prepare a complex and extensive competitive analysis, you do not have to worry.
Recognize your competition
Competition analysis in social media needs to start with finding out who your competitors are. This stage is crucial for the next steps, and if you miss any competitor then you can really regret afterward. Identify what companies are your direct competitors, and which ones can still be a potential threat to your business – points out a specialist from NapoleonCat.com.
Find out where they are active
You know that your competitors are active on social media, but are you sure that you know absolutely all platforms that they are active on? While you may be looking for competitive analysis on Facebook, it may turn out that they make the most of Twitter. Keep your eyes wide open. Once you sort it out, it is high time to take a closer look into their content (and analyze what kind of posts work like a charm for them) and ways of engaging with their followers. Speaking of followers – how many of them have your competitors gained? Are those audiences active at all, or it is rather vanity metrics? The very first glance can tell you a lot about each brand, but do not stop digging.
Evaluate their social media strategy
There is a very small probability that you can find out 100% about the social media strategies of your competitors, but by analyzing their profiles with some social media tools, you can obtain a lot of interesting data. Then, you can turn those insights into actionable practices and find out if those conclusions work for your brand. With social media competitive analysis, you can take content under the magnifying glass and find out whether their lines of communication really deliver results. You can also use some social listening tools to analyze sentiment and mentions, and potentially create chances for your brand to sparkle.
Get familiar with their strengths
A situation where all your competitors are worse than your brand in every single field is rather unheard of. Being aware of your competitors weaknesses, but also strengths, can help you customize your strategy and highlight those parts you want to show off with. If you want to take a step further, you can decide to prepare a whole SWOT analysis that identifies Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of your competitors or your own brand. This kind of analysis needs a lot of data from social media, but is extremely helpful for preparing thoughtful activities.
Take another look at your own strategy
Competitive analysis should be wrapped up with quite a few conclusions, and some of them may refer to your own strategy. Evaluate your strategy and find out whether you can make some small changes or modify it a bit if, after conducting analysis of social media performance of your competitors, you simply feel like it’s the right way to go. It can turn out that filling one gap in your communication will improve your engagement rate and make your brand more popular. If you never try, you’ll never know.
Competition analysis on social media does not have to be troublesome. Quite the contrary – revealing the hand of your competitors can actually be great fun and an adventure. Remember that it is not a single activity, but a process that you should repeat on a regular basis and enhance with extra conclusions on the way. Good luck!
