When it comes to social media strategy, execution is everything. That’s why you need Social Media Strategy Analysis, a new monthly column on Mashable. This monthly column will provide you the insight and advice that you need to put your social efforts into action.
Social media strategy analysis is a detailed overview of a company’s market potential, room for information and growth, competitor demographics, target audience and future marketing techniques. Our comprehensive social media strategy analysis will describe the factors necessary to successfully launch a diverse campaign while outlining any obstacles to that success.
What is social media competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is an analysis of your competition to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to your own.
It’s a process of benchmarking your own results against the heavy-hitters in your industry, so you can identify opportunities for growth as well as strategies that aren’t performing as well as they should.
A social media competitive analysis, specifically, will help you:
- Identify who your competitors are on social media
- Know which social platforms they’re on
- Know how they’re using those platforms
- Understand how well their social strategy is working
- Benchmark your social results against the competition
- Identify social threats to your business
- Find gaps in your own social media marketing strategy
Why do a competitor analysis on social media?
Learning about your competitors is not the only reason to do a competitor analysis on social media. It will also give you insights into your own business and your audience (which likely overlaps with your competitors’ audiences).
Here are some surprising insights a social media competitive analysis can give you:
- Performance benchmarks for your own business, such as average followers, engagement rates, and share of voice
- Ideas for the best times to post on social media (since your audience is likely online at a similar time)
- An understanding of the potential customer pain points
- New (and better) ideas for content that may resonate with your audience (or that, conversely, does NOT resonate with your audience, and which you might want to avoid)
- An understanding of how to communicate with your audience on certain platforms (i.e., casually or formally)
- Ideas for ways to differentiate your brand
- And more!
How to perform a social media competitive analysis
Identify your social media competitors
First, identify your social media competition and find which platforms they use. Hopefully, you already have a general idea of your main competitors. But there’s more to it than that. You want to focus on the competitors that actively use social media marketing to grow their business.
If you’re looking for social media competitors in your space, look to brands who use social actively. These are brands whom you can learn from and benchmark against. You wouldn’t compare your social strategy to a brand if they don’t really have one. Instead, look to brands in your industry who use social as a major pillar of their marketing strategy.
The easiest way to find your competition is Google. Search for the keywords consumers would use to find your business. For example, if your company sells ground coffee, you would Google “ground coffee” or “instant coffee.”
You can rule out large online marketplaces like Amazon or Target. Look for websites that are in your specific industry. In our example, La Colombe and Folgers could be good options. The second step is to go to each website and identify whether or not they’re active on social media, and which platforms they use.
Most websites link to their social media profiles in the header or footer of their site.
Also look through the social networks you’re interested in pursuing. Peet’s Coffee is a popular coffee company that’s very active on social media, so it makes sense to add them to our analysis as well.
Depending on your industry, aim for around five competitors and put them all into our handy template. This is where you’ll store all of your data.
Notice that our spreadsheet has sections for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For your analysis, you can choose any social networks you’d prefer. You’ll likely notice most brands in your industry have three or four main platforms in common.
This process can take a lot of time if you’re in a highly competitive industry. But the more thorough you are, the better results you’ll get.
Gather data
After you’ve narrowed down your competitors, the next step is to gather data.
The process will be slightly different depending on which platforms you target.
Build your own reports in Sprout
Simplify your analytics deep dives at any time by using Sprout’s report builder.
Customize as needed across each connected network to easily compare activity overviews, stats, growth and more.
Let’s take a look at how to compare your brand to the competition. For our purposes, we’re going to stick to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram since they’re the most common.
Facebook competitive analysis
Start by doing a manual review of your competitor’s page. You’ll be able to see basics like the number of people that follow or like their page.
It’s also a good idea to jot down any specific tabs or features they have. Some coffee roasters might have the shop section enabled. If we notice the same trend with other competitors, it’s likely a good sign it’s working for them.
Follower count is nice to know, but that’s not where your competitive analysis should stop. Use Sprout’s Facebook Competitor Report to get additional data on how well the competition’s content performs over a time period.
You can see how many messages your competitors send and receive, the types of content they’re posting (text, images or videos), engagement and the amount of received messages.
Include all of this in your spreadsheet, as well as any additional metrics that are important to your brand.
Twitter competitive analysis
Next, you’ll need to look at some Twitter-specific metrics using a social media analytics tool.
Sprout’s Twitter analytics software is the perfect tool for the job. It compares your Twitter profiles against each other, or a competitor. Select your Twitter account, then enter a competitor for the other slot.
The report shows engagement, influence, followers gained/lost and mentions. You can change the time period, but it’s best to stick to the last 30 days to keep the data relevant.
Once you’ve looked over all the competitive social media analysis from the Twitter report, be sure to enter the data into your spreadsheet. Tracking this information can be extremely valuable down the line.
Instagram competitive analysis
Instagram doesn’t have a lot of public data available about your competition. However, with Sprout’s Instagram Competitors Report, you can easily compare and benchmark your brand against competitors in key areas:
- Audience growth: Gauge whether your competitors growing their audience quicker than you are?
- Media sent: Get a sense of how frequently your competitors are publishing. You may find you’re not posting enough to keep your audience engaged.
- Engagement: See how many likes and comments your competitors are getting on their content.
- Hashtags: Find your competitors’ most frequently used hashtags. You may be able to use the same ones in your posts if they’re relevant, and get exposure to more people.
- Top posts: Take a look at your competitor’s most popular posts. Try to get an idea of why these posts are performing well. Are they product photos? Do they use certain colors? Find out what these posts have that your content doesn’t and use the info to improve your images and videos.
Another interesting tactic is to do a search for #Folgers on Instagram and see how many results come up.
This gives you a good idea of your competitor’s popularity. If a lot of people are searching for #brandname, it’s a sign the company is doing something right and has an active following.
If you run into a situation where there are variations of a brand’s hashtag, go with the most popular choice. This will usually just be the company’s name. For instance, Folgers has a few hashtags. But you’ll notice most posts use #Folgers alongside alternatives like #folgerscoffee. In this scenario, it makes more sense to just use #Folgers.
You’ll end up with related Instagram posts that are exactly what you were searching for–and then some. Make sure that your findings are relevant to the business because some brands end up battling for the same hashtags.
Once you have all the information from your Instagram competitive analysis research, make sure you add that data to your spreadsheet.
Which social media metrics should you follow?
The social media metrics important for your social media analysis depends on the goal you want to achieve.
Tracking the changes in brand awareness requires different set if metrics that measuring the results of your brand awareness campaign.
Another aspect you have to keep in mind is the quality of the metrics. A good social media analysis provides very actionable social media insights. Focusing on vanity metrics won’t bring you far when it comes to your social media strategy.
That being said, which social media metrics are vital for your social media analysis?
The volume of mentions
The volume of mentions will tell you how many times the name of your brand, your hashtag, or any other keyword, was mentioned in a predefined time.
This is your starting metric when it comes to social media analysis. The ultimate goal of your social media presence is to raise brand awareness — get your brand known across your existing and potential new audience.
The more people talk about your brand, the higher the volume of mentions.
Sentiment
To correctly analyse the volume of mentions, you need some additional sets of data. One of them is the sentiment around your mentions.
Social media sentiment analysis will tell you how social media users feel about your brand. If you see a sudden spike in negative mentions about your brand, product, or service, it might indicate a social media crisis in the making.
Analyze the volume of social media mentions and the sentiment around your brand.
Conclusion
The popularity of social media has allowed millions of people to connect like never before. Businesses can now interact directly with their customers and have the opportunity to better understand their needs, wants and desires. This gives them the unique opportunity to develop brand loyalty by providing tremendous customer service. The analysis of your business’s social media strategy is a three-tiered process that allows us to thoroughly analyze your current social media plan and determine ways to improve it .