Social media is now an important part of every industry and one of the major platforms for all businesses and brands. However, there are hundreds of social media sites, which means you have a lot of competitors! Therefore, it’s essential to analyze your competitors on social media. With tools like Facebook Insights or Twitter analytics, you can see a lot of data which will help you improve your strategy and marketing plan.
Social media is one of the best, cost-effective marketing tools you can use to promote your brand. To get the most out of your social-media marketing campaigns and grow your brand, track your social performance with free competitor analysis tools for social media.
As marketers, we all want as many people as possible to see our content and products on social media. How do we know if it’s working though? One way of measuring the success is to see how many people are engaging with our social media accounts. The best way to find out is by using some of the best free competitor analysis tools 2021. These free social media analytics tools will show you how your social media metrics stack up against your competitors. But first, let’s see what they can do for you.
Social media is a way to connect with your current and potential customers. With the uses of social media, you can make use of giveaways, polls and surveys, among others. One way to better connect with people is to utilize free competitor analysis tools for social media. Using this tool allows you to see what others are doing such as creating better ads or top-of-mind awareness by getting user reviews about others’ social media pages.
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
Unbox Social
Unbox Social is a multi-faceted tool, which offers many different features, including competition tracking. With the help of the competition tracking feature, you can track your competitors’ activity, and know what kind of content that is working in the industry.
You can also capture your share of voice against that of your competitors in the industry with the help of Unbox Social. The tool allows you to monitor your performance against that of your competitors. It also helps you capture the interactions on your content against that of your competitors.
To dig a little deeper, with Unbox Social, you will get access to insights on what the audiences are saying about your competitors. The tool will also help you get an idea about the key themes around your competitors’ conversations. Further, you can find out which of your competitors’ posts are receiving a good response and build a content strategy accordingly.
The tool is very efficient as it allows you to compare ten different brands in one bucket.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo offers a competition research tool. This competition tracking tool lets you look at your competitors’ most shared content by simply keying in the competitor domain. It also helps analyze what is working for them with the help of filters such as ‘content format’ and ‘networks used to get traffic’.
The BuzzSumo tool helps you track mentions and discover trends.
FollowerWonk
Dedicated solely to Twitter, FollowerWonk is a must-have tool for brands that mainly want to focus on their Twitter competitors. This tool allows you to compare Twitter accounts, which can also help you discover the strategies your competitors are using.
Moreover, FollowerWonk also allows you to track follower demographics to help you get a better understanding of your audience. With the help of FollowerWonk, you can also get an insight into what’s trending on the platform and what your competitors are tweeting about.
Owletter
Brand managers often underestimate email marketing but this marketing technique can also help improve your brand presence. Owletter is a competitor analysis tool that is focused on the comparison of email marketing activities.
The tool studies and analyses the email marketing activities of your competitors and gives you intrinsic insights like the frequency of their activities, trends in email marketing, and the best spot to implement your email marketing plan.
Spyfu
Not everything about competition analysis is solely based on the number of likes and comments, it is also necessary to see the keyword performance.
Spyfu is a tool that allows you to conduct SEO competitor analysis. It helps you see who are your closest competitors and gives you insights on the keywords that are fetching them the clicks!
This tool is quite useful when it comes to planning an effective content strategy.
Mailcharts
As a part of your digital marketing strategy, not only should your website and social media channels be polished and well-refined, your email marketing strategy should also be top-notch.
With the help of Mailcharts, you can gain insights into competitors’ email marketing strategies. Using the insights and intelligence derived from this competition analysis tool, you can plan out your future email marketing campaigns and promotions more effectively.
You can also generate competitive reports to dig deeper and gain clarity about your email campaigns.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a tool that helps you with everything related to SEO. Ahrefs comes with a range of features and tools that help you benchmark your SEO strategy against competitors. This makes it one of the most useful tools for social media competitor analysis. The tool offers solutions like site explorer, keywords explorer, site audit, rank tracker, and content explorer.
SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the most widely-used SEO tools on the market, but its competitor analysis features set them apart from the pack. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.
Here’s a sample dashboard after running a domain analysis for FreeCodeCamp:
And here’s the piece of the analysis which provides a by-the-numbers view of who’s competing for their keywords:
This is an invaluable tool for understanding who your competition is from a strictly SEO perspective. Likewise, highlighting what keywords are targeted by competitors directly influences your own content strategy.
MozBar
This browser extension from Moz provides a surface-level view of how authoritative a site is in the eyes of Google. Based on Moz’s own metric of domain authority (DA), MozBar assigns sites a DA score based on its likelihood to rank in search engines (based on factors such as backlinks). The higher the DA score, the better.
Settled atop your browser, the MozBar is a useful tool to quickly determine a site’s search potential performance at a glance.
When enabled, you also see how competing sites compare in a Google query.
MozBar allows you to conduct a sort of passive competitive analysis as you examine competing sites to figure out how long they’ve been around and whether or not they’re winning backlinks.
Sprout Social
With social media ranked the No. 1 channel for connecting with customers, there’s no better starting point for competitive analysis.
Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.
You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.
Up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool that offers deeper insights into your social platforms, along with interactive charts and graphs that you can customize to align with your goals.
Sprout offers the same competitive analytics on Instagram too.
And you can dive even deeper using Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool.
By tapping into publicly available social conversations, you can quickly find out how consumers feel about your competitors’ products and services, as well as examine your own share of voice in your industry.
With direct access to consumer sentiment, Sprout makes it easy to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand from competitors.
Phlanx
This Instagram engagement calculator clues you in on how active any given account’s followers are. This is an awesome resource to analyze your competitor’s Instagram presence. Plus, it doubles as a way to figure out whether or not an influencer has a legitimate following.
Phlanx’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate that followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc).
For example, Trader Joes has an engagement rate of 2.56%. This is a fair score for a larger brand that posts on a consistent basis.
But compare that to the likes of Denny’s, well known for their cult-like social following and rabid fans:
This score isn’t the be-all, end-all of a brand’s Instagram presence, but it does offer some much-needed perspective.
Take Adidas, one of the most followed accounts out there, for example. They do get an insane amount of engagement on their posts, but it’s low relative to their massive follower count.
This speaks to a bigger point about competitive analysis on social media. Context matters. It’s easy to get caught up in follower counts, but engagement is arguably a much more important metric.
Social Blade
A fun tool for checking out bigger brands is Social Blade. It assesses follower counts on the likes of Twitter, Instagram and YouTube among other services. Although often used to assess the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, there are some interesting insights here for marketers.
For example, their Twitter competitor analysis applies a “grade” based on their average number of retweets and likes.
Perhaps most notably, Social Blade provides a day-by-day follower update as well as a live follower count.
Another cool feature is the ability to stack brands’ social presences against each other.
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!
Ultimately, a social media competitive analysis will give you as much as you put into it. You may choose to do a one-off social media competitor report or hire someone on your team whose sole job it is to keep track of your competitors. Most businesses do something in-between: a quarterly or monthly report.
Whatever you level of analysis you choose, the insights will be invaluable.
Conclusion
There are so many social media tools out there. So many, in fact, that it can be a bit of a pain to keep track of the best social media analytics tools and the free competitor analysis tools for social media. But I guess this is the struggle we all face in life. Still, it’s good to know which analytic tools are recommended by other enthusiasts — whether they’re blogs, websites, or tweets.
The measure of true social media success is the ability to drive traffic to your websites and get there results. Our company specializes in digital marketing, including Social Media Marketing (SMM). Our customers have grown their email lists, improved SEO rankings and boosted conversion rates from our SMM services.