Social Media Competitor Analysis: The Complete Guide

It is crucial to conduct a social media competitive analysis if you deem social media to be critical to the success of your business.

Experts in the field of social media know that the most effective approaches are those that are founded in hard numbers. Making the effort to back your plan with data will pay off, whether your goal is to increase the return on investment (ROI) of your social media efforts or to gain support from the top brass at your company.

Fortunately, analysing the competition on social media doesn’t have to be difficult. Our reporting template will make you look great, and this post will make your job easier.

Preparing to Get Started: Methods and Documentation, Free of Charge

Take a look at these foundational necessities that will put you on the path to success.

To follow along, first download the social media analysis template. You can get these templates for free and use them to make your work go much more quickly.

Collecting Our Resources

We need a data tool to collect the necessary information for our social media competitive analysis. This analysis could be done with a number of different programmes, but we’ll be using Rival IQ to handle the bulk of the work.

You should also get a copy of our template to use as a guide as you conduct your analysis.

Incorporating potential rivals into your business plan

Gathering data on potential rivals is the first step in conducting a social media competitor analysis. Even though you should already be familiar with your major rivals, I’ll throw out a couple of suggestions for researching possible parallels.

Tips for expanding your garden

If you want to check out the competition, use SimilarWeb.

Check Google for ads that compete with your brand by entering your brand name.

Use Google to look up competing businesses that make your main product.

Get suggestions for other accounts to follow by visiting your Twitter profile page. See more for a link to your main brand’s connecting page.

What are the major social media platforms?

After compiling a set of potential rivals, the next step is to choose which social media platforms to evaluate. We’ll look at average performance across audience size (fans), activity level (posting frequency), and engagement to prioritise your efforts.

Analyzing Captions

The pictures we use in our posts certainly help, but the words we use to engage our readers are also important. In keeping with our recent trend of analysing Instagram’s social engagement, let’s take a look at the best way to uncover high-engagement topics by analysing the most frequently used terms in the health-food industry.

Spindrift’s most frequently used and most engaging phrases

Here we examine the most frequently occurring phrases in Spingdrift’s engagements, with each phrase counted at least three times throughout the time frame.

A Review With a Hashtag

Users of social media platforms can use hashtags to quickly locate posts on a particular topic. Hashtags are used by brands to encourage consumers to publicly display their support for a given marketing effort. Using the appropriate hashtags is also critical for exposing your brand to users who aren’t currently part of your demographic.

We’re conducting a competitive hashtag review to see how content with various hashtags fares and to identify any missed opportunities. Insights into our rivals’ campaigns can be gleaned from studying their hashtags as well.

Analysis of the Post

What kinds of media you share on social media are significant. You need to make sure you’re posting the appropriate variety of content for the platform, the subject matter, and the target audience.

Separating your analyses by post type is a surefire way to learn how different post types affect your engagement. It is strongly recommended that you conduct post-type analysis for each individual channel. Since there is a significant difference between the various social media platforms, it is important to conduct separate analyses for each.

The following is a breakdown of Instagram posts by landscape type. There are roughly four times as many photo posts as video ones. Brands may want to branch out from just posting photos, as the photo engagement rate per post is about the same as that of a video or carousel.

Examining the Effects of Promoted Posts

Knowing how often and what kinds of posts our competitors are boosting on Facebook can give us invaluable intelligence. In order to determine the significance of these promoted posts, we can use a service like Rival IQ to examine them.

Only three brands are even using Facebook boosting, and the ones that do aren’t doing much, as shown in the slide below. Even though this isn’t always the case, it is still useful to be aware of the areas where the majority of your rivals are focusing their energy and resources.

Examining Tweet Mentions

We can find out who is talking about our competitors and how often by doing some light social listening on Twitter. We see Twitter Mentions move for brands through influencer marketing, public relations, and hashtag campaigns.

Take a look at the slide below to see how the number of mentions a brand receives on Twitter correlates with the size of its audience on Twitter. The most popular and frequently mentioned meatless alternatives are Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Spindrift and Health-Ade, two brands with relatively small followings on Twitter, have among the highest mention volumes.

As a conclusion,

Put together an executive summary before you finish and present your findings to the team. Explain the findings, emphasise the most important takeaways, and call attention to the steps that need to be taken. In doing so, you’ll be able to help the rest of your team zero in on the areas of your report where they feel most drawn to spending more time.