Competition in cyberspace has never been so fierce. What essentially used to be a fundamental tool of marketing—competition analysis—has transformed into a strategic war zone. Companies want to win at all costs, and hence, a detailed understanding of the competitive environment becomes paramount.
Image Source: https://adespresso.com/blog/social-media-competitor-analysis/
Understanding the competition in the digital domain requires a deep, extensive social media competitor analysis. Therefore, the strategy, strengths, and weaknesses of rivals are very closely observed to turn up valuable opportunities and rectify the approaches toward outdoing them in the long run. This step-by-step guide will show precisely how social media competitor analysis can empower your brand, along with some actionable insights.
Step 1: Defining The Competitive Landscape
The core and basic element of any good competitor analysis is correctly and appropriately defining your competition. Of course, that does sound pretty obvious; however, a nuanced understanding of that has to be in place. If this definition goes wrong, all the reworked strategies will have no bearing whatsoever.
Direct Competitors: This means the exact track of businesses—the ones offering similar products or services that are more or less identical to what you are proposing to sell to your target marketplace and have almost the same customer base.
Indirect Competitors: Those types of businesses offering the same or very similar goods and services but targeting a slightly different audience; they still might compete for what otherwise could have been sent over to you. Everyone wants a lion’s share!
Aspirational Competitors: Industry leaders or particular brands for which you hold the greatest respect in your chosen field of interest, which determine your highest aspirations; they’re usually the leaders of focused groups.
To proceed with a detailed analysis, one must prepare a comprehensive list covering these categories.
Step 2: Selecting Appropriate Social Media Channels
Not all social channels are relevant to your business or the competition. First, concentrate your efforts on the channels where your target audience is hyperactive and where your immediate competitors have created a significant presence. Factors like platform demographics, industry trends, and the nature of your products or services will guide your choice.
Step 3: Conduct a Detailed Profile Analysis
A detailed view of your competitor’s social media profile can offer you a number of very valuable insights. More than the superficial observations one would have made, scrutinize these following traits:
Profile Completeness: See how rigorously competitors make use of all the available profile sections to really show their use of the platform.
Visual Branding: Take note of just how thematic and compelling their visual identity is across different platforms and how this fits with their brand messaging.
The Tone of Voice: What is their style of communication? Most importantly, is it reassuring to their target audience? Does it capture the writer’s brand personality? Find Out.
Audience Demographics: Characteristics, likes, dislikes, and behaviors of their target audience. Can you find any similarity to your customer base?
Bio and About Sections: Are these filled with keywords, brand messaging, and compelling CTAs?
Cover Photos and Profile Pictures: Check visual impact and relevance.
Check brand identity representation.
Step 4: Cracking The Content Code
The content your competitors are making is a treasure trove of insight you can use for strategy and audience preference. Muck Dive into these aspects—
Types of content: Identify the mix of content format: text, images, videos, stories, etc., which they use to engage with their audience.
Topical Content: Be sure of important topics and themes that formed the content strategy.
Content Calendar: The frequency, pace, and timings of the posts to get an idea of how they spread the content.
Content Performance: Some generally key metrics will be there, e.g., likes, shares, comments or engagement rate.
Visual Appeal: Check the quality, aesthetics, and overall impact of their visual content in capturing attention and ensuring engagement.
The adage is so true- ‘Competition is your best teacher!’
Step 5: Audience Engagement Analysis
The key to success on social media channels lies in building meaningful relationships with your audience. See how your competitors do it with theirs:
Response Time: How prompt and effective their replies are to comments, messages, and mentions.
Engagement Tactics: What they do to encourage engagement, such as contests, polls, questions, and user-generated content.
Community Building: See if they’ve created a community with their followers in terms of brand loyalty and advocacy.
Sentiment Analysis: Get the pulse of the sentiment from the audience in general and what needs to be worked upon.
Step 6: Paid Advertisements Strategies
It is one of the most impactful methods to reach a larger audience. Get more insights by analyzing the kind of paid campaigns your competitors are running:
Ad Targeting: Find out whom, exactly, they target with their campaigns.
Ad Creatives: Designing, messaging, and call-to-action methods in the ad campaigns.
Ad Placement: Find out where its ads are placed and on which platforms.
Ad performance: How do their campaigns perform in terms of CTR, Conversion Rate, and ROI?
Step 7: Influencer Partnerships
Influencer partnerships may help considerably to increase the brand’s influence and reach. Study the competitor influencer associations based on:
Influencer Alignment: See if the influencers really fit their brand values, the audience they target, and their messaging.
Campaign Success: Measure the number of effects influencer campaigns have on engagement, brand awareness and, eventually, sales.
Partnership Frequency: How they are faring in terms of the frequencies of their partnership activity and how consistently they maintain this behavior.
Step 8: Social Listening Tools
Social listening tools help draw you closer to the invaluable conversations happening around your brand and your competitors. Keep track of the mentions, hashtags and keywords that allow you to understand the pulse of people, identify what’s on the rise, and develop strategies accordingly.
Step 9: Set Your Benchmarks and KPIs
Set clear benchmarks and KPIs so that one is able to measure the progress effectively towards the end. Compare the metrics with those of your competitors to understand where you can improve and grow.
Step 10: Create and Fine-Tune Your Social Media Plan
Drawing from these competition analyses, draft a unified, high-impact social media strategy that is in sync with your brand personality and, therefore vibrant with whom you are speaking to (your target audience). State your points of differentiation clearly, define your goals, and develop a content calendar that, in effect, is congruent with your broad marketing goals. Keeping an eagle eye out on what your competitors are doing that will help you adjust strategies accordingly to forge ahead.
Develop Competitive Advantage using SWOT Analysis
Use the information collected from your competitors as opposed to them to surge ahead in the marketplace. SWOT analysis is an examination of the S, W, O, and T of your firm. It will help you in knowing your position relatively to your competitors and develop better strategic ways of avoiding pitfalls that might arise.
Strengths and weaknesses point out what is going on inside the brand: what one is good at and where there are shortcomings or gaps to be plugged. Opportunities and threats focus on the outside—descriptions and estimations of the competitive landscape and judgments of what important challenges lie ahead.
Strengths (S): What are your internal advantages? Identify metrics where you are better than your competitors. Maybe your number of Facebook followers is higher than your competitors, or your engagement rates are better.
Weaknesses (W): What are the things where you lack in terms of standards? Identify areas where your metrics don’t measure up compared to your competitor metrics. These are your opportunities to change things for the good in your social media strategy.
Opportunities (O): Now that you have placed your brand in the matrix, identify the possible opportunities at hand. These could be from those areas in which you can perform better compared to your competitors, or they could be from recent shifts in the trends of social media.
Threats (T): What are the external factors that put pressure on your business? Analyze the trends in terms of how the numbers have changed and gone up or down over months or years—for instance, followers, engagement, the frequency of posts, etc. For example, a small competitor who is experiencing rapid growth in his followers can be a bigger threat than a large competitor whose growth in followers has been flat.
Having conducted the SWOT analysis and these key findings at hand, follow through. Note all your insights on a spreadsheet so that they may act as guiding attributes.
Deep and thorough competitor analysis on social media requires both time and energy. It needs a sharp eye for detail. Yet it is worthwhile. It will help tactically outrank competition by increasing your visibility and meaningful engagement with your brand.
Remember, it is not about imitating your competitors; rather, it is about learning from their triumphs and failures to deliver an easily influenced and robust social media network for yourself.
With the passage of time and continued evaluation, you will find full potential of social media delivering incredible results for you.