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Social Media Competitor Analysis Guide

Struggling with beating your competitors on social media? Many of us do which is why I wanted to share some thoughts and knowledge on analyzing your social media competitors. Enjoy reading!

Whether your competitor is a huge corporation or a small company, you need to monitor them very well. Chances are, they’re already monitoring you. Every single day.

Monitoring your competition and their customers is crucial to every business. Luckily, there are several ways to do it. In this article, you will learn:

  • What a Social Media Competitor Analysis is and why it’s so important
  • Step by Step guide in conducting it
  • Useful tools to help you perform it better and to save your time
  • How to improve your Social Media Marketing based on the research

If your competitors are paying attention to your social media presence, they’re one step ahead. As a founder, marketer, or employee in your company, it’s your duty to help it grow.  

Ognjen Vuković from Reportz explained in a few sentences why competitive analysis is so important for your business:

Knowing your competition is good. Knowing what works for them is even better, and knowing how to do that better than them is the ultimate goal you should set regarding your competitor analysis.

At Four Dots we use multiple tools and techniques to monitor and out-perform particular clients competitor activities such as social behaviour, paid efforts metrics and SEO/SEM stats.

Every good strategy has to have competitor analysis at its core, since having an in-depth info about what works best for your competitors can give you an overview on what to focus on and how to outperform them in order to make a success.”

That’s a glimpse of why monitoring your competitors’ social media matters.

Research the market

Before starting any business, you must do your homework. Research the market. Create a spreadsheet and write down any info you can find about your competitors or potential customers.

Tomer Aharon, co-founder of Poptin.com, shared their way of doing competitive and market research:

“Before every product we develop, we look into the competitors to learn everything possible about the relevant market. We create a spreadsheet with the names of all the competitors and write down who the founders are, when the company was founded, how many employees they have, what their distribution channels are, where most of their traffic comes from, their pricing, features, and also read their last blog posts and the positive and negative reviews they got so we can learn from their mistakes.”

Personally, when I started my first startup, mentors and advisors from several accelerators recommended me to conduct a very careful competitor research, because the chances of making mistakes are very high. Also, Yam Regev at Zest shares his best tips of distributing content in our Planable Webinar. 

Here are the competitors’ information and data you should check:

  • Founders
  • How much they’re pricing for services/product
  • Social Media Presence
  • Distribution channels
  • Core Value propositions
  • Number of employees, headquarters, stage, and the size of the investment
  • Other information (Number of customers, data pulled from Similar Web, etc.)

Anything can be useful if you want to beat your competition!

You found out everything about your competitors. What’s next?

It’s time to start monitoring them! Everywhere. You can monitor their websites, newsletters, keywords, and SEO strategies.

But, what’s probably the most important place to keep an eye on?

Social Media Networks. Why?

Well, Social Media is the place where we communicate with both our current and potential customers. That’s the place where we can find what’s good and what’s bad with our competitors’ products/services or even marketing campaigns. We can skip a lot of “trial and error” methods.

In today’s marketing where social media gave everyone a voice, standing out is very hard. Today’s marketing goal isn’t to make actions, discounts, or to create eye-catching visuals.

It’s to tell stories. Stories are told through content, and content is mainly published through Social Media.

 

If you carefully monitor your competitors’ Social Media Networks, like Facebook (pages and groups) or Instagram, you will find lacks in their campaigns and opportunities for you.  

Here’s how:

  • Organize your marketing team to follow their social media and content every day
  • Turn on notifications from your competitors’ social media profiles
  • Use some tools

Here are 3  social media competitor analysis tools that can help you

Your time matters. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my entrepreneurship adventure is from my mentor and founder of MVPWorkshop – Ivan Bjelajac:

“Time and Money are equally important resources”.

That’s the reason why we’re very often using different tools for our business. They’re saving our time, energy, and effort.

Below, I will compare 3 different tools for monitoring your competitors on social media and anywhere else online:

1. Competitors.app

Competitors.app is a new SaaS tool with great potential. It allows you to monitor your competitors’ Social Media Pages. You can track their mentions, published content, and hashtags. But, Competitors.app doesn’t support just Social Media, you can track competitors’ website changes, their SEO strategies, and newsletter campaigns.

Disclaimer: I’m part of the team.

As I said, the product is still in the beta stage. The price is 7,90$ per competitor/per month, but if you register and provide them with extensive feedback about the platform, you can earn 1 year free for one competitor. So grab your free trial account, try it, and send them feedback. Help, and be a part of something new on the market.

2. KeyHole

KeyHole allows you to track all your and competitor hashtags and posts on various Social Media channels. With KeyHole, you can optimize your posting and you can find your competitor strategies on Social Media.

With KeyHole, you have a 7-day free trial version for all plans, and then pricing starts at $179 per month for the basic account.

3. BrandMentions

BrandMentions gives you an opportunity to spy on your competitors’ social media networks. You can track both mentions of your competitors and your brand on every social media channel you can imagine. It’s good for finding missed opportunities and competitors strategies.

The Price is 49$ per month, with just one project and 2 keywords tracked. It’s an excellent solution if you have money to buy bigger packages with more keywords tracked.

How to improve your social media marketing based on competitor analysis and monitoring

You and your competitors are not just sharing a similar product or service, you’re also sharing the same audience. Understanding your competitors’ Social Media marketing and content can help you. Based on their good or bad campaigns, you’ll understand your audience better.

Interview your competitors’ customers so you can understand:

  • What’s their main problem?
  • How do your competitors’ product/service help them?
  • What’s their biggest pain about the competitors’ product/service?
  • In the end, give them a demo version of your product to test and give you feedback and comparison with your competitors’ products.

After you carefully do your competitors’ analysis, their customers’ interviews, and monitor them, it’s time to outmaneuver them! Here are some examples of what can you do:

Quality

Deliver a better quality product, user-friendly interface or higher value in the eyes of your customers.

Tell better stories

Give your customers a sense of belonging. That they’re a part of some movement that will totally change and disrupt the industry.

Today, people are not buying products. People are buying value and stories.

Create better and more engaging content for your audience every single day.

Planable helps you create and publish better content across your team. You should check this tool!

Better Customer Support

Customer Support is very often what makes a customer choose one product instead of another. So focus on your customer support.

Are you responsive enough? If your competitor has 24-hour support, 7-day a week, you should probably have it too!

Use your competitors’ customers as a custom and lookalike audience!

Try to scrape your competitors’ customer data. You can scrape their page followers, likes or comments! Everything you can image.

Pull them into a spreadsheet, and import a Facebook custom audience. And, voila

You have your potential customer database with several thousand names.

Use your research and data from monitoring competitors to create better and more engaging content for your audience. Give them demos or trial accounts to test your product, and swoop them off their feet! 🙂

I hope this article helped you. Hit a share button to spread the love and value, and, of course, good luck in slaying your mortal enemies! 😉

This article was submitted by Ugljesa Djuric, Head of Growth at Competitors.app.

Ugljesa Djuric

Ugljesa Djuric

The young entrepreneur from Serbia. SaaS Enthusiasts and result-oriented Digital Marketing expert with a Growth Mindset. Head of Growth at Competitors.app

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