How to stay ahead of the competition and win on social media? Start by analyzing the competition on social media.
It will tell you how you compare to others in your industry and identify new opportunities and potential threats.
This guide will teach you how to do your own competitive analysis for social media. We will also list the best social media competitive analysis tools and provide you with a free template to help you get started.
Social media competitor analysis is the analysis of your social media competition to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to your own.
It is the process of comparing your own results to those of your industry leaders so you can identify opportunities for growth as well as strategies that are not working as expected.
In particular, the analysis of competition in social networks will help you:
- Find out who your competitors are on social media
- Know what social platforms they are on
- Find out how they use these platforms
- Understand how well their social strategy is working
- Compare your social performance with your competitors
- Identify social threats to your business
- Find gaps in your social media marketing strategy
Studying your competitors is not the only reason to conduct competitor analysis on social media. It will also give you insight into your own business and your audience (which is likely the same as your competitors).
Here are some unexpected insights that competitive social media analysis can give you:
- Performance benchmarks for your own business, such as average followers, engagement rate, and voice share.
- Ideas for when is the best time to post on social media (since your audience is probably online at the same time)
- Understanding a potential client’s pain points
- New (and better) content ideas that may resonate with your audience (or, conversely, that do NOT resonate with your audience and that you might want to avoid)
- Understanding how to communicate with your audience on certain platforms (for example casually or formally)
- Ideas to make your brand stand out
- And more!
Ultimately, competitive social media analysis will give you as much as you put into it. You can do a one-time competitor report on social media, or you can hire someone on your team whose sole job is to keep track of your competitors. Most businesses do something in between: a quarterly or monthly report.
Whatever level of analysis you choose, the insights will be invaluable.
We’ve broken down the social media competitive analysis process into four steps that work for any brand.
Before you get started, download this free social media competitor analysis template to track your efforts.
Step 1. Find your competitors
Define your competitive keywords
You probably already know some of the keywords your business is trying to rank for on search engines. For example, if you work in a hotel in Manhattan, you’re probably focusing on keywords like “New York hotels”and “best places to stay in Manhattan.”
But if your property is a boutique hotel with evening wine tastings and local art, you won’t necessarily be in direct competition with the Holiday Inn. A thorough understanding of your keyword list will help you get a clear idea of who you’re really competing with online.
The Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a great place to find the keywords that are most relevant to your brand. Even if you don’t advertise on Google Adwords, this tool is free to use.
To get started, use a tool to analyze your site. You’ll get a list of relevant keywords, as well as the average number of searches per month and the estimated level of competition.
Or you can enter your known target keywords into the tool. Again, you’ll get a list of related keywords with search volume and competition data. Use these related keywords to narrow down your competitors and make sure you’re analyzing businesses that actually compete with yours.
Check out who is ranking for these keywords on Google.
Choose five or 10 keywords that are most relevant to your business and submit them to Google. Soon you will understand who is your main competitor on the Internet.
Pay special attention to brands in your industry that pay for Google ads to get their names above the regular search results as they invest their money in their marketing ambitions. Even if they don’t rank highly in organic search (yet), it’s worth checking out how they perform on social media.
Go to the websites of any brands that seem like potential competitors. Most companies link to their social channels in the header or footer of their website. Enter links to their social profiles in the competitive analysis table.
Check who appears in social searches for these keywords
Brands that rank for your keywords on Google are not necessarily the same brands that rank well on social media itself. Since this is a competitive social media analysis, you also need to see who ranks first in social media search results.
For example, go to Facebook and enter a keyword in the search field. Then click Pages in the top menu.
For more tips on how to search various social networks, check out our post on the best ways to search the web.
Find out what similar brands your audience is following
Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Analytics can give you a good idea of what brands your audience is following on these social networks. If these brands are similar to yours, consider them as potential competitors.
To see which brands your audience is following on Facebook:
- Open Facebook Audience Statistics
- Use the left column to enter the demographics of your target audience OR scroll down to “Pages”in the left column and enter your existing Facebook Page in the “People Associated With”section.
- In the top menu, click “Like Page”.
Want to dive deeper? We have a whole post with more tips on how to use Facebook Audience analytics for customer research.
You may find that none of the pages listed are relevant to your industry, but if so, add them to your competitor list.
On Twitter, instead of checking your entire audience, you can check who your core followers are connected to.
- Open Twitter Analytics.
- Scroll down to each of your top followers from the last few months.
- Click “View Profile”for each lead follower.
- Click “Following”on their profile to see a full list of the accounts they follow, or click “Tweets & Replies”to see which accounts they interact with.
Choose up to 5 competitors to focus on
By now, you have a huge list of potential competitors—much more than you could reasonably include in a thorough competitive analysis. It’s time to narrow down the list to the top three to five brands that you compete most closely with on social media. Choose the brands that best suit your target niche.
Step 2: Gather Information
Now that you know who your competitors are, you need to find out what they are doing on social media.
Go to the social networks of each of the brands that you named the main competitors. As mentioned above, you can usually find these links in the header or footer of their website. In your social media competition analysis template, note the following:
- What social networks are they on?
- How big is their audience and how fast is it growing?
- Who are their main followers?
- How often do they post?
- What is their level of engagement?
- What is their social share of the voice?
- What hashtags do they use the most?
- How many hashtags do they use?
You can find most of this information by simply clicking on your competitors’ social media profiles. For more convenient data collection, check out the analytics tools mentioned below.
Don’t forget to keep track of all these things for your social channels too. This will help you with the analysis in the next step.
Step 3. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
Now that you’ve gathered all of this data, it’s time to analyze it to understand where you stand compared to your competitors. As part of this analysis, you will also look for potential ways to improve your strategy and potential dangers to watch out for along the way.
A SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you think through all this information clearly. In a SWOT analysis, you take a close look at your business and competitors to determine:
- C – Strengths
- B – Weaknesses
- About – Opportunities
- T – threats
It is important to know that strengths and weaknesses are related to your brand’s internal factors. Essentially, it’s what you’re doing right and the areas you could improve.
Opportunities and threats are based on external factors: events happening in your competitive environment that you need to be aware of.
Here are some elements to list in each quadrant of the SWOT template.
Strengths
List the indicators for which your performance is higher than that of your competitors.
Flaws
List the metrics where your performance lags behind your competitors. These are the areas you should focus on improving as you test and adjust your social media strategy.
Keep in mind that you can have both strengths and weaknesses for each social network. For example, you may have more followers on Facebook than your competitors, but they have better follower growth. Or maybe you have fewer Instagram followers but more engagement.
Be as specific as possible because these differences will help you identify your opportunities and threats.Possibilities
Now that you can immediately see where you are compared to your competitors, you can identify potential opportunities that you can take advantage of. These opportunities may be areas where you think you could improve your performance against your competitors based on the information you have already collected, or they may be based on expected or recent changes in the social media world. For example, if you check out Hootsuite’s weekly Instagram roundup, you’ll know that Byte just launched a new video platform , which is essentially the successor to Vine. Given the strengths and weaknesses you have identified, could this present your brand with the potential to outshine the competition? Like opportunities, threats come from outside your organization. To get a clear idea of the threats ahead, take a close look at the numbers associated with growth, or anything that means change over time. For example, a competitor that is small but has high follower growth may pose a greater threat than a large competitor with stagnant growth. This is another area where you need to be on the lookout for upcoming changes in the industry that may affect your position relative to your competitors. The Hootsuite State of Digital Reports are a great source of industry information to consider. You will need to review your competitive social media analysis regularly to keep it up to date. Make it a regular part of your quarterly or annual reports and reviews. This means that you will need a constant source of up-to-date information. Implementing a robust social media monitoring strategy will provide you with this real-time data to include in your next analysis. This is a particularly useful strategy for identifying potential opportunities and threats. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the tools you can use to monitor social media. Basically, it’s all about staying on top of the social conversations involving your brand, your competitors, and your industry. Record any important information or events you discover through social media monitoring in the Notes column of your competitive analysis template and include them in your revised opportunities and threats during your next review. In step 2, we talked about how to collect information directly from social networks. Here are some of the best social media competitive analysis tools to help you get started. Whether you’re doing a full competitive analysis or just looking for inspiration, look no further. Hootsuite Analytics provides you with a competitive analysis of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. You can track up to 20 competitors per network and get a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as actionable insights into popular posts, hashtags, and content formats in your niche. Follow these 4 easy steps to keep track of your competitors with Hootsuite: Then enter the name of a competitor in the search bar and select the desired profile from the drop-down list. You can add up to 20 social accounts per network (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) to your watchlist. That’s all! You can now view multiple competitive reports, including: Overview, where you can see the number of posts posted by you and your competitors in a selected time period (this can be configured in the top right corner of the dashboard), as well as each account’s posting frequency, average engagement, number of followers, and audience. growth rate. Start Free 30 Day Trial Post Performance, where you can view your top posts and those of your competitors and sort the results by likes, comments, and engagement, and quickly get inspiration for your next post. Performance by post type, where you can see which types of posts—photos, videos, carousels, or videos—are most popular with each brand’s audience. The results can be sorted to show which post types get the most likes, comments, or engagement. Post results (by comment, like or engagement score) where you can see how you and your competitors performed each day for a specified time period – all in one easy-to-read chart. You can refine the results by post type or stick to a general idea. Popular hashtags… that speaks for itself. Try it for free Post Length, where you can find out how many characters and hashtags your competitors use on average in their posts. Learn more about competitive analysis at Hootsuite Analytics. This feature is available on all paid plans. If you want to see how your results compare to your industry as a whole (rather than individual competitors), this is the perfect tool for you. With Hootsuite social media benchmarking, you can learn how others in your industry are doing on social media and compare your results in just a few clicks. To obtain industry benchmarks, follow these steps: That’s all! Now you can see how your results compare to the average performance statistics in your industry. You can set your own time frames, switch between networks – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok – and look for benchmarks for the following metrics: … and more. Try it for free You’ll also find productivity resources right in the summary section: And, if you need to present your results to your team, boss, or other stakeholders, you can easily download the comparison report as a PDF file. Hootsuite Streams is a powerful tool that allows you to track keywords, competitors, and hashtags across all social networks – all from one easy-to-use dashboard. Easiest use case? Add accounts of all your competitors to one stream and check it at any time. But you can do much more. Brandwatch offers several powerful competitive analysis tools. One of the most important is its easy-to-understand graphic showing your brand’s share of social media voice. Social Voice Share is a measure of how much people are talking about your brand online compared to how much they are talking about your competitors. This is one of the metrics you should track in your social media competitive analysis template. Brandwatch integrates with Hootsuite. Here’s a video showing how the two apps work together to provide key insights for competitive analysis. Ready to go beyond competitive social media analysis? Synapview is an app that allows you to track competitors and hashtags on Reddit and blogs. Mentionlytics is a social media monitoring tool that is also great for social media competitive analysis. You can find out everything that is being said about your brand, your competitors or any keyword on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and all web sources (news, blogs, etc.). Plus, it has a handy “sentiment analysis”feature, so you can see not only what your competitors are saying, but also how they say it. PS: Mentionlytics integrates with Hootsuite so you can see everything it pulls from your streams. Talkwalker is primarily known as a social media listening tool with a huge library of information – competitive or otherwise – from over 150 million sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news, reviews, and social media. Use it if you want to keep an eye on your competitors beyond social media and if you want to keep an eye on what the entire industry as a whole is saying. It is great for high level overviews as well as detailed analysis. You can create your own spreadsheet to keep track of all the information you collect during competitive social media analysis. But if you want to get started collecting data and using it right away, download our free social media competitive analysis template and just start adding the information you collect. There is also a tab for your SWOT analysis.Threats
Step 4Include Latest Data in Social Media Monitoring
1. Competitive analysis in Hootsuite Analytics
2. Industry benchmarking in Hootsuite Analytics
3. Hootsuite streams
4. Brandwatch
5. Synapview
6. Mentions
7. Phrasebook
