How to Do a Detailed Analysis of your Social Media Competitors?
One of the areas that many businesses are struggling with in online marketing comes up with a detailed analysis on social media. Everything from making a social profile to a social content strategy may be a daunting task. As marketers, we now live in the world in which social media is completely integrated in our communication plan and brand strategy. We are all using social media and have presence in many different social networking websites. It is now time to start your analysis about the kind of social communication that is effective and about what is not.
- Identifying your competitors – Perhaps you already have a good idea about who of your top competitors are in your space. Even though it is essential remembering, that based on the activity level, these could vary from network to network. Most of the brands have active Twitter or Facebook accounts, but many do not have account on several other networks like Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. The best way to do this is to signup for Rival IQ service, there is a 2 week free trial so you can start with that options.
- Identifying their voice – It is also good to take note about whom they are posting. Is it a person within the brand or the voice of the brand? While most of the large brands are posting as he brand, it could be a more personal approach posting as an individual within a brand.
- Knowing their follower to fan ratio – Now that you have identified your competitors, you can login to different social networks and take note of their follower to fan ration. Furthermore, do not forget to track your own metrics during the entire process for the purpose of comparison. Do they follow everyone that follows them? Or are they only following a handful of people.
4. Knowing how active they are on social media websites – You would want to look at the frequency of their post. It is a manual process. Look at the past month and take note how many times they are posting unique content during that time. Do not include the retweets and reply while looking at those in a proceeding step.
5. Engagement rate with the fans – In this step, you should look about how many engagement they receive at average every post. Contingent about how thorough you would want to be. You will be able to take ten posts or random, or you can look at an entire months worth of data. Note how many retweets, comments, likes, repins etc they are getting on every post and get an average for every engagement.
6. Knowing the types of content they post – By looking at the kind of content that your social media competitors post, you will be able to measure how successful the different medium are regarding to fan engagement and involvement. The types of content that you need to observe include contests, videos, polls, photos, sponsorships or endorsements, trivia, questions, hashtags, reposting other brands’ content, or if they are using a link shortener service, like Bitly or Google’s shortener Goo.gl. After you do an analysis of what type of content you should focus on, there are several online tools that can help you with this, and some of them are Buzzsumo, Tagboard, and many others.
After you have collected all the data and compared with your own metrics, you can comprehend where you have failed, relative to the competitors, as well as the industry. Therefore, while the point of all this is to do a detailed analysis of your social media competitors; in reality, you are analyzing your own brand.
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