12 min read
In today’s marketplace, gathering market intelligence on your competition is critical to the survival of a brand. Besides carrying out SEO, competitive analysis is essential to getting more conversions from the lucrative media channels. While this might be easy to accomplish in theory, it can easily become time consuming and tedious. 90% of all brands consistently use social media to build awareness.
Luckily, there is a wide collection of competitor analysis tools available that offer social media competitor reports after your specified periods. The data, if used right, is the key to staying ahead of competition. We are going to have a detailed discussion regarding social media competitor report, competitive analysis for social media, social media marketing competitor analysis and how to analyze competitors social media.
What is a Social Media Competitive analysis?
Who wouldn’t love to know about what their competition is doing? Social media competitive analysis helps you find out what your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are and how they compare to you in their social media marketing skills.
According to an eMarketer study, the adaptation of social media marketing across the globe has been growing rapidly since 2007. Using social media competitor analysis tools, you can streamline your brands marketing strategy on social media channels, better target audiences, and compete more efficiently with your competitors. In case you need to spend more or even less time or effort to educate your audience about what you are offering, a good social media competitive analysis tool will help you decide.
Why use Third-party Social Media Analytics Tools?
Deeper Analysis: When calculating the engagement rate of your target audience on a specific page manually, there is only so much you can do. However, with social media auditing tools, you can analyze much more data. Consequently, this will help you create a solid foundation to the results of your audit and make better decisions when designing your social media marketing strategy.
Time-Saver: Analytics tools are fast as lightning, with most of them offering real-time data on the audience or brand that you need. Needless to say, the analysis that the tools carry out would take you days if not weeks to complete, which would be too late. Whether you only need a single page analysis or need to compare the performances of your competitors, social media analytics tools are well equipped to handle the tasks in a fast and efficient manner.
Best Tools for Conducting Competitor Analysis
1. NETBASE
Netbase is the top contender when it comes to next generation AI-powered analytics. Armed with first-in-market automated theme discovery and Next Generation AI platforms with AI Studio, Netbase is ages ahead of competition.
Netbase excels in analyzing customer sentiment across all the brands needed. It also incorporates and aggregates structured, as well as unstructured data from social media channels, websites, blogs, comment data, review sites, and news. It also has CRM data brands that you may be in competition with.
Delivering reports and insights at five times the speed of its closest competitor, Netbase definitely knows a thing or two about competitor analysis. The tool is optimized to carry out a full corpus analysis of every data source to offer the industry’s fastest and most reliable data for strategic and real-time marketing decisions.
Netbase can help you better focus your marketing strategy on social media by social listening, social monitoring to know when critical actions take place. Netbase also does image analytics to help you better understand the best image strategy that similar brands are using as well as customer experience analytics to tie the strategy together.
The insight available on Netbase is both transparent and granular to accurately provide openings that reveal new product and service ideas as well as audiences. You also get to know where you stand in comparison to your competition and even more importantly, why.
With the insight provided by Netbase, influencer marketing also takes a whole new meaning. You will find that it has all the power players in every customer segment and offers insights into how you can take advantage of the situation to connect with the agents for mutually beneficial brand impact. Here is an example of Netbase:
(Image Credit: NetBase Quid)
2. Sprout Social
With social media being the top ranked channel for connecting with consumers, Sprout Social is one of the best starting points for competitive analysis. The tool enables you to understand competitor performance on various social media channels from different data points and angles.
The competitive reports available on Sprout can help you optimize and assess your social media strategy with critical data points spanning across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Whether you are simply looking to take a peek at what your competition is posting or to benchmark the growth of your brand against the average of your competition, Sprout presents it as a simple click. This removes the back-breaking manual research and tedious spreadsheets. For instance:
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(Image Credit: Sprout Social)
Sprout also offers a premium analytics tool that offers an even deeper analysis of your social media platforms in interactive graphs and charts that you can configure to your brand’s goals. Sprout provides similar competitive analytics for Instagram users as well. You can use their advanced listening tool to dive even deeper into the data and reports.
Sprout also enables you to find out how your customers feel about your competitors’ services and products by simply tapping on Publicly Available Social Conversations. This could also help you examine your brand’s share of voice in your industry. Additionally, Sprout Social allows its users direct access to consumer’s sentiment. This makes it easy to identify opportunities and set your brand apart from your competition.
3. Social Blade
Social Blade is a fun, yet efficient tool for checking out bigger brands in your industry. The tool assesses the follower counts on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to estimate customer responsiveness to advertisements and posts. The tool is often used to evaluate the popularity level of celebrities. However, there are plenty of interesting insights available here for marketers as well. The image below shows Social Blade’s YouTube competitor tool:
(Image Credit: Social Blade)
Social blade’s Twitter competitor analysis provides a grade based on the average number of likes and retweets. Even more notably, Social Blade offers a day-to-day follower update and live follower count. This could help a marketer track the kind of advertisements that appeal to their target audience and grow their brand by applying some of the techniques and the ideas that they like.
An additional cool feature on Social Blade is its ability to stack all your competitors’ social presences against one another.
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4. Sociality.io
For a tool that puts all analysis of your social media competitors in one report, Sociality.io does an excellent job in identifying the initiatives being taken by your competitor. That means that with the help of this tool, you can easily prepare your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as Instagram reports in just a few minutes. For example:
(Image Credit: Sociality.io)
You can easily measure the growth or performance of your brand against your competitors’ detailed customer interaction charts and analyze competitor page content using the comparative reports. This will allow you to review your content strategy and understand how you can improve on it. You will find the features below in Sociality.io to suit your different marketing needs.
- Retrospective data
- PPT and Excel reports
- Content analysis
- Sharing times
- Sharing email
- Comparative charts
- Interaction rate
- Graphic descriptions
- Unlimited number of reports
5. Hootsuite
You cannot cover the most effective social media analytics tools without mentioning Hootsuite. It is one of the most efficient analysis, management, and content listening tools. You can also follow your competitor’s social media activity, see how their customers perceive your brand, and look for specific keywords and hashtags that you could use to streamline your social media marketing campaign.
Hootsuite also boasts the features below to aid you in getting more insight into your competitors’ social media marketing campaigns:
- Competitor monitoring
- Customizable reports
- Campaign analytics
- Post Scheduling
(Image Credit: BrandMentions)
6. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is another efficient social media competitor analytics tool that can help you better understand your brand’s performance against your competitors. With the diverse array of insights offered by Brandwatch, you can shape and improve your marketing strategy on social media and gather a bigger following. Take a look at Brandwatch below:
(Image Credit: Brandwatch)
Brandwatch also offers insights into customer perceptions and sentiments towards your brand’s competitors. This helps to add quality context to your social media competitor analysis. Brandwatch offers the following social media analytics features:
- Reputation management
- Competitive analysis
- Trend tracking
- Influencer tracking
- Sentiment analysis
- Audience segmentation
7. Quantcast
Quantcast is an audience behavior analysis tool that collects first-party data and runs it through its AI-operated “Q system” to track customer patterns in your industry and beyond. You simply specify the category of audience that you would like to monitor and the Q system finds out the customers and audiences fit your brand’s profile at a massive scale. Quantcast is a great way to kick your social media marketing strategy off at high gear. It delivers your messages to suited audiences at the perfect time.
Through its Direct Response capabilities, Quantcast offers webmasters the opportunity to open up their brands to the world of prospects. It grants the user access to other brands’ audiences and figures out how they could also become your audiences. What’s more, the tool lets you measure the impact of such efforts on your brand’s reputation and organic traffic.
One feature that is unique to Quancast is post-campaign reporting. It also validates that your advertisements were delivered to the intended purpose, which is already included in the service price.
(Image Credit: Nuvro)
8. Feedly
Feedly helps marketers keep track of all the content that matters to your brand. The tool brings all elements of content that are of interest to you in one place. This allows you to organize them according to topic. You are also allowed to create the topics that you are interested in. For example:
(Image Credit: Brandwatch)
You can use Feedly to stay ahead of your brand’s competitors by using social media channels to see the content that is popular in your industry, or in any other category. The feature is particularly useful to bloggers or people who have publications and they would like to measure themselves against others in their field.
You can also use the feeds on Feedly to create boards and integrate the tool with apps like Trello, Slack or IFTTT to share the boards with your brand marketing team. You could also save the boards as topics that you would like to write on later.
9. Keyhole
Keyhole features one of the most user-friendly search engines that shows various metrics on any keyword, hashtag or brand. You can also track multiple keywords, hashtags as well as influencers according to the level of service you offer.
The metrics are based on data from hashtags, posts, and keywords collected from top social media channels including Facebook and Twitter. With its Event Performance monitoring tool, brands can share data on the impact of their hosted events leading to growth in ROI conversion. It also features a “media Wall” feature that allows attendees to connect with each other and share their experiences by live-streaming the posts via desktop, mobile, tablet, or laptop. Here is just one feature of Keyhole:
(Image Credit: Influencer Marketing Hub)
Social Media Competitor Analysis on Different Media Channels
Each social media channel has its own audience and set of tools and features. Since social media platforms are very different, users on different platforms have different expectations for the type of content they would like to see or post there. For instance, while Instagram is primarily focused on photo and video content, LinkedIn is focused on showcasing professional experience.
The content you post on every account on social media affects how well the account performs in terms of growing traffic towards your website or brand. Businesses should always post and share their advertisements on platforms that have the right target audience. Otherwise, they will only work in dropping your brand’s approval rates. It is often wise to focus your efforts on one social media platform and use it to its maximum potential.
Facebook is arguably the most powerful promotion tool in the world. It not only allows you to connect with your audiences and share content, it is also budget-friendly. Also, it is the largest social media platform with users spending an average of 37 minutes a day on the platform. However, with such a large and diverse pool of audiences, it is quite easy to find yourself promoting your brand to the wrong audience. Finding the right promotion strategy is key to finding new customers on Facebook. It is also a wonderful opportunity to outdo your competitors when you know the strategy they are using on the channel.
Twitter is excellent in keeping brands on the loop about what their customers comment or share about them. Using competitor analysis tools, you could take advantage of the giant social media channel and make it a source of quality competitor reports.
We hope that you found this article useful.
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LinkedIn has grown into an essential platform for professionals to network and recruit new personnel online. The fact that LinkedIn is designed to serve professionals in different fields only makes it easier to find your target audience and promote your brand more efficiently. You can also conduct a fruitful social media competitor analysis on the platform and learn the current market trends to compete more aggressively.
LinkedIn also surpasses all other social media platforms in the amount of profiling and positioning data about any brand that they provide. This makes the platform the perfect place to analyze competitors and get quality leads on your brand’s social media marketing strategy.
According to research, Instagram users spend an average of 28 minutes per day on the platform in 2020. Competitor analysis on Instagram is centered on photos and videos, which makes it easier to analyze competitors and make adjustments and promote your profile more efficiently. Using Instagram competitor analysis tools, you can understand the dynamics of audience behavior in your niche. You can also get insights into how you can grow content strategy, saving you time and money.
Turn Reports into Actions
Finally, it is essential that all the data that you uncover from the different reports of social media auditing tools is translated into relevant actions. For instance, if you uncover a new set of keywords that your brand could use to gain a larger audience on social media, it should translate to an action such as pushing content hard enough to always contain these keywords in the appropriate concentration.
The end game of any competitive analysis should be to improve your brand’s marketing strategy. If you do not put it into practice, then why go through the hassle? The more information you gain from your competitors, the more the actions your brand should take towards taking advantage of the insights.
Diib®: Pro Social Media Competitive Analysis!
If you own a business/brand, you have to keep an eye on your competitors, irrespective of your budget. While not all the audit tools named above are comprehensive, they all offer a great starting point for young brands. The more expensive and more comprehensive tools are more suited to larger brands with loftier budgets and goals.
Whichever analytics tools you choose will most likely be worth the investment. For example, partnering with Diib Digital will provide you with an added measure of confidence in your competitive analysis campaigns. Here are some of the features we’re most proud of:
- Social media integration, competitor analysis and performance
- Platform specific audience demographics
- Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
- User experience and mobile speed optimization
- Technical SEO monitoring
Click here for your free scan or simply call 800-303-3510 to speak to one of our growth experts.
FAQ’s
How to conduct a competitive analysis on social media in 4 simple steps
- Identify the keywords of your competitors.
- Check their ranking in Google.
- Check who appears in social searches for those keywords.
- Find out what similar brands your audience follows.
- Focus on your top 5 competitors.
- Identify any threats.
Conducting competitive analysis gives you the chance to not only check out your top competitors and what they’re good at, but it allows you to look at your own strategy and compare.
The biggest objective and goal of social media networking is to build relationships. With social media, you are allowed to be more informal and personal with your customers. This can be a great way to get and respond to customer service requests and questions.
This is a plan or summary of everything you plan to do or achieve on social media. It can help guide your actions and posts and let you know how you’re being perceived by your followers.
This is a misconception among many. Maybe it’s the wording, but spying on your competitors is not illegal. It’s analyzing what works and what doesn’t work and is a matter of public record.
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