Are you having trouble growing your brand presence with social media marketing? Competitor analysis could be the perfect solution.
The social media landscape is crowded, and it’s hard to get an edge over your competition. When you’re first starting out, it’s nearly impossible to compete with businesses that have thousands of social media followers.
Your competition has likely spent time and money to create detailed social media strategies. They post new content on a regular basis and stick with a consistent message.
Competitor analysis helps you get a closer look at what your competition is doing. You can learn from their efforts and find new ways to reach your audience. You may even uncover areas that your competition hasn’t explored.
Here is a short guide on getting started with competitor analysis. Learn how to boost your social media efforts by checking out your competition. The process is simple:
- Find your competition
- Analyze their social media activity
Explore each of these steps in detail, and then perform your own competitor analysis.
Find Your Social Media Competition
As you go through these steps, you should take notes—starting with a list of your competitors.
You might already have an idea of who to include in this list. But you should do a little research before you finalize your list of competitors. Search Google for keywords related to your industry.
The sites that show up in the top few positions are the top competitors. But you will want to focus on the businesses that are within your reach.
For example, if you appear on the second page of Google search results for these keywords, then look at the competition towards the bottom of the first page.
Those companies are your direct competition. These are the businesses that you need to pass before you’ll ever get the chance to compete against the top two or three businesses—depending on the size of your niche market.
When you start filling out your list, you might find it easier to take notes using a spreadsheet. You can easily populate new fields and keep your data organized.
Learn More About Your Competition
Now that you know who your competition is, you need to learn more about their strategies. You will gather data by analyzing some of their social media stats.
Visit the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages of each business in your competitor list. You can start with one business and go through all of its social media channels.
Analyze Facebook Statistics
Start with Facebook. When you view your competitor’s Facebook page, you can click on the “X people like this page” button. This will bring you to a page containing additional stats.
You will see the number of people who are currently talking about this Facebook page. You can also see the total number of people who have liked the page or checked in. Write all of these stats in your spreadsheet or notes.
Analyze Twitter Statistics
Next, you should find out how many followers your competitors have on Twitter. Using online SEO tools and programs, you can find out how many followers they have lost and gained in the past 30 days. Other stats to track include user engagement and overall influence.
The image below shows analytics that only the individual user on Twitter can access, but much of what it shows can be found using other tools.
Analyze Instagram Statistics
It is harder to gain stats about Instagram. But you can still do some research. In the search bar on Instagram, enter a hashtag with the brand name of your competitor. This will provide search results of posts talking about the company.
A lot of results is an indication that this company understands how to grow a brand on Instagram. Paying attention to their posting habits can give you some insight.
Make a note of the number of Instagram followers the company has. Include any details that stand out about its Instagram activity.
Take a Look at Social Media Activity
The next area to explore is the activity of your competition. You want to see how often they post and other details of their social media efforts.
Write down the last time that your competitors posted on each social media network. Determine how frequently they post. Also, find out if they respond to the comments on their posts. Write these details in your notes or spreadsheet.
You will now scroll their feeds on each network and make notes about the type of content that they share. They will likely have a mixture of promotional posts and curated content.
Curated content is simply content that is found on other websites. The brand believes that their followers will enjoy this content.
Calculate the percentage of promotional posts. To do so, you simply need to answer one question: how many of their last 10 posts were promotional? Multiply the answer by 10. So if they had 3 promotional posts out of the last 10 posts, 30% of their posts are promotional.
Putting It All Together
Now you simply need to determine which competitor has the best performance. You want to mimic what that brand is doing and incorporate it into your own social media strategy.
Go through the following list and write down what worked best for each area:
- Percentage of promotional posts
- Type of curated content
- Frequency of posts
- Responding to user comments
You can build your own strategy based on the research that you performed. You’ll know how frequently you should post new content and what type of content to post. Put this information to use and remain consistent in your posting strategy.
Competitor analysis can be incredibly beneficial. But you will need to repeat this process occasionally. Trends can change and overall public interest can shift. You will want to keep up with changes in your niche market.
Every quarter, you should conduct another analysis of your competition. Not only will doing so help you stay on top of new strategies but you can also verify that your efforts are paying off.
If your social media strategy is not working properly, you need to look at your competition. Perform competitor analysis, looking at their posting habits and overall user engagement. Use these steps to start growing your social media presence.
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Yes, i agree with your article, competitor analysis is very important for bloggers.Thanks for sharing a blog post…
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Congrats Sameer,
For your Excellent post about Competitor Analysis. Thank You.
Facebook, LinkedIn are main popularity creators. Analyse them .
Very nice blog! this blog is very informative for social media competitor analysis, thanks for share this type of blog.
I think the best reason to perform competitor analysis is that one can identify the strategy of the competitor and can make a better strategy for best results.
I’ve been experimenting with Instagram more lately. It’s such a fun platform. I kind of like that they don’t have “stats” per se, because it lets you think more freely without thinking about the numbers all the time. That said, there are definitely times I’d like a little more insight so I don’t feel like I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall here and there.
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Hi Sameer,
I found this post very useful for me. Thanks for posting it. Whether posting the same content on the different social channel will damage my SEO? I recently started a blog http://coinfunda.com what will be the feed address for it?
No, content on social channels will help SEO, not damage it. Your blog feed is http://coinfunda.com/feed/. The two most common RSS feed default urls at http://domainname.com/feed/ and http://domainname.com/rss.
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Yes, well said. Social media is not damage any of your SEO result, infect it is helpful to increase your site traffic.
Thank you for sharing this great information. This information helpful and useful for many people and in this post also good explanation for Social Media Presence with Competitor Analysis in detail and helpful for easily understand.
Thanks a lot Bhavik 🙂 We’re glad to know that you liked this article on social media competitor analysis. Keep watching this space for more such articles.
Regards,
Sameer
That is a difficult question to answer accurately; however, it does appear that social signals cause aggregation sites to republish your content and make it more likely writers will see it and link to it.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..How Should You Handle Price Competition on Amazon?
This blog is really very useful and informative for me. feel happy to know about more and more details about social media.
Thanks a lot Rahul. Glad to know that you find it useful 🙂 Social media is a vast learning field and everyday there will be something new to learn from your experiences.
Regards,
Sameer
Great blog! this blog is very informative for social media competitor analysis, thanks for share this blog.
Thanks a lot Sumit. Social media competitor analysis is one thing that you can’t miss out on these days. It’s extremely point and must needed for online businesses to keep a track of the trends happening in the market.
Regards,
Sameer
This blog is realy useful for me .feel haapy to know about more and more details abt social media..
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Thanks a lot gotzutech 🙂 As I said in an earlier comment, social media is best learned through experiences. Try and make everyday count for you.
Regards,
Sameer
Hi Sameer,
First of all thanks for your article. I found it very useful. I have recently started a website and building it social presence. This post helped me a lot.
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Thanks a lot Ankur. Growmap and myself would like to wish all the very best for all your future endeavors. Meanwhile, since you have recently started a website, to take care of the SEO aspect and where to get started with SEO, I would like you to take a look at this short video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K346OjNa-Bg&t=7s
Please do have a look and make sure to spread the word 🙂
Regards,
Sameer
Rightly said. Competitor analysis is effective and every other field to start with. It gives a fair idea of our shortcomings, what to expect, what others are doing right, and how we can improve ourselves to stay ahead of the rest.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking to do a social media competitor analysis in near future, I would like to you to try Mondovo’s Facebook competition analyzer – https://www.mondovo.com/facebook-competition-analyzer.php and Twitter competition analyzer tool – https://www.mondovo.com/twitter-competition-analyzer.php. You will be surely amazed with the data that you get.
Do share your experience if you get time to use the tools.
Regards,
Zeeshan
Social media is an important platform to help boost online presence. You’ve explained a practicable technique to boost social media presence. Great job. I love this piece.
Thanks a lot Melissa. I’m glad you liked the article and it was help to you. And yes, I would agree with you that social media is indeed a great platform to boost your brand, promote your offerings, engage with your readers etc.
However, with every one jumping onto the social media bandwagon, it’s important for a business to be smart and keep things sweet and simple.
Regards,
Sameer
Nice share . It was really great post. social media is one of the main weapons of any blogger and I think this post will surely help a blogger to increase the blog reach. The methods shown here that how can you take the advantage by analysing your competitor is really good.
Thanks a lot Shweta 🙂 Good to know that you liked this piece of information.
Yes, social media is indeed one of the main weapons of a business and/or a blogger. The amount of reach that social media has, can’t be compared with any other medium. Plus, with a bit of luck on your side, you’re sure to do wonders on social media (if you play your cards smartly).
Meanwhile, since you have also talked about analyzing your competition, I would like you to take a look at Mondovo – https://www.mondovo.com/. You can not only analyze your social media competitors + seo competitors but also look at the right content ideas to generate for the right audience along with a bit of keyword research.
I’m sure you can increase the reach of your blog a couple of notches with Mondovo.
Regards,
Sameer
Hi Sameer,
Thanks for posting such an excellent article, Analyzing social media traffic is an important factor which you mentioned in your article, I really like the article.
You’re welcome Cbigfish 🙂 Glad to know that you liked the article. Yes, often I have seen businesses going all out with marketing strategies, spending on ads and promotions but then failing to measure the traffic. This is where they tend to lose out when compared to others.
Gauging traffic of any kind, be it organic or social media, can give some really great insights on how you can better customize your offerings for the right people.
Also, using the right tool to measure traffic is really important. Although, we have Google Analytics to give the right information, things can get a bit hard. To simplify matters, I would prefer using this tool Mondovo. It has got 2 analytics tool under its belt – Mondovolytics and Google Analytics that can help you measure and monitor your web traffic in real time.
Do take a look.
Regards,
Sameer
Amazing post. Your article is really informative. It is really important for bloggers to do competitor analysis.
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Thanks Ashley. As mentioned in the replies to all the comments here, I would again stress upon the fact that it’s really important to do competitor analysis. And, things don’t just get over once the analysis is over. Change is an on-going process and doing the right things at the right time can have a great impact for any business.
Regards,
Sameer
Hey Sameer,
Thanks for writing such an amazing & useful article on boosting social media with competitive reasearch!. Competitive analysis is something which most people fail to do when they to do social media marketing especially newcomers.
Getting Traffic from social channels is easy and anyone can get it but to get huge traffic, it’s very important to understand the things that you have pointed like understanding the analytical data of social channels, understanding the competitor’s strategies etc. in order to boost engagement and traffic. And following this kind of data is something which comes after some experience. That’s why beginners struggle to get traffic during their initial days because they don’t understand the importance of their web statistics.
Nevertheless, thanks again for writing this useful article. 🙂
Harpreet
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Competitor analysis is the basic, important thing in digital marketing and this is best way to boost our online presence in social media. Thanks a lot for these helpful tips.
Every week I check my competitors. Competitor analysis is useful to analyze the strength and weakness of my site compared to theirs. Thanks for sharing this blog post.
Amazing Post! Social media is good way for get rank and traffic our blog and websites.
Thank you so much for sharing this important information.
Thanks a lot for the appreciation Sangeeta 🙂 I’m glad that you liked this article. Yes indeed, social media a great way to get ranked on search engines as well as to generate quality targeted traffic to our blog and website.
Regards,
Sameer
this post is really imagine because we know that socia media is the good way to pramote our brand or event but for your post knows that our point is right
Hi Seela,
I’m not able to understand your point. Can you please re-phrase it for me? But yes, what I do know is that social media is a good avenue to not only promote your brand and/or events, but also your products, services, blog articles, lead magnets like ebooks or a downloadable template etc.
Look forward to your response.
Regards,
Sameer
Very helpfull post ,
thanks bro,
but my website social not ranking,
plz i need your suggestions.
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Hi Mhmamun,
Do you mean your site is not ranking or your social shares are not ranking?
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Hello Mhmamun,
I’m glad that you liked the article. However, I have the same query as Gail is having – Is your website not ranking? Have you lost rankings? Or is your social media campaign not giving you the desired results?
Meanwhile, I would like you to take a look at this article that deals with lost Google rankings – https://www.mondovo.com/blog/effectively-deal-with-lost-google-ranking-with-rank-drop-quadrant/
This can be of help to you.
Regards,
Sameer
I was new in social media marketing. So I researched about it but nothing was so helpful. Then I found your article and it is really helpful. Thank you very much for the article. 🙂
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Glad to know that you found this article at the right time 🙂 I would just like to give you one advise – Since you’re just starting out in social media marketing, don’t just go too broad. Try to go niche, try to be specific. This is an easier way to resonate with your target audience and build an authoritative brand.
Regards,
Sameer
hi sir i am Seela and i am new learner of digital marketing and i know that social media is good platform to fins the new audaence but i don’t know that how to use social media to find new audiance but your post is very use full for me so once again i am very thank full for you
Hello Seela,
Good to know that you found this article useful 🙂 I would like to give you the same advice that I mentioned in my previous comment – Instead of targeting anything and everything, it pays to go niche and to be specific. Going niche is a good way to resonate with your audience and benefit from targeted traffic to your social pages/website/blog. Also, just try and keep things simple and social media will surely work for you.
Regards,
Sameer
I am very new SEO Marketing Manager. I looking every blog how to suggest everyone for helping content. If everyone know better suggest to me please re comment me. Thank You Very Much.
Thanks a lot for reading and liking the article Krzysztof. If you would like to know more on how to get more site visitors, please do check this new SEO tool that we have been using for quite some time now. It’s named – Mondovo.
Do check and let me know your thoughts.
Regards,
Sameer
Hi Sameer,
Awesome post……. your article is really informative. Really you have described everything in descriptive, simply yet effective too. Social Media is best way to drive huge traffic on website. You’ve done a great job with this.
Thanks to share this informative article.
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Hello Gaurav,
I’m glad you liked the article. No wonder social media is the best way to drive traffic, but along with that you also need to provide your customers the best user experience. You can either tweak and make these site changes yourself or make use of multiple SEO and Social Media tools out there. Some of these, that we often use are Mondovo and Buffer.
Regards,
Sameer
Thanks for sharing this post. Yes it is really important for bloggers to do competitor analysis.
Hi Ashik,
Glad that you liked the article. Please do keep spreading the word 🙂 Meanwhile, yes, it’s really important for everyone out there with an online presence to go for a competitor analysis to gauge the competition and opportunities that lie ahead. This would better help in planning or drafting a proper online marketing strategy.
Regards,
Sameer
Competitor analysis is must for a quick start and it helps analyze the improvement areas. To deploy a 360 marketing plan competitor analysis is must in any case.
Very rightly said Ragasaans. I would not disagree with you. Not only a proper competitor analysis helps in finding out the improvement areas but it also helps in spotting golden opportunities that many other may have missed.
And yes, competitor analysis is a must when deploying a proper marketing strategy for your business. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting article that I would like you to go through. It deals with spotting opportunities through competitors’ backlinks. Please take a look here – https://www.mondovo.com/blog/spot-opportunities-from-your-competitors-backlinks/
Regards,
Sameer
Well I have been using buzzsumo for social media competitor analysis and I think its quite helpful. The points you have shared above are worth implementing in my next campaign.
Thanks
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Hey Vinod,
Glad to know that you liked the points and will be implementing them on your next campaign. All the very best.
Meanwhile, buzzsumo, is no wonder a really good social media tool. However, I would want you to give this new Social Media tool a try – Mondovo. You can analyze your twitter and facebook competition easily and be amazed with the data that I believe no one in the industry provides.
Do take a look at – http://www.mondovo.com
Regards,
Sameer
Share your content on social media like Facebook, Google plus, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. and also social engagement with others.
Yes, that’s a valid point. However, selecting the right social channels is also important. And to do that, you need to first know the medium that’s frequented by your target audience. This is a good way to promote your brand and build social engagement.
Regards,
Sameer
Competitor analysis is essential in social media marketing it helps you see their strengths and weaknesses and help you create a more effective strategy to get ahead of them.
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