Competitor Analysis: The Foundation Stone of your Social Media strategy

Many people presume or claim to understand social media marketing since they utilise multiple social media platforms on a daily basis. Social media marketing isn’t something you can undertake on the spur of the moment. You must be well-versed in your platforms and recognise that no two people are alike. Our moods, personality traits, physical appearances, and ideas differ, as do our tastes. It’s all about changing the way you evaluate any content you come across using social media marketing. You can’t just jump into social media without first conducting extensive study and analysing your competition.

What Is Competitive Analysis, and Why Is It So Important?

Competitive analysis is gathering and analysing competitor data and intelligence on their company practises, customers, and other factors. It has long been a cornerstone of business practice, and it is critical to the success of your company. The manner you should do a competition analysis report has evolved with the arrival of social media and web analytics.

You’ll need to consult more sources of information these days than you did previously. On the plus side, this means that the amount of information you can gather on competitors has increased substantially, allowing you to create a complete profile of who your competitors are, where their weaknesses are, and how you might exploit them to get a leg up on the competition. It’s important to note that competitive analysis isn’t the same as shady spying. You won’t have to dig through anyone’s drawers or piece together shredded receipts to find what you’re looking for. With the correct tools and advice, you can tap into a staggering amount of important, publicly available data.

Another thing to remember when conducting a social media competitive analysis is that you shouldn’t limit your analysis to your immediate competitors. To truly get an advantage, you’ll need to broaden your research and compare your results to others in your sector and location.

The Benefits of Competitive Analysis

The advantages of doing a thorough social media competitive study are numerous. Social media competition analysis will touch every part of your business performance and prospective success, from detecting rival organisations and fine-tuning your plan to benchmarking your performance and getting ahead.

• To gain a better understanding of your competitors’ activities.

Keep an eye on what your rivals are up to. Compiling a list of all your industry rivals on various digital platforms can help you see your domain from a different perspective. This might help you figure out which brands are making it through these platforms. Your social media approach will be heavily influenced by the research you or your team conducts. Extensive study will offer you with information that will help you in the long run.

• To determine which platform is most effective for your competitors.

It’s possible that the platform that works best for your competitors will also work well for you. You may sell on hundreds of different platforms. You also don’t have to be active on every social networking channel. Monitoring your competitors will help you decide which platform is ideal for you. Because users behave differently on different platforms, you’ll need to concentrate on the platforms that benefit your competitors first, before gradually expanding your presence to other platforms.

Brands will not invest time and money in platforms that do not provide them with a positive return. As a result, examine the platforms in order to improve user engagement or brand awareness.

• Pick Up on Useful Market Trends

Another significant advantage of your social media competitor analysis will be the ability to recognise and capitalise on industry trends. Using the proper tools to tap into the amount of data available on social media may help you look beyond the present, put your performance in context, and develop a picture of your future.

This might help you stay ahead of the curve in terms of what’s ‘in’ and what’s out, keeping your material fresh and entertaining. Also, this will help you prevent potential blunders – and in a setting where any mistakes are made public and mistakes can be screenshotted, the value of this benefit cannot be understated.

• Identifying your own strategy’s flaws

You may have spent hundreds of hours planning your brand’s social media strategy. Great! However, your competitors may have used a chunk of this strategy, along with a lot of creativity, to do a better job. The contrary is also true: you might come upon a competitor’s concept or strategy that can help you strengthen your own.

• Understand user engagement and brand awareness

User engagement is a measure that may be used to assess the success of a social media post. But how can you determine how engaged a post is? Examine the number of shares, likes, and comments received by each post. Take a look at the comments to see how people react to the brand.

• To understand the budget needed to run big campaigns

Word of mouth is still the most effective form of marketing. However, you’ll want to boost your company’s social media presence. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to generate high levels of interaction with organic material. Content strategy and advertising budgets are essential for today’s brands. Spending a lot of money on commercials will give your brand a lot of exposure, and you’ll be able to target the right people. If you’re a new company, you’ll need to develop a brand recognition strategy that will be ongoing. It’s best to start with a small group of people or a small area in which to raise awareness.

• To gain a better understanding of ORM (Online Relationship Management)

Every business claims to be the best in its field. But how can this be proven? ORM is the answer. Brands that listen to their customers and show empathy will always have loyal customers. So, to examine comments, messages, and queries on their social media channels, social media organisations use a daily ORM checklist. To gain a sense of how users feel about the brand, they also use social listening technology. People will not always engage in pleasant interactions with you. So, every brand has a responsibility to assist customers in every way possible.

•  To determine the frequency with which postings are promoted

Brands with a large marketing budget will almost always efficiently promote most of their posts. However, you’ll have to pick which post needs to be boosted more than the others at some point. You must sort the posts into the following categories:

• Hygiene post: These posts will ensure that your brand’s social account remains visible and authentic. 

• Hero post: This is the kind of content that will be pushed. The purpose of these items should be to increase interaction and generate leads. Begin by advertising one post to a small audience once a week.

The very same demographic can be reached with different engaging content every week to track the campaign’s performance. So, you don’t need to post every day to raise awareness; all you need is a decent copy or a fantastic, unique post that encourages visitors to click on the call-to-action button.

• Make Smarter Strategic Decisions and Investments

You’ll have a better view of the playing field and be in a better position to make informed and successful business decisions for improved investment and strategy with a complete social media competitive analysis study. Many businesses overlook the value of social media competitive intelligence, but the data you’ll have at your fingertips will be precious and priceless if you have a well-defined and continuing data collection strategy.

A simplified approach can make things a lot easier.  That is why it is always preferable to hire an expert to do such tasks. There will be no stress or concern then. Contact our Digital Marketing Agency, to help you with your Social media marketing. We are the leading b2b content marketing agency in the UK. 

How to Improve Your Social Media Performance Through Competitive Analysis?

It’s time to put the information from your social media competitive research to good use. First and foremost, determine which aspects of your approach are succeeding and which are failing. Here, you’ll want to look at the aspects of your plan that aren’t doing as well as they should be and examine how to improve them — your new data should help you discover where and why you’re not performing as well as you should be and help you improve those areas.

Do you think your content could be better? This isn’t simply about the quality of the product. Even good content will underperform if parts of it aren’t customised to your target audience — think about tone, the information you’re distributing, and even the structure. After you’ve completed the entire social media competitive research report process and changed your plan, it’s critical that you revisit your progress on a frequent basis. So, compare your most recent results to those of your competitors to discover if your efforts to improve your strategy are paying off.

You should also perform a thorough social media competitive analysis report on a regular basis to keep your information on your competitors and their market position up to date. You need to know if any new players have joined the game and what your competitors have been up to since the last time you looked at them. 

As aforementioned, contact our Online Marketing Company today to handle it effortlessly and stress-free.

Conclusion

A great marketing strategy’s bread and butter is social media competitive analysis, and it should be an intrinsic element of your business decisions. It can help you understand both your competitors’ and your own performance in the context of your industry and regional market. A full social media management platform with analytics and listening capabilities is your most important asset when seeking for data, but there are some fantastic free social media competition analysis tools accessible as well.

Also, read about Significance of Online Marketing..