The Complete Guide to

on Social MediaCOMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis on Social

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Identify Your Competition 2

Share of Conversation 3

Share of Audience 4

Share of Engagement 5

Conduct a Competitive Analysis 6

Metrics to Measure 7

Establish Benchmarks and Brand Averages 10

Put Insights to Use 11

Conclusion 12

1

This guide will walk you through best practices for learning what your competitors are doing on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, how well they’re doing it, and, ultimately, what your brand could be doing better to win.

Introduction You conduct regular analysis of your own Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but how often do you look at what your competitors are doing?

Before you set your social strategy, it’s essential to have a solid understanding of your brand’s particular competitive landscape, both online and off. Competitive analysis helps you identify important trends, impactful tactics, and new competition as you plan your social marketing efforts.

In addition to keeping you updated on your competitors’ activities, a solid competitive analysis empowers you with:

Market Context: Study the norms for your market, especially on social where longstanding benchmarks don’t exist.

Opportunities for Growth and Expansion: Inform your roadmap for the next week, quarter, and year.

Content Insight: Learn which content increases engagement and social audience size among your competitors.

Fresh Thoughts: Spark new ideas for staying competitive.

The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis on Social 2

Identify Your Competition The first step to competitive analysis is identifying the brands you consider competitors.

There are two types of competitive lists you’ll want to create:

• Industry Competitors: Companies competing for the same market share, customers, and dollars that you are.

• Aspirational Social Competitors: Brands from your space (or related spaces) that are operating in a way you’d like to emulate on various channels.

Identifying industry competition will take into consideration location, sales and revenue data, intuition, and other offline factors.

Identifying aspirational competitors on social media can sometimes be even more valuable to marketers because tactics can align more directly than they might with direct industry competitors. Aspirational competitive analysis on social should be focused on the brands you consider threats to your brand perception, or brands that have seen the type of social media success you’d like to achieve:

One way to identify potential competitors for your list is to look at the three following factors.

1. Share of Conversation Are there brands being discussed organically in conversations that you’d like your brand to dominate?

2. Share of Audience How many people follow the brand on different networks? Do these people align with your target audience and ideal customer?

3. Share of Engagement Is one brand excelling on a specific network?

By focusing on these three factors, you’ll compile lists of competitors that you can analyze and learn from.

The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis on Social 3

In the above example, an analysis of the term “widgets” can highlight the brands being mentioned in conversations about the widget industry.

1. Share of Conversation By analyzing conversations around specific topics or industries relevant to your brand on social media, you can identify the companies that your target audience is aware of, and are potentially active and successful on social media.

Choose keywords to analyze like you would choose search terms for your product or industry. What are consumers talking about?

In addition to looking at your industry keywords, also analyze other important terms to your business and how each of your competitors play into that conversation. Which features are important to your customers? Which products? Which locations?

The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis on Social 4

2. Share of Audience By compiling a list based on audience size of brands in your space that have found success, you can pinpoint companies to analyze further for best practices and tactical direction.

In the above example, Brand B may have the largest audience, but Brands C and D are seeing the largest growth rate per day.

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3. Share of Engagement By aggregating brands with high engagement, you can develop a list based on successful social media tactics, rather than offline recognition that translates into digital success. This is important for developing a strategy based on best practices and proven tactics for social media, specifically.

In the above example, Brand D has seen the largest volume of engagement on both Facebook and Twitter. This is grounds for inclusion in your aspirational competitors list.

By combining share of conversation, audience, and engagement as qualifiers for your list, you’ll have a more complete picture of your competitive space on social media.

These lists of competitors can be as long or as short as you need them to be. Brands may differ, based on your type of business but it’s important to have a holistic view of your marketplace, both online and off.

Real World Facebook Instagram Twitter

Brand A Brand A Brand A Brand A

Brand B Brand B Brand B Brand B

Brand C Brand C Brand C Brand C

Brand D Brand D Brand D Brand D

Brand E Brand E Brand E Brand E

To start off your social media competitive analysis, collect the names of all your brand’s competitors, both online and offline.

Now that your lists are compiled, you’re ready to begin analyzing your competitive set.

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Conduct a Competitive Analysis Once your competitive lists are set, you have a couple of options for conducting a competitive analysis.

Manually You can aggregate each of the metrics from each of the channels manually, by scraping pages on a regular basis and compiling various metrics into a spreadsheet. This can be tricky and time consuming, but a good option with limited budget.

Using Analytics Software Social analytics software will collect, aggregate, and bucket your competitive data for you. While it comes with a price, there is a significant time savings and additional insight and data you won’t find through manual scraping. Be sure to identify a software solution that works with all of your relevant networks, and collects all relevant data.

With either option, you’ll need to focus on the metrics that will give you directional insight and help identify key tactics.

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Engagement Levels How often do people comment, Like, and share your competitors’ content on social and tag or mention them?

These engagement stats can be a signal that their content and tactics are resonating (or not) with people on a specific network. Benchmarking engagement levels and noticing changes over a period of time will allow you to zero in on brand content that resonates with your target audience.

This chart from the Simply Measured Facebook Competitive Analysis shows how much engagement six cereal brands received during a month-long period.

Metrics to MeasureFollower Growth How many followers are your competitors gaining on a weekly or monthly basis? Jot down their baselines now and then check in regularly.

It’s also important to watch for outliers and spikes in follower growth. Where are your competitors finding success? Which campaigns are working especially well? This will help you look for the key factors that led to success.

This chart from the Simply Measured Instagram Competitive Analysis shows how five luxury brands experienced follower change over a six-month period.

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Posting Frequency How often do your competitors post new content? Should you be posting more frequently? Less?

By paying attention to the relationship between your competitors’ engagement levels and posting frequencies, you’re one step closer to discovering the best ratio between these two metrics for your own brand.

This chart from the Simply Measured Facebook Competitive Analysis shows how frequently six cereal brands posted during a month-long period.

Content Type Are your competitors posting mostly photos, videos, or an equal mix? Are they generating original content on each network, posting cross-channel content, or sharing user-generated content? Which content types are your competitors’ followers responding to best?

Track this information over a set period of time to gain real insights about which content works with the audience you market to every day.

This chart from the Simply Measured Facebook Competitive Analysis shows how content type related to engagement levels for six cereal brands over a month-long period.

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Search Results. Find out what your competitors’ CMOs, social media managers, and community managers are saying about their social marketing efforts. Look for industry articles and other write-ups.

Supplement the data you’ve digested in your analyses with strategic insights straight from the mouths and blogs of your competitors themselves.

Create four different competitive groups to keep track of on a regular basis: one that holds brands with impressive follower counts, one that holds brands with staggering engagement levels, one that holds brands with high posting frequencies, and one that holds brands with low posting frequencies.

Watching how these competitive groups evolve will give you a good idea of your industry’s social trends. PRO TIP

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Establish Benchmarks and Brand AveragesIn order to keep your analysis manageable and effective, you need to create a reliable, data-based benchmarking process.

That means it’s time to calculate averages, which represent certain minimum standards over a period of time in relationship to your competitors’ performance. These averages can help you plan your tactics and activities for the coming quarters.

You can do this by taking averages from the members of your competitive lists and benchmarking period-over-period for Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. We recommend monthly reviews or, at a minimum, quarterly.

Benchmarks vary from industry to industry, depending on your priorities and goals. You also may have to update the metrics you’re focusing on as the year unfolds, depending on what your monthly competitive analyses show you.

Metric List Average - Period 1 List Average - Period 2

Number of Brand Posts

Total Engagement

Photos Posted

Videos Posted

Engagement as % of Fans

Audience Size

Audience Growth

A table like the one above can be used as a place to collect channel-specific competitive benchmarks.

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Put Insights to Use In the final step of your competitive analysis process, use the SWOT analysis to determine your brand’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats at the current time. SWOT analysis is a common marketing practice, and a valuable tool for building a social media strategy. This final phase is where the full competitive map you’ve drawn for yourself will help you understand where your brand stands.

By asking certain questions, you can bring the insight you’ve gained into your planning process to contribute to your overall social strategy.

Strengths Characteristics of your social presence that give you an advantage over competitors. Where are you exceptional? Where are you being proactive, not reactive?

Weaknesses Characteristics of your social presence that put you at a disadvantage in comparison to competitors. What are you not doing that you need to be doing? Which minimum industry standards are you failing to achieve?

Opportunities Holes in your competitors’ social strategies that you can fill. What are some successful competitive strategies you’ve learned that you can mimic or improve upon? Which social network capabilities are you not taking advantage of fully?

Threats Possible competitive impediments or encroachments to the quality, reputation, singularity, and overall value of your cross-network social presence. Where is your brand at risk on social? Where do you need to devote resources immediately?

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Conclusion Performing regular and thorough competitive analyses is central to your success as a social media marketer.

Audiences and trends move at a fast pace, so paying attention to what your competitors are doing is a good way to measure your own progress and effectively plan your next move.

Though you may not always be able to act on the information you uncover, the insight it provides will help you in making decisions about your own content and figuring out how to reach your audience best.

Lucy Hitz is a Social Media Content Writer at Simply Measured, where she works on longform content and writes for the award-winning social analytics blog. Her favorite musical artist is Taylor Swift, and you can find her on Twitter at @LLHitz.

Social Analytics Framework How Competitive Analysis Fits In

Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of a social analytics process that enables marketers to plan and measure their social marketing programs. Competitive analysis fits into the planning process, allowing marketers to understand their opportunities, challenges, and differentiators as they set their social strategy.

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