Social media helps you connect with your customers, promote your brand, and showcase your services. But it’s also a highly competitive space for every brand vying to make their name on social media. How do you stand out? Here’s where social media competition analysis comes into play.

Social media competitor analysis is the gateway to unlocking the key strategies to uplift your social media. Not to mention, it involves more than just researching other brands’ social pages.

It’s about evaluating your competitors’ social media data to unveil valuable insights to boost your social media game.

So, how do you perform social media competitor analysis? In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through everything you need to learn about it.

Let’s dive in!

What is social media competitor analysis?

Social media competition is the process of evaluating, analyzing, and researching your brand’s competitors on social media to build better refined social media growth strategies.

Performing this technique helps you get ahead of your competitors by learning about their strengths and weaknesses to achieve what will align with your social media game plan.

Moreover, social media competition analysis allows you to dig up valuable metrics about your target audience, such as what makes them interested in your competitor’s social media business brand.

In the realm of social media competition analysis, utilizing evaluation form templates proves essential for systematically gathering and assessing data, empowering businesses to conduct a thorough and insightful evaluation of their competitors’ strategies and performance.

What makes competitor analysis in social media crucial?

Let’s go through what makes knowing about your competitors important for generating leads on Instagram and other social media platforms:

1. Build a diligent social media strategy

By understanding how your competitors are doing, you can pitch greater ideas out of their content and craft a more effective and powerful social media growth strategy that aligns with your marketing goals.

You can also compare your performance and progress with your competitors to adjust your content strategy accordingly.

2. Understand your target audience

A social media competitor analysis can provide a clear picture of your target audience, including their interests, demographics, and psychographics.

These deep insights will give a better understanding of who your ideal customers are, so you can create the content that they desire.

Knowing your customer personas will help your social media marketing game because you will understand:

• The pain points of the customers
• What type of content do they consume
• What time they are active on social media

3. Create relevant content

Performing a careful social media competitor analysis will help you master the psychology of your customers.

Knowing what content and brand image resonate with your ideal customers is essential for creating your brand’s digital creation.

In addition, you can audit your competitor’s social media pages by learning more about social media content creation by pinning down the color scheme, text styling, and other formats used in content creation.

Pro Tip; When conducting a detailed social media competition analysis, don’t overlook the power of social platforms like Pinterest. Utilize effective strategies, such as ‘Pinterest Influencer Search,’ to uncover valuable insights and stay ahead in the game.

How to do a social media competitor analysis

Now that we understand the importance of analyzing our competitors’ social media presence let’s explore how to implement it.

1. Find your social media competitors

Finding your social media competitors is the first step in analyzing their social presence. These are businesses or brands that offer similar services or products to your target audience.

To get started, it’s essential to identify the competitive keywords that land your social pages on search engines.

Identify your competitive keywords

These are the keywords or phrases that your target audience searches for search engines for the services you offer.

As an example, if you run a fast-food restaurant’s business page in Ohio, you’re likely to be focused on keywords such as “best fast-food restaurant in Ohio ” and “Ohio restaurants.” But if your restaurant caters to only meat lovers on specific working hours, you’re not directly competing with McDonald’s.

Having a clear understanding of your brand vision will help you develop a clear vision of who you are competing against.

Check the websites of all your competitors that appear with your keywords. Thoroughly go through the websites, and click on the social pages in the header or footer of the website.

Most of all, don’t forget to copy the links of your competitive analysis social pager in a spreadsheet.

Check who’s ranking for social searches for those keywords

Once you have noted down the brands that rank well on searches, check their social media pages. However, it’s a note that not always the websites that rank for your keywords on Google also rank well within social networks.

So, when conducting social media competitor analysis, you will need to check what brand tops in social media search results, too.

For instance, look for Facebook pages related to your services by searching for relevant keywords in the search box.

2. Gather platform-specific data

The next major step is gathering valuable data on your competitors’ social media platforms. You will need to focus on the platforms used by target customers, which are essential for your business to prosper on the platform.

To take a step ahead of everyone, you will need to refine your social media analysis by collecting data and listing it on a spreadsheet. However, to simplify things, leveraging a social media analytics tool like SocialBu will provide you with a complete, competitive picture of your competitors.

Nevertheless, let’s look at how your brand compares with competitor’s social media business pages.

Instagram competitive analysis

Instagram is the most popular visual platform for sharing and showcasing your brand image, services, and promotions.

That said, to gain insights into your competitor’s Instagram account. There are many factors that you will need to inspect:

• How optimized is their Instagram bio?
• Do they have a link in bio tool? How are they using it to get traffic?
• What is their Instagram Theme like?
• Are they using story highlights? And how often do they update them?
• What hashtags are they using? Is there any brand-specific hashtag?

One secret hack to figure out your competitor’s Instagram presence is to search your competitor’s hashtags, such as #flogerscoffee, to see how many people are posting with the same hashtag; this will tell you about how popular the brand is on Instagram.

Facebook competitive analysis

Facebook is the place for everything! It’s where the social media revolution started, having a solid following on Facebook is crucial for your social media competition analysis.

Start doing a Facebook audit of your competitors by looking for the business basics:

• Number of Facebook likes and followers
• The visuals and graphics on posts. Are they similar to Instagram posts?
• Look at their hashtags. Are they using any specific hashtags to get reach?
• Do they have any specific tabs or business page features? For instance, some shop openers have a shop section enabled.
• Check their About section how they have set up their business page and Facebook presence.

Not only do you have to craft a visually attractive Facebook presence, but scheduling a Facebook post on the ever-growing social media platform will give you much time to work on your social media strategies.

X competitive analysis

X, previously called Twitter, is a widely used social media platform that businesses leverage to meet their objectives and engage their followers.

Twitter analysis will look similar to Facebook analysis. Here are some factors you should take into consideration when inspecting your competitor’s X analysis.

• Number of followers they have
• Do they have a blue tick on X?
• Review their bio. What are they highlighting? Is their bio similar to an Instagram bio?
• Are they active with Twitter trends?

To better understand competitors’ progress on X, level up with SocialBu’s Twitter analytics to analyze your competitor’s X metrics, posts, likes, reshare, and much more.

3. Keep an eye on your competitor’s social media strategy

To get a full view of how your social media competitors perform on social media, you will need to do a complete analysis of how your competitor does on each platform.

You must understand how your competitors use social platforms to achieve their objectives, communicate their goals, and sell their ideas.

Start evaluating your social strategy by laying the foundations on three main points:

• How active are their pages?
• What type of content do they post?
• What’s their brand persona on social media?

How active are their pages?

Knowing how frequently your social media competitors post on social media platforms will allow you to compare their posting frequency with yours so you can adjust your posting schedule.

It’s important to monitor how often other brands are posting. For example, if your competitor is posting multiple times a day and achieving excellent results, you may want to adjust your posting schedule accordingly.

What type of content do they post?

What type of content does your competitor post to get high engagements? Are they posting more reels or regular posts? You can analyze their content format to understand what type of content performs well for them.

Moreover, you can also identify what content they are missing, and fill the gap with your content. A great example of social media strategy is providing solutions to the pain points of your audience.

What’s their brand persona?

A brand persona is the tone, voice, and style brands use on social media to convey their brand identity and relate with the audience on social media.

Voice denotes the attitude and perspective that a brand expresses on social media. Some brands opt to post from their viewpoint, while others entrust the responsibility to their social media managers.

4. Incorporate the latest data with social media monitoring

Surprisingly, most social media managers don’t keep up with the latest data for analyzing their competitors.

For mastering your social media competition analysis, you need to stay updated with the latest trends, developments and new strategies in social media and your competitors’ content.

Benchmark your social media metrics against your competitors

You will need to recompose your social media metrics against your competitor to keep it up to date. This will require tracking and measuring your social media results over time and analyzing your social media content strategy and metrics.

Laying down a well-grounded social media monitoring strategy will help you equip yourself with real-time data to help you plan for your social media strategy.

Competitive analysis with SocialBu analytics

SocialBu is a top-of-all- social media management and analytics tool that will take social media competition analysis to the next level. The effective social media tool will help you conduct a comprehensive and successful social media analysis.

Improve your social media performance by analyzing your posts based on real-time data and get tailor-made, intelligible reports in the form of highly detailed yet simple charts.

Wrap up

Finally, we have concluded this comprehensive guide to social media competition analysis. It’s all about identifying the strong and weak points of your competitors and gathering metrics and data from the competition to create your social media strategy.

By following the process explained in this guide, you can conduct a competitive and efficient social media analysis. Use SocialBu to get ahead of your competitors on social media and unleash your brand’s digital potential.

FAQs

What is a social media competitive analysis?

A social media competitor analysis, also known as social media competition analysis, is an analysis of your social media competitors that offer similar services. It involves inspecting their social media strategy and finding out their strengths and weaknesses to sketch your social media strategy.

What is a comprehensive competitive analysis?

Competitor analysis is a strategy or methodology used for identifying competitors in your industry and researching their different marketing strategies.

How do you conduct a competitive analysis guide?

To conduct a competitor analysis guide, follow these simple steps:

• Define your goals
• Analyze your competitors and identify their strong and weak points
• Gather valuable information about your competitors
• Identify the gaps and opportunities in the market
• Strategize and implement your business plan accordingly