Build Your Social Media Campaign with the help of Your Competitors

One of the best ways to help develop a social media strategy for your brand is to research what your competitors are doing. Performing a social media competitive analysis is an essential part of your social media success. You should analyze your competitors’ activities to set realistic benchmarks for your brand.

Check what social networks your competitors use. Thy may differ a lot depending on the industry you are in. While Pinterest may be great for a florist or an interior design company, it might be less useful if you are in engineering. Now when you have a list of the social media profiles of your competitors you can start your competitive analysis.

1. Check how often your competitors post.

Yes, this is a very manual process. However it’s really important to know how many times they posted unique content during the last month. This will help you to craft your own schedule.

2. Learn what type of content is popular with your targeted audience.

By looking at what type of content your competitors tend to post you can measure how successful the various mediums are in terms of fan involvement and engagement. Does the audience like photos and videos? Is it a good idea to repost other brands’ content? Should you use hashtags? Answer these questions to better understand what types of content will be helpful for your marketing.

3. Investigate your competitors’ social engagement.

Analyze the number of followers your competitors have. This will show how popular they are and how big their online community is.  While you may not be able to see the changes in social media numbers, you can see trends very clearly.

4. Monitor your competitors’ online reputation.

You should know what is said about your competitors across the web. This helps you to react immediately and fine-tune your social media marketing. For example, if you detect a weakness that happens to be a strength for you, you may consider writing and publishing more content that explains how good you are with that aspect of your business.

A great way to monitor your competition is to use the Web CEO Social Buzz tool. Simply type your competitors’ brand names into the tool and get everyday updates showing freshly indexed content mentioning them.

Look through the found posts and react if appropriate. Besides you can favorite posts you commented on so you can return to them later and see what new comments were added.

When you collect all the data and compare it to your own metrics, you will be able to adjust your own social media campaigns to outperform your competitors. By looking at how your target consumers communicate with your competitors, you will get insights on how to effectively interact with them through social networks.

Remember that your competitors are changing and improving all the time.  They will be adjusting their approach and updating their campaigns in order to try to improve results. That is why your competitive analysis should be an ongoing process. It’s not something that you can do once and then forget about.