If you are looking to develop on social media, expect that merely posting content does not guarantee success. Having awareness of what works in your particular niche is essential. To achieve this, you have to conduct the audience analysis of your competitors.
Competitor analysis (also known as competitive research) is one of the quickest ways of enhancing your growth potential. Instead of wondering what your audience is likely to like, you can check what has been interesting, engaging, and profitable for businesses that are similar to yours.
In this post, you will learn what competitor analysis means, what makes it significant, how to do competitor analysis for social media, which tools can be used for that, and which errors are usually made.
What Is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor evaluation is the activity performed to find out who your competitors are and how they operate: their content, audience, messages, strengths, and weaknesses.
In terms of social media, it could involve looking into the following areas:
- The kind of content they post (e.g. memes, videos, carousels, tutorials, etc.)
- The frequency of their posts.
- The posts that receive the maximum likes, shares, and comments.
- The way they communicate with their audience in comments and captions.
- The keywords and hashtags they use.
- Audience demographics.
- What they do differently from you.
The purpose is to gain insight on what’s happening in the marketplace instead of copying your competitors.
Why Competitor Analysis Matters for Social Media Growth
There are many brands that play guessing games with social media. They just share what they think would be suitable and rely on algorithms to do the work for them.
Competitor analysis eliminates this guessing game. Here is how:
It helps you understand what kind of content already works. If one of your competitors made a video which was viewed 500,000 times while yours have only 500 viewers, then you already have the information on what your target audience likes.
It allows you to fill content gaps. In some cases your competitors lack a whole topic, format or even segment of their audience. Such a gap is your chance.
It helps with the positioning. Having knowledge about the way competitors represent themselves will help you understand your unique selling proposition and position yourself differently from them.
It helps you save time and money. Testing new content ideas is costly and time-consuming, so using existing examples of successful (or unsuccessful) content can save you both time and budget.
It creates an effective long-term strategy. Random postings do not create a brand. Knowing the competitive landscape gives you a chance to develop a repetitive content strategy rather than a trend-based one.
How to Do Competitor Analysis for Social Media (Step by Step)
Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors
Begin to create a list of perhaps 5-10 competing accounts which compete with you; not necessarily in the field but also from other sectors. There are two types of competitors typically:
- Direct competitors: Those who sell the same product / service to the same audience.
- Indirect or content competitors: Selling a different product, but keeping the audience occupied. For example, a fitness coach and a supplement manufacturer may reach the same audience.
Don’t limit this list to the biggest names in your industry.Small and rapidly growing companies might have more interesting techniques than well-established brands.
Step 2: Audit Their Profile and Positioning
Review the presentation style of competitors in these areas:
- Bio and value proposition — what promises do they make and how do they communicate that?
- Profile and cover images — how professional and polished is their branding?
- Link in bio — where do they lead traffic to and for what?
- Frequency and consistency of posts
This will show you their intended perception and whether their branding is indeed doing its job.
Step 3: Study Their Top-Performing Content
This is the most important step. The next action is to scan through the last 30-60 posts of the competitor and observe:
- Which posts significant gain the most engagement if compared to their average engagement rate
- What format is applied in each of these posts (video, carousel, image, or text)
- What topics or feelings are involved in the posts
- How is the caption created (intro, length, call to action)
You will soon notice the pattern that will show you that only a couple of themes or formats are doing the overwhelming majority of the work.
Step 4: Analyze Their Audience
Check who is commenting. Are they current customers, interested potential customers, or fellow industry players? What issues keep coming up? The comments section is one of the best sources of free market research as users are being transparent about their desires.
Step 5: Track Hashtags and Keywords
Look at the hashtags, captions, and keywords – what competitors use on a regular basis. It shows how they want to be discovered and which words are worth fighting for in your own content and profile.
Step 6: Monitor Their Paid Ads
If your competitors put advertising campaigns, check which one they’re promoting. A great tool to do that is Meta’s Ad Library where you can see all the active ads from the brand. Ads show what a company thinks is worth getting a budget allocation and usually it means that it sells well.
Step 7: Turn Insights Into Action
Gathered data becomes worthless when no further actions are taken. Now that you have done your research, it’s time to put it into a content plan with an outline of possible content formats, topics to be focused on, content gaps to be eliminated, and the tone or approach to be taken.
Moreover, this is the moment when a lot of companies realize the severity and amount of work to do in order to be successful with this strategy in a timely manner on a regular basis, across multiple channels. If you want to avoid handling this issue all by yourself, you can hire a social media marketer that already does competitor research in practice.
Best Tools for Competitor Analysis
You don’t need a huge budget to do this well. Here are some reliable options, from free to premium:
- Meta Ad Library is a free tool that shows every live ad from brands on Facebook and Instagram.
- Social Blade keeps track of your follower growth and engagement trends in time.
- Sprout Social is a social media analytics tool that provides competitor reports.
- Hootsuite allows you track your competitors as well as schedule content and analyze.
- BuzzSumo is a tool that helps find the most successful content by topic across different platforms.
- Semrush/Ahrefs enables you to do keyword research for your competitors and do SEO research as well.
- You can keep track of your follower growth by creating your own spreadsheet.
Most companies don’t need all the tools above; choose one or two tools that fit your needs and use them consistently.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Copying instead of learning. Audiences know when something has been copied and when something else has inspired someone. Use what you learn to improve your own posts.
- Only learning from the same large competitors. Small and fast accounts often demonstrate new tactics before the bigger companies even realize that this is happening.
- Only focusing on the number of followers. A small account with high engagement often succeeds much better than a large one with no interaction.
- Doing a competitor analysis only once. The world of social media has moved too fast for this tactic to be practical just once.
- Ignoring the reasons. It’s not enough to say that something makes sense; you should also look for the underlying reasons.
How Often Should You Do Competitor Analysis?
For the majority of companies, a month-to-month update is more than sufficient to keep track of the situation without wasting too much time. In the case that you belong to an industry that evolves in a fast way — beauty, fitness, food, etc. — conducting reviews twice a month is recommended to be able to catch the changes and adapt quick.
Final Thoughts
Competitor analysis does not mean you need to keep track of your competitors’ actions. You need to apply real data to build a strong online presence, rather than guessing. If you do it regularly, you will gain a great number of benefits in terms of producing better content and developing better positioning on the market.
In case you want to run your business while the professionals do the research, create the content and develop the marketing strategy – you should definitely hire a digital marketing specialist.