• Mikey Ryu
• May 14, 2024
• 0

Competitor Analysis in Social Media Strategy Development

In any business strategy, understanding your competition is crucial, and this is particularly true in social media marketing. Competitor analysis in the context of social media helps you understand your industry’s landscape, identify trends, and learn from the successes and failures of others in your field. Here’s how to effectively conduct a competitor analysis for your social media strategy.

Identifying Your Competitors

Start by identifying who your direct and indirect competitors are. Direct competitors offer products or services similar to yours, while indirect competitors may satisfy the same customer needs through different products or services.

Steps to Identify Competitors:

• Market Research: Use industry reports, market surveys, and existing customer insights to identify key players.
• Social Listening: Tools like Mention, Brandwatch, or Hootsuite can help track mentions of competing brands and gauge their presence and popularity.
• Customer Feedback: Sometimes your customers can tell you who your competitors are, based on their alternatives before purchasing your product.

Analysing Competitor Social Media Presence

Once you’ve identified your competitors, analyse their social media presence. This involves looking at various aspects of their social media strategy.

What to Look For:

• Platforms Used: Note which social media platforms your competitors are active on. This can indicate where potential customers might expect to find your brand as well.
• Content Strategy: Observe the types of content your competitors post, their posting frequency, and the engagement each post receives.
• Community Interaction: Look at how competitors engage with their audience. Note their response style, the promptness of their replies, and the types of conversations they are having.
• Campaigns and Promotions: Identify any special campaigns or promotions your competitors are running. Analyse their approach and results to see what you might be able to learn or improve upon.

Benchmarking Against Competitors

With a thorough understanding of your competitors’ strategies, you can start to benchmark your social media performance against theirs.

Benchmarking Considerations:

• Engagement Rates: Compare likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement rates.
• Follower Growth: Track how quickly competitors’ follower counts are growing compared to yours.
• Content Reach: Measure how far their content is reaching beyond their immediate followers.
• Brand Sentiment: Use social listening tools to analyse the public sentiment surrounding your competitors’ brands.

Learning from Competitor Analysis

The goal of competitor analysis is not just to replicate what others are doing, but to identify opportunities where you can excel and differentiate your brand.

Strategic Insights:

• Gaps in Competitor Strategies: Look for areas where competitors are underperforming or not fully engaging with their audience. This could represent an opportunity for your brand to capture that niche.
• Innovative Tactics: If a competitor is particularly successful with a certain type of content or strategy, consider how you can adapt those tactics in a way that aligns with your brand’s unique voice and objectives.
• Avoiding Pitfalls: Learn from any mistakes or poorly received efforts made by competitors to avoid similar pitfalls in your own strategies.

Conclusion

Competitor analysis is a powerful tool in shaping a successful social media strategy. By understanding the competitive landscape, you can make more informed decisions about how to position your brand, where to focus your efforts, and how to innovate your approach. Regularly revisiting this analysis ensures that your strategy remains adaptive and responsive to changes in the market and consumer behaviour.