If you want to succeed in social media marketing, you need to track what your competitors are doing and the strategies that work for them. This is the essence of competitor analysis, a key part of using social media for market research. However, you need to realize that competitor analysis isn't about tracking what your competitors are doing right. 

It involves staying on top of trends, noticing gaps and opportunities, and learning from successful and unsuccessful strategies. You can use competitor analysis to refine your approach to align with your current targeting options. This article will guide you through performing social media competitor analysis.

What is Social Media Competitor Analysis?

Social media competitor analysis involves assessing your competitors' strategies, engagement, and performance to identify opportunities, insights, and trends to guide your social media strategy for viral and evergreen content. Studies indicate that 91% of American companies are active on social media, so there is a chance that your competitors are using social media for networking, thought leadership, or brand awareness.

By tracking your competitor’s social media pages, you can get critical insights into the strategies they are using, their target audience, and the industry's overall performance. Some of the critical competitor analytics data you need to track are:

• The followers' growth trends.
• Posting timing and frequency.
• Different content formats such as images, stories, and videos.
• Audience sentiment.
• Hashtag strategies.

When you analyze your competitors on social media, you can get answers to different questions, such as:

• The type of content that is driving the highest engagement for your competitors.
• Which social media platform is driving the highest engagement level?
• Competitor strengths and weaknesses in their social media strategy.
• The hashtags and keywords that your competitors are using to reach their target audience.
• The missing link in their social media strategies.

Importance of Performing Social Media Competitor Analysis

According to one study, the respondents suggested that they only followed brands they were loyal to. By analyzing your competitors' social strategy, you can determine what they are doing right to get loyal customers. This can also help you to:

• Discover any emerging trends.
• Notice the engagement tactics your competitors use.
• Determine the kind of content that resonates with your target audience.
• Determine how you are holding up well against the competition.
• Find the opportunities and gaps in your social media strategy.
• Discover the potential brands and influencers for your social media collaboration.

Understanding the Key Social Media Metrics to Track

With lots of data from competitor analytics tools, it can be hard to determine which metrics to track, as the exact KPIs will depend on your business needs. Here are some key metrics to track in your competitor analysis:

Engagement Metrics

This metric tracks the rate at which social media users interact with the competitor’s posts through likes, comments, shares, saves, and more. When performing competitor analysis engagement metric, you should track:

• Engagement rate. This should be a percentage of the followers' engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares, compared to the total number of views or followers.  You can learn more about the TikTok engagement rate in our guide.
• Amplification/Share rate. This tracks the frequency at which your followers or viewers share your content compared to your social media audience size.
• Click-through rate (CTR). It shows the number of social media users who click on a call to action or link compared to the total number who saw the post.

Visibility and Reach Metrics

These are important metrics for tracking the unique people who can see your content and how fast the content is spreading across different social media platforms. Consider these metrics when tracking the visibility and reach metrics:

• Impressions. How often is the content, whether in the form of a story, ad, or post, displayed or appears on the user's social media feed, and whether they click on the story or not? If the content seems to the same user different times, that will also be considered as different impressions.
• Sharing of voice (SOV) can be considered a great metric to show how frequently your brand is mentioned compared to other competitors. It's also a good metric for displaying a brand’s presence and visibility on social media, illustrating whether it's dominating the market. 

Content Metrics

Another metric to track during your competitor analysis is your competitors' content details. This should include how they mix up their content, length of their posts, timing and frequency, number of hashtags to track, etc.  

Here are the key details to track in competitor analysis:

• Posting timing and frequency. When conducting competitor analysis, you need to find out how often your competitors post on different platforms. This is key to increasing your reach and engagement.
• Hashtag analysis. You need to track the popular hashtags that your competitors are using, the volume, and the types. This is important because it will help you discover the most popular hashtags for boosting your visibility and connecting to your audience.
• Analysis of post length. Consider the number of words your competitors post on social media platforms and how well that length attracts audience impact and attention.

Audience Metrics 

It is also essential to track the behaviors and characteristics of your audience’s followers to better understand who your audience is and how they interact with your content. When doing that, pay special attention to the:

• Follower growth rate. Track how fast your competitors are gaining new social media subscribers or followers. This is a good metric for tracking the competitor's performance in attracting followers.
• Audience demographics. This provides insights into the competitor's user base on different platforms, including their age, location, income, gender, interests, and education.

How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis

When conducting social media competitor analysis, follow these four steps:

Determine Who Your Competitors Are

Unless you know your competitors, it can be hard to determine the key metric to track. For instance, your competitors will likely be other treadmill sellers if you sell treadmills. Start identifying the brands in your niche that seem to be getting their social media strategy right, with high followership, post ideas, visuals, and engagement. 

Competitor Analysis

Now that you understand who your competitors are, the next step is to determine the strategy they are using. You can do this by looking at their social media profiles, platforms they are using, how they are mixing content, posting frequency, influencer partnerships, themes, hashtags they are using, and more.

Also, analyze the competitor's paid content strategy to determine what is working. Then, use this data to refine your plan. If they run paid campaigns, analyze them to determine what works for them.

Benchmark Against the Competitor

The next step should be to compare your social media performance with the competition's. Using the KPIs we discussed in our earlier section, compare the performance of your content with the competition and the overall industry. 

Use the data to discover your strengths and weaknesses. Then, use the data to determine if there are opportunities for improving your strategy and refining your content. This will help you stand out in a crowded digital landscape.

Use the Data to Refine Your Social Media Strategy

You can refine the strategy after getting the necessary insights into your social media competitors and benchmarking the data against your own. You can share the insights with your team and use them to improve your social media strategy.

In Conclusion

With so many brands competing for social media visibility, it is now necessary for brands to go out of their way to get noticed. One way they can do that is by conducting competitor analysis to gain insight into their competitors' strategies. If you are wondering how to do that, our detailed guide will help you get started.