With online marketing slowly taking over traditional marketing, most marketers have made a steady shift towards the new form of marketing. Though both forms of marketing have their pros and cons, digital marketing in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic has gained immense popularity. Social media has emerged as one of the most preferred digital marketing, helping businesses generate quality leads, boosting online presence, etc. Businesses focus on social media platforms with the growth of every sector and the innovation of effective online marketing platforms.
The increase in social media platforms and the ongoing rise in its user base has attracted most businesses to use them for advertising and promoting their products & services. This has led to an increase in unimaginable competition among the marketers on these platforms. The rise in competition has slowed the business's growth due to the multiple options consumers get when buying products or availing of services. It has also allowed analyzing the competitors thoroughly and improving the marketing strategies to make them more effective. Focusing on own business and keeping an eye on the competitors' marketing strategy have become equally important to sustaining a business and surviving in a highly aggressive environment. This is why conducting social media competitor analysis has become extremely important.
The emergence of marketing on social media platforms
Considering the growing popularity of social media and how it is becoming highly competitive is essential. Understanding why most businesses have opted for this digital marketing platform to enhance their company's growth becomes critical. An eMarketer report on the association of national advertisers study shows that 90% of US marketers use social media as part of their marketing activities. This shows the immense space for opportunities derived from social media marketing and why there is a rapid switch on these platforms for marketing purposes.
The number of monthly active users on different social media sites, as shown in the image below from Semrush research, asserts more weightage to the fact of why to use social media platforms for marketing.
Not only the number of monthly active users but the revenue generated on different social media sites are shown in the image below. This research from searchenginejournal also clears the doubts related to why social media marketing is in demand.
SWOT analysis
An analysis is a base for improvement in any sector. Without analyzing, it is very tough to determine the points that are leaving a positive or negative impact on the work that is done. Conducting a social media analysis helps find helpful business insights that can benefit your brand and give you an edge in social media marketing compared to competitors. Social media analysis not only highlights the points that need to be improved to be better from the competitors but also puts forward the data on the issues that need to be neglected. To reduce any negative impact on your brand’s social media marketing strategy and convert it into a positive one, a proper swot analysis needs to be performed.
The simple method of social media analysis is SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats) which works as a competitor analysis tool and helps boost your marketing strategy.
Strengths - Identifying your business strength is the first step in the analysis process. In which fields you are doing great, like the keywords you are ranking on the top, your posts that have gone viral or get the most engagement, hashtags that better describe your business, etc. If you recently started an advertising campaign, you can highlight your unique business features that have the potential to attract new users, any services or ideas that can outrage your competitors, etc.
Weaknesses - Try to find out the weak points where you are lagging behind your competitors, also looking for their weaknesses where you can target and beat the competitors in business. Find the answers to the questions like on which platform you are getting less social media engagement? Why are posts not getting expected visibility? Whether you need to run the paid campaigns or focus on the other factors to improve your performance?
Opportunities - The scope of opportunities that have not been discovered yet may become visible to your brand with thorough social media competitor analysis tools and research. Opportunities like exploring the whole social media platforms for the new features that can benefit you, opportunities through paid campaigns, and finding loopholes in the competitors' strategy as a part of deep competitor research and analysis.
Threats - Social media competitor analysis tools can greatly help you in identifying any opportunity which reduces your business ROI. Only focusing on the big players in your field is never considered a good approach. Thus it would help if you also keep an eye on the new emerging competitors in the business as it might be possible that they can outrage you from the competition. Apart from this, you also have an effective strategy to deal with the trends that might harm your business, and the negative reviews from the users can be an alerting signal for you.
How to do social media competitive analysis
To analyze your brand’s competitors and strengthen your social media marketing strategy, you need to take note of some specific points.
1. Identify your top competitors - Be it social media competitor analysis or any other competitors in business different from social media, identifying them is the primary task to perform. Without the knowledge of the competitor, you can never outperform them. To identify the competitors, you need to perform extensive market research to understand which other brands are using social media marketing as a tool to sell the same products as your brand does or to create an awareness of their brand. It is also necessary to find out the top competitors, i.e., the competitors who are on a parallel level to your business or those who have surpassed your market capitalization and then dedicate your focus to understanding their social media marketing strategies to build a better strategy for your brand compared to them.
2. Keyword selection - You can perform keyword research to determine the keywords used by the competitors. This helps to enhance your brand’s keyword selection and is a critical social media analysis method. Conduct keyword research to select the preferred keywords for your brand, analyze competitors' keywords in business, and then find out who is ranking high for different keywords on social media platforms for the same business products. This is an important way to optimize your brand’s keyword strategy and exceed your competitor’s in selecting the best keywords.
You can use Semrush’s search intent feature and insert your competitor's best-performing keywords (keywords for which they are ranking high on the social media platforms). The search intent tool categorizes keywords into four different categories, i.e., informational, navigational, commercial, & transactional, and will give a clear idea of the target audience's search intent on competitors’ social media pages. This will enable your brand to focus on suitable keywords that can result in driving maximum traffic, helping in enhancing the result of social media marketing practices.
3. Define metrics of analysis - There are multiple numbers of variables that define the success of a business. When you decide to conduct social media analysis, it can only concentrate on certain selected points. It is very important to determine the crucial points that your brand wants to focus on while analyzing the competitors.
a.The growth of your peer's followers within a fixed time frame. Analyzing how many followers competitors are gaining to understand if they are getting positive results on their social media marketing methods. This enables your brand to dedicate competitor research to prospects whose social media marketing strategies analysis can be useful in designing yours.
b. What is their social media content strategy on different platforms, if it’s more text-based or visual-based, or if they have a balanced approach. Instagram is more visual-based, and posting on Facebook can be more descriptive or text optimized. Therefore, analyzing top competitors' content strategies can clearly show how to win on multiple social media platforms and outperform them.
c. Their target audience and keywords are used to optimize their social media ranking. The audience they are targeting on different platforms, i.e., if they are tackling the same audience on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or they have an approach to targeting a specific audience segment on a particular platform. Also, the keywords that are letting their page rank high is the same, or it varies on the different social media platform.
d. At what time are they most active on social media, and if they are targeting through multiple social media platforms, i.e., Facebook marketing, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
e. Frequency of their social media posts, i.e., the time between two posts. If they publish their content hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. It helps to understand their content posting strategy that is delivering optimum benefit to them and what your content marketing strategy should be on different social media platforms to reap the maximum advantage.
Defining the social media analysis metrics simplifies the task of competitor research and optimizing your social media marketing strategies with the availability of insightful data.
4. Giving an in-depth touch - Apart from the basic social media competitors' analysis methods, your brand needs to improve its social media marketing strategy to enhance its visibility on this online platform, serve its target audience well, and achieve its call-to-action. Focus on the competitor's social media posts comment section to analyze their audience demands and queries, what they are asking for, and the issues they are facing. The competitor’s comment section provides insight into the audience review or feedback. It provides your brand with an opportunity to focus on the positive points and eliminate all the negatives that can hamper your company's growth.
5. Highlight your features and services - To have the edge over competitors in business, you should focus on strategic marketing to strengthen your core business. Every business has some unique features & services, and you need to highlight these and find the weak point in your competitors with the help of a planned competitor research strategy. Various social media competitor analysis tools are also available in the market, which helps you to stay ahead of your competitors.
6. Regularly monitor your insights - If you cannot measure the insights of your posts and accounts with the help of social media competitor analysis tools across various platforms, it can be a huge mistake in your social media marketing strategy. Running an effective competitor research and analysis is a thing that helps to measure the campaign's effectiveness and performance. It provides you with the information needed to improve the campiagn performance. Thus from the social media experts, the more you can analyze your business insights, the more opportunities you have to grow your business.
Wrap up
No matter whether you are running ads on which platform Facebook Ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter, etc., Any business you are involved in, you find one thing common in all that is intense competition. This competition is spread at a vast level due to the entry of advertising on social media because it has the enormous power to scale up or scale down any business. Thus, here comes the picture of social media competition analysis, where you can analyze the insights. Almost every business owner must be familiar with the power of social media, which now has a 4.55 billion user base and is still adding to it. If adequately optimized, you take no time to scale up your business. Outsourcing a company for all your social media campaigns can be a good move as you get in touch with experts that have mastery in optimizing campaigns. You can outsource us for any digital marketing services, including content marketing services, reputation management, white label social media management, market research services, email marketing and any search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC) services.