How to Conduct a Social Media Competitor Analysis [+FREE Template]
In the digital age, understanding your competition on social media is not just beneficial—it’s essential for crafting content that resonates with your audience and outperforms your rivals. Metricool offers a comprehensive competitor analysis tool designed to streamline this process, making competitor analysis not only accessible but also actionable. Below, we will guide you through using Metricool’s competitor analysis tool, and how to use that information to your brand’s advantage.
What is a Social Media Competitor Analysis?
A social media competitor analysis is exactly what it sounds like – an analysis of your brand’s competition on different social media platforms. Analyzing competitors on social media is key to any good digital marketing strategy, providing insights into industry trends and strategies to enhance your brand’s own digital presence.
Metricool streamlines this process by offering comprehensive competitor analysis across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. By benchmarking your performance against competitors, you can identify areas for improvement and capitalize on growth opportunities. This strategic approach ensures you stay ahead in the competitive landscape, enabling informed decisions for successful social media marketing endeavors.
The benefits of performing a social media competitor analysis
Conducting a social media competitor analysis provides numerous benefits to your brand’s digital strategy, including:
- Benchmarking Performance: Set performance benchmarks for your business, such as average followers, engagement rates, and share of voice.
- Content Strategy Insights: Discover new and better ideas for content that resonates with your audience, as well as what to avoid.
- Audience Understanding: Gain insights into potential customer pain points and the best times to post on social media.
- Brand Differentiation: Reveal untapped opportunities and gaps in your competitor’s strategy to set your brand apart in today’s crowded digital landscape.
- Identifying Trends & Opportunities: Uncover trends or missed opportunities in your industry, allowing your company to adapt quickly in a competitive market.
- Enhancing Audience Engagement: See how your competitors engage with their audience to improve your own brand’s relationship with its own.
How social media competitor analyses help business marketing strategy
By evaluating how audiences react to your rivals’ content across social media platforms, you can create a more effective social strategy, resulting in increased audience engagement and brand awareness. It also provides insights into best practices for content creation, helping you save time and resources.
How to Perform a Social Media Competitor Analysis with Metricool
Metricool has competitor data available for X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch. You can access your brand’s competitors from your Metricool profile. Select the social media platform you want to analyze, and click “Competitors” at the top of the page.
All Metricool accounts have access to competitor data, though only premium accounts can download the data as a CSV file to better manage their analysis.
With both our premium and free competitor analysis tool for social media, you can click the graph icon at the end of each row that corresponds to each competitor. Here you will see their information in more detail, including an evolution graph, posts, and engagement information.
FREE social media competitor analysis template
Performing a social media competitor analysis is simple with instructions, however, to further speed up this process we have created a free competitor analysis template for you to customize and record your competitor’s data.
Want to download the template? Fill out this form to get it sent straight to your inbox. Then adapt it to your brand for a seamless competitor analysis:
To get started with the Metricool social media competitor analysis tool, consider the following steps:
▶️ Start your brand’s social media competitor analysis ◀️
1. Identify your competitors
The first step in any competitor analysis is identifying who your competitors are. This includes both direct competitors within your industry and indirect competitors that vie for your audience’s attention.
You can discover your top competitors by tracking and analyzing hashtags related to your brand or industry. This is an effective way to see what your audience is talking about, and which brands are focused in the same sector.
Learn more about Metricool’s Hashtag Tracker
Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can add them to your Metricool account to start tracking their social media presence. Metricool allows users to add up to five competitors with a free account and up to 100 for Premium accounts, providing a broad view of the competitive landscape.
2. Analyze competitor’s brand profiles and presence
Once you’ve identified your competitors, the next step is to analyze their social media profiles and presence. Metricool provides detailed insights into your competitors’ social media strategies, including community growth, post count, and a list of the top posts in the chosen time period. This data can help you understand how actively your competitors are engaging with their audience and what kind of content resonates with their followers.
3. Content strategy deep dive
Understanding the types of content your competitors are posting is crucial for refining your own content strategy. Metricool not only shows you the top posts from your competitors but also allows you to compare multiple competitors at once. This feature provides a direct comparison view of different accounts, to help you identify what content has worked best and gained the most traffic.
4. Evaluate engagement
Engagement metrics are key indicators of how well your competitors’ content is performing. Metricool shows detailed information about growth, interactions, and posts, allowing you to measure your competitors’ engagement levels effectively. This insight can help you adjust your strategy to boost your own engagement rates.
5. Assess competitor performance and benchmarking
Benchmarking your social media performance against your competitors is made easy with Metricool. The platform allows you to view and download data such as community growth, post count, and engagement metrics in a CSV format. This feature is particularly useful for tracking performance over time and identifying areas for improvement within your own social media strategy.
6. Identify trends and opportunities
By analyzing your competitors, you can spot industry trends and content opportunities that you may have overlooked. Metricool’s competitor analysis tools enable you to view top companies’ statistics and compare them against other brands, providing valuable insights into successful strategies and emerging trends.
Develop your Digital Marketing Strategy with a Competitor Analysis
With the insights gained from Metricool’s competitor analysis tool, you can refine your digital strategy to better compete in your industry. Below, you’ll find some ways to use the data and information gleaned from your social media competitor analysis to enhance and refine your own social media approach.
Improve your content strategy
Analyze the types of content your competitors post, and which get the most engagement. Consider the topics they post about, the format in which they post them (videos, images, stories etc), and on which platforms. From there you can refine your own content strategy, by experimenting with similar or different content types.
Optimize your posting schedule
Look to see when your competitors are posting, and how often they engage with their audience. Our social media studies show that different social media platforms have higher engagement at different times of the day, or different days of the week. Consider adjusting your own brand’s posting schedule to test these different windows, and see when your audience is most responsive to boost engagement.
Enhance engagement tactics
Consider how your competitors engage with their audience and which tools and tactics are most effective. Do they often use polls or ask questions to encourage engagement with their audience? Are they quick to respond to questions or comments? Alternatively, maybe they don’t engage with their audience frequently. Is there a way to stand out above them by encouraging more interaction with your own brand’s audience?
Monitor and adjust
Social media is dynamic, and competitor strategies can change rapidly. Metricool’s real-time analytics and competitor tracking features ensure you stay informed about any shifts in your competitors’ strategies, allowing you to adjust your approach accordingly.
Do you have any other questions about competitor analyses on social media?
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