Before planning your company’s social media strategy, it is always good to have previously analyzed what your competition is doing on social media. If you want to differentiate yourself from your competition, you have to know what they are doing on social media. Below are significant steps to planning and running a thorough social media analysis of your competition.
The Objectives
Before starting with the study of the competition, it is necessary to know what your purpose is and, for this, it will be necessary to determine some objectives. These should be:
- Clear and well-defined objectives, free of ambiguity or confusion
- Measurable objectives, which can be measured and analyzed
- Achievable objectives, which realistic, and doable
Some objectives may be derived from a number of issues, such as the following:
- What social media is your competition on? And in which of them you are not on?
- What type of content does the competition publish on social networks?
- Do they post different types of content on each social network?
Or some more specific details such as:
- Does the competition frequently publish some type of specific content?
- Are you investing in social media advertising?
- How do you and your competition, communicate on social media? What style does your competition use?
Identifying Competitors
Do you have a list of our competitors? If not, it is very important to create one that shows where all your competitors are, whether direct or indirect (they are in your sector, but have a different target) and online media (blogs, websites), tweeters influencers, who have a similar theme to yours and that they have the same target audience as you do.
Conduct Research
Once the objectives have been established and your competitors identified, it is essential to plan what means you are going to collect the information you need. It is, therefore, a stage where various procedures and techniques will be implemented in order to obtain results that help you with your study of the competition. First, you would determine what you will be investigating or researching, whether quantitative or qualitative. Thus, depending on the type of metrics or analysis indicators, you can carry out an exploratory (qualitative) or descriptive (quantitative) investigation.
Some examples of metrics to use would be:
Quantitative metrics: number of followers, engagement rate (ER), PTA (people who talk about your fan page), number of posts per month, and Retweets /tweets, among other things.
Qualitative metrics: topics and types of content, days and hours of publication, use of hashtags, playlists, header and avatar, and more.
In this phase, it is necessary to carry out a process of constant monitoring of the activity in social networks of your competitors, in addition to applying various actions (eg; creating private lists on Twitter of the competition in order to know what they are publishing by that social medium). Or measure their degree of influence and notoriety in social networks through various tools (eg: Mention.net, Like Analyzer, Klout, etc).
Data Recording
To collect all the above information, it is essential to create a table where all the metrics that you are going to analyze are presented. This document will help you to easily fill in all the data and be able to compare them at a glance.
Analysis of Results
Once the list with all the information has been created, the results are extracted in a clear and precise way. It will always be better if you present them in a visual way following a model or presentation template of your monthly highlights.
Conclusion
The last stage of benchmarking in social networks is to have someone or you manage the social networks, so you can interpret the results obtained in order to give value to the analysis of the competition. It is important to highlight mainly the errors or opportunities detected, but above all to propose feasible solutions and improvement actions for the brand. If you don’t know how to conduct any of these steps, it is best to use a company like NetbaseQuid that specializes in social media analysis and ways that you can drive your online business with brand health, campaign strategy, product innovation, competitive intelligence, trend analytics and more. The performance of your business will be in good hands.
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